Last day in Long Beach February 2, 2008

I wanted to say some words about the feedback of my presentation before flying to New York. On Wednesday, I gave a slideshow about Web 2.0 and Medicine to cc. 20-30 people (medical students from USC, physicians and scientists) and the feedback was really positive (what else I could say on my own blog?). I’ll make this slideshow public after going back home. The motto of the presentation was centered around taking control of publishing medical information on the web. This is the responsibility of physicians to fight against pseudoscience and medical quackery.

I mentioned some tools and methods on how to build an on-line reputation which anyway becomes more and more important in a medical practice or research.

Web 2.0 will not revolutionize medicine and healthcare but will revolutionize the dissemination of medical information. So I talked about the medical blogosphere, Second Life, the medical search engines and blog carnivals as well. I consider it as a successful presentation because I had to stay in the Salon for 4 hours after finishing my slides as there were many questions and some of the participants wanted to try Second Life and those medical tools themselves.

On Thursday, we organized a live medical exercise in Second Life which the medical students here really enjoyed.

So I have to say I’m absolutely satisfied and the Salon was so interesting with those mind-blowing ideas. Nintendo Wii for surgical education; a computer game for examining the physiological processes of the kidney in 3D, etc.

I visited some places in Long Beach, finally had a great lunch with a Hungarian scientist who lives in the US and attended the last sessions. Took a deeper look at the local Aquarium:

Tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM, I have to get to the airport (LAX). Don’t worry, I wake up at 4 AM every single day because of the bloody jet lag…

I’ll write the next post from New Haven, or at least I hope to do so.