When Your Therapist Is Only a Click Away
Ms. Weinblatt, a 30-year-old high school teacher in Oregon, used to be in treatment the conventional way — with face-to-face office appointments. Now, with her new doctor, she said: “I can have a Skype therapy session with my morning coffee or before a night on the town with the girls. I can take a break from shopping for a session. I took my doctor with me through three states this summer!”
Full Story: New York Times
CHART OF THE DAY: When Will Kindles Be Free?
When will the Kindle be free? When will Amazon’s special offers, and Prime program make it cheap enough for Amazon to give away Kindles? Next year? The year after that?Full Story: Business Insider
Would this not mean that Amazon would be able to offer schools some dirt cheap kindles to be used in lieu of existing textbooks. Supplying students with the same educational material but in a significantly more interesting manner and for a relatively similar price. They could be given to students free of charge (the devices being paid for by schools out of an existing book budget or even government funded sources) on the basis they are offered the chance to buy them at the end of their secondary school career (16/18 years old). This would save schools a LOT of money potentially as they’d only have to buy e-books and the maintenance of a library would be obsolete.
I think that it is inevitable that iPads or other tablets will eventually be brought into schools to enhance the learning experience (a little sad in my surprisingly old-fashioned opinion). So, if I were Amazon (or even any other provider of similar products) I would definitely be aiming to grab a market share as soon as I could.
In a recent article, Pharmalot mentions a pattern in which some companies share prices tend to increase before the announcement of successful Phase III drugs trials and often decrease before the announcement of unsuccessful trials. Is this a sign of corruption seeping into the one place you would really hope it never did or just a bit of cheeky insider trading?
(Source: pharmalot.com)
Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a “keep out” sign on the gates.You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50. Springer charges €34.95, Wiley-Blackwell, $42. Read 10 and you pay 10 times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50. Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets, which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.Illustration by Daniel Pudles
(via emergentfutures)
Funny
(Source: newyorker, via emergentfutures)
As reported by Nature on the 31st August 2011, there is such thing as a promising cancer treatment study (http://blogs.nature.com/nm/spoonful/2011/08/cancerkilling_viruses_zero_in.html). The link is there for you to read but the jist of the treatment is oncolytic viruses being developed to specifically target tumor cells. However, my point lies in a limitation placed upon the study by its key beneficiaries. Albeit a horrid ordeal to handle and my support goes out to individuals affected, the shame is relatively few cancer patients participate in clinical studies as pointed out by Pharmalot recently. (http://www.pharmalot.com/2011/08/few-cancer-patients-participate-in-clinical-trials/)
Maybe the future will make it easier for patients to join trials.
Yours with hope.
A UK pilot project for mass genetic screening of cancers will begin next month. The project will combine personalized medicine and centralized research, with the aim of benefiting patients and scientists.
[…]
Surplus material from biopsies on the tumours will be sent to three centralized laboratories and tested for specific genes and mutations. Eventually it is hoped that this information can be used to tailor treatments to a patient’s cancer. At the same time, the data will be held centrally and offer researchers a resource for improving medicine from the top down.
This could be an interesting way forward to increase the knowledge processes beyond what is possible with isolated information gathering and judgment in different regions or hospitals.
But… there is still this problem that public medical organizations must act as a top-down organization and ratify different treatment methods accordingly. That is why it will take some time and why they are careful and add:
The new pilot programme will not actually influence treatment decisions, because it is a proof of concept. But if successful, it could provide a model for bringing personalized medicine to the United Kingdom. This is likely to be increasingly important as, for example, drug companies look to identify which patients will benefit from expensive targeted therapies before they are administered.
(via emergentfutures)
This did make me wonder if, as there are placements in food testing, during my year in industry I’d be able to get involved in something like this. That would be awesome and would also give me some bragging rights!
(Source: twitter.com)
In early August 2011, Pharmalot released an article that highlighted the different levels to which doctors are impressed by the use of Ipads by drugs sales reps compared to other digital mediums. This makes for an interesting thought when, early in the same month, Pharmalot also released an article pointing out the lack of time reps in India get with doctors due to the incredibly high competition.
The latter mentioned article says that some doctors are only able to give 20 seconds on average to individual reps, who can sometimes aim to see up to 11 doctors a day, and will queue for hours week after week to ensure they get their quick pitching time. The article also points out that continued training is not a priority to some docs in India and many do not have to do anything in order to keep their accreditation.
Maybe some of this money for Ipads could be put to better use in poorer countries, especially as many physicians don’t necessarily appreciate their use.
(Source: pharmalot.com)
After a read of a fascinating article on the upcoming use of tissue-engineered blood vessels for use in the treatment of heart defects, it occurred to me that differences in safety approval protocol can ultimately lead to loss of life and sustained suffering. Of course, that sentence is a bit coarse. The truth of the matter is that the safety protocols are there to ensure that new-found treatments are ethical, cost-effective and, most importantly, are not going to kill people.
However, in the case described in the article in question, Toshiharu Shinok performed a similar operation on 25 people in Japan around 10 years before anything was allowed to go into trials in the US. This almost begs the question: “Can standards ever be bypassed to recognise success under different authorities?” In effect, this asks if the FDA (The Food and Drugs Administration in the US) would be able (or willing) to recognise the success of foreign research even though the protocols are not as stringent.
(Source: blogs.nature.com)
