Group items tagged

A conference folks might be interested in

AMA's social media guidelines

A collection of resources on health literacy on trailmeme

"Even highly skilled individuals will find it challenging to grasp complex health information when made vulnerable by poor health. As reported by the American Medical Association (AMA), poor health literacy has a significant impact on health care outcomes as poor health literacy is "a stronger predictor of a person's health than age, income, employment status, education level, and race." "

A social contract does exist between medicine and society. Because society has chosen to use the concept of the profession as a means of organizing the services of the healer, professionalism has come to serve as the basis of this social contract. What is expected of the physician as healer is largely determined by what it means to be a professional in contemporary society.

"It's not just patients who can learn from tools that help them make evidence-based decisions. Assessing patients' understanding of the information provided and the reasons for their health care choices has been an educational experience for Dale Collins Vidal, MD, director of the Center for Informed Choice at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire."

"Diagnosis-Independent Alzheimer Disease Biomarker Signature in Cognitively Normal Elderly People"

I heard Trojanowski (the senior author) talk about this last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. It's a very interesting topic with a lot of social ramifications. The statement in the absrract that among people with mild cognitive impairment, the biomarker profile had a 100% sensitivity for development of AD needs to be carefully considered. First, the metric that is of greater interest is the positive predictive value. Second, it is known that some patients who have the classic AD findings at autopsy did not have mental impairment in life. We know this from the Nun study.

Recommendations issued in current ACC/AHA clinical practice guidelines are largely developed from lower levels of evidence or expert opinion. The proportion of recommendations for which there is no conclusive evidence is also growing. These findings highlight the need to improve the process of writing guidelines and to expand the evidence base from which clinical practice guidelines are derived.

"In this national study of internal medicine residents, suboptimal QOL and symptoms of burnout were common. Symptoms of burnout were associated with higher debt and were less frequent among international medical graduates. Low QOL, emotional exhaustion, and educational debt were associated with lower IM-ITE scores. "

The median reported time dedicated to LGBT-related topics in 2009-2010 was small across US and Canadian medical schools, but the quantity, content covered, and perceived quality of instruction varied substantially.

"Patient communication skills need to be taught as part of residency training. With limited training, case-specific skills (herein, involving patients with cancer) are likely to improve more than general communication skills."

"In comparison with no intervention, technology-enhanced simulation training in health professions education is consistently associated with large effects for outcomes of knowledge, skills, and behaviors and moderate effects for patient-related outcomes. "