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Health 2.0 News: From Facebook to the Anatomy of Trolls July 29, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Facebook, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.
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At some point the courts will test the limits of physician dialog on physician networks.  And hopefully fear of legal retribution won’t hobble these new forms of interaction which stand to improve the quality and efficiency of patient care.

So if you are concerned about dialog on a medical web 2.0 platform, you should be just as concerned with dialog around the water cooler.

Fascinating story from the early days of biotech: How three errors in a 166 amino acid protein sequence ended up being the deciding factor in a showdown between two companies who both wanted to patent the genes behind the protein that triggers red blood cell formation.

Serial Cloner: a Molecular Biology software July 29, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Biology, Biotechnology, science.
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A short note about Serial Cloner, a free Molecular Biology software that is available for Windows and Mac as well. It has tons of features such as sequence alignment, vitual PCR, cloning, etc. A real diamond for molecular biologists.

Serial Cloner has been developed to provide a light molecular biology software to both Macintosh and Windows users. Serial Cloner reads and write DNA Strider-compatible files and import and export files in the universal FASTA format. Serial Cloner also import files saved in the Vector NTI, ApE, pDRAW32 and GenBank formats. Import from MacVector is also possible now.  Powerful graphical display tools and simple interfaces help the analysis and construction steps in a very intuitive way. Serial Cloner 2.0 now handles Annotations and Features both in the sequence and in the Graphic Map.

Crohn’s disease and Web 2.0 July 28, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, PeRSSonalized Medicine, Web 2.0, Webicina, e-patient.
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There is an incredible amount of stories, resources and links related to Crohn’s disease, which affects more than half million people only in the US, online so Webicina.com selected the most relevant blogs, journals, news sites, Twitter users, mobile apps, Youtube channels and many more in the new Crohn’s disease and Web 2.0 collection.

If you also want to follow easily these selected resources in a personalized way, here is PeRSSonalized Crohn’s disease, the simplest medical information aggregator.

webicina newsletter

Here is table of contents:

Feel free to share any of these resources via Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc.

My Bookshelf: Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig July 28, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, My Bookshelf, Web 2.0, e-patient.
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I’ve recently started a new series called My Bookshelf in which I post short reviews of the new books I finish. The second book I review is written by fellow blogger and e-patient superstar, Dave deBronkart. First I read the story of Dave years ago, and actually, he is now included in my Internet in Medicine university accredited course. I describe his story to my students as he is THE example of how e-patients can leverage the potential advantages of web 2.0. His recent book, Laugh, Sing, and Eat Like a Pig, How an empowered patient beat stage IV cancer (and what healthcare can learn from it) is just fantastic.

1) I’m sure it’s a golden mine of information for patients dealing with similar health issues; 2) it’s more than useful for doctors who really want to know how they can help their patients even more; 3) it should be a must-read book for policy makers in order to get insights about the lives of empowered patients.

He does not only share his moving and inspirational story, but also shares his opinions on electronic medical records, Google Health, patient communities and also contacting other e-patients. This book will certainly lead the way for the Participatory Healthcare and also for the Medicine 2.0 and Health 2.0 movements. A must-read!

Regulations.gov: Healthcare July 28, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
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In this era, when we are moving towards open government, Regulations.gov serves as a great example about how citizens should be involved in developing regulations:

Established in October of 2002, eRulemaking is an E-GOV initiative that is committed to:

  • Increasing access to and participation in developing regulations and other related documents that can impact the public
  • Promoting more efficient and effective rulemaking through public involvement

In 2003, the eRulemaking program launched the Regulations.gov Web site to enable citizens to search, view and comment on regulations issued by the U.S. government.

If you have never checked the Healthcare section, you really should. There are dozens of good ideas.

A few examples:

Twitter Maps Emotional State of the USA July 27, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Visualization, Web 2.0, twitter.
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Recently, I mentioned a software that detects depression in text without obvious terms like “depression” or “suicide”. It seems mapping the mental health or emotional status of the online world is becoming a reality and here is a new evidence for that. The New Scientist reported a study in which scientists used the positive and negative words of Twitter messages in order to map the country’s emotional state:

To glean mood from the 140-character-long messages, the researchers analysed all public tweets posted between September 2006 and August 2009. They filtered them to find tweets that contain words included in a psychological word-rating system called Affective Norms for English Words – a low-scoring word on ANEW is considered negative, a high-scoring one positive. They also filtered out tweets from users outside the US, and also from those in the US who did not include their exact location – for example, their city – in their Twitter profile.

That left 300 million tweets, each of which was awarded a mood score based on the number of positive or negative words it contained. For example, “diamond”, “love” and “paradise” indicate happiness, whereas “funeral”, “rape” and “suicide” are negative. “Dentist” is fairly neutral.

Blood Pressure Chart: New Application July 27, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Innovation, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Video, Web 2.0.
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According to Consumer Reports, there is clear evidence about the advantages of using applications in blood pressure monitoring.

People were given a device for checking their blood pressure. It plugged into a phone jack, and automatically sent off the results, allowing patients and their doctors to keep track of their scores online. After six months of treatment, people using the device saw the top number of their blood pressure reading (their systolic blood pressure) drop by 12.9 mmHg. People receiving the usual treatment from their doctor saw a drop of just 9.2 mmHg—a difference of 3.7 mmHg.

Now Mateusz Mucha came up with a great app, Blood Pressure Chart, that lets users keep track of their readings, analyze and share them with their doctor.

Here’s a list of its features:

  • stores your blood pressure and heart rate records
  • automatically calculates average values from multiple readings
  • displays history on an interactive graph
  • displays all records in an informative table
  • shows statistics - average values and “distribution of stages”
  • lets users share all the above information on a public profile.  This feature can be turned off for privacy reasons.
  • lets users set up daily reminders (doctors recommend to take readings at the same time every day)
  • no installation required and it’s free

PeRSSonalized Medicine in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy July 27, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine 2.0, PeRSSonalized Medicine, Web 2.0, Webicina.
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Kevin Clauson kindly mentioned PeRSSonalized Medicine, the simplest customizable medical information aggregator that is available in 11 languages, in his recent paper published in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy.

Pharmacists’ duty to warn in the age of social media
Kevin A. Clauson, Matthew J. Seamon, and Brent I. Fox
Am J Health-Syst Pharm. 2010; 67:1290-3

Radiopaedia: Quizzes in Radiology July 26, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Innovation, Medical Imaging, Medical education, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Radiology, Web 2.0, Wiki.
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A few days ago, I described how I use Quiz.MD for keeping myself up-to-date and just came across a new feature on Radiopaedia, a radiology wiki site I frequently write about. They now offer quizzes which are actually detailed, illustrated case presentations. Really useful and can also help you boost your radiology knowledge.

One example:

Internet moderitis: New disease in mental health July 26, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine, Web 2.0.
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There is a new profession in the internet era, the so called Internet content reviewer. They check all the submissions and uploads on huge social networking sites, review tens of thousands of pictures and make sure only legal content is being uploaded to these communities. It seems a new disease is starting to spread: moderitis. Here is a New York Times piece on the topic:

Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.

YouTube, a division of Google, is an exception. If a user indicates a video is inappropriate, software scans the image looking for warning signs of clips that are breaking the site’s rules or the law. Flagged videos are then sent for manual review by YouTube-employed content moderators who, because of the nature of the work, are given only yearlong contracts and access to counseling services, according to Victoria Grand, a YouTube spokeswoman.

Photo: Stephen Mally for The New York Times