Mobile patient portals, organ donation on Facebook, what those stats were really saying, open access news and baby sea otters…in the brave new fuzzy world of blog buzz.
Kaiser Permanente rolled out a patient EMR app for Androids (with over 99,000 downloads!!) last week and has now introduced an iOS app, reports MobiHealthNews.
What did the stats behind news reports of infections causing 16% of cancers really mean? A great explanation of population attributable fractions from Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Dr. Bertalan Meskó over at Science Roll was underwhelmed by the response to the Facebook organ donor drive, but one might wonder if Facebook profiles are the place for any medical or legal information.
The publisher of PLoS One is leaving to work on a new Open Access project, PeerJ, launching in Fall 2012.
And some very cute videos are waiting for you in Joanne Manaster’s review of Otter 501 at Scientific American’s blogs.
MSKCC’s Dr. Peter Scardino comments on Warren Buffet’s decision to undergo radiation therapy for stage 1 prostate cancer.
Marlo Thomas in an article in the Huffington Post, asked some of the top cancer scientists, including MSKCC’s Dr. Charles Sawyers, what makes them optimistic about the ongoing battle with cancer.
On January 17, 2012, the Systems Biology Discussion Group gathered at the New York Academy of Sciences for the Single-Cell Level Systems Biology symposium. Grégoire Altan-Bonnet from MSKCC described new ways of using flow cytommetry, eg Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS), to characterize signal transduction pathways.
The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen reported big news from Harvard this week—a faculty committee announced that, due to the high price of academic journal bundles, they are encouraging faculty to publish in open access journals and add their work to the institution’s repository. In related news, the library has released nearly all of its bibliographic records under a Creative Commons license and hopes to encourage other institutions to make their metadata available as well.
In a recent issue, The Economist discusses charities (especially patient foundations) collaborating with pharmaceutical companies in drug discovery efforts. The article mentions an April 19 announcement that the Michael J. Fox Foundation will pay the clinical trial costs of a Sanofi drug targeted against Parkinson’s disease.
Donna Wilson of MSKCC’s Integrative Medicine Service has a series of online videos explaining breathing techniques and exercises for patients with lung cancer and other breathing problems.
The following video teaches you how to calm and control your breathing, and is just one of several that Donna leads on YouTube.
Healing Breath: For shortness of breath, pain or coughing
The Institute of Medicine has released a report, “Strengthening a Workforce for Innovative Regulatory Science in Therapeutics Development: Workshop Summary.”
