kindproject

100th doctors visit for a detached retina

Posted by jonathan - 17/05/08 at 08:05:25 am

	Name	Score
1.	JBK	100
2.	WTF	97
3.	OMG	92

Next week, Wednesday, will be my 100th doctors appointment with my retina surgeon. I have asked that they put a leader board up like the old school arcade games.

At the very least I am hoping for a cake :)

Since I started seeing this doctor, he has built out his own surgery center and his business seems to be thriving. For me the twelve surgeries, at least I think its twelve, (do I count the laser procedures, do I count the gas removal), have been trying. Hopefully there are not too many more.

23andMe

Posted by jonathan - 12/05/08 at 05:05:26 pm

I have been seeing more articles about this new personal genome service, 23andMe. On the patientslikeme.com blog, a staff writer talked about the privacy implications of submitting her info, but in the end she spit since her company, patientslikeme, is all about sharing of medical info. Yesterday at work we got an invite to get a 50% discount for this service. I went to the site, read through some info and while still not really seeing the immediate value was considering the purchase mostly out of curiosity. Today I found out how much the discount was. Let me just say that the price confirms my feeling that access to medical services in this country is completely class ($$$) based. I’m not sure this is how George Bush expected you to spend your $600 tax rebate this year. Would you drop a grand on gene mapping?

ref: nytimes article

Is fido good for johny jr?

Posted by jonathan - 06/05/08 at 06:05:14 am

My wife and I have long believed that the anti-bacterial germaphobed American masses have lost touch with the natural cycle of life. Ashes to ashes dust to dust is lost on the control-freak, ocd culture of Americans. I am a firm believer in “the Hygiene Hypothesis, formulated by the epidemiologist David Strachan about 20 years ago, argued that children’s immune systems were not being sufficiently challenged - because of falling family size and increasingly sterile homes - to learn how to fend off diseases. The result was that once harmless invaders, such as cat hair, triggered immune overreactions (this is what constitutes an allergy). In the late Nineties, the evidence for Strachan’s hunch was snowballing: kids in daycare showed lower rates of asthma than infants kept at home, suggesting that immunity might be conferred by early contact with other children.”

In the latest news, scientists now believe that my dog, melba, helps the immune system of my baby, emma. Just one more reason why dog is mans best friend!

Last week our news pages quoted a study from the National Research Centre for Environmental Health in Munich saying that children lessen their risk of being sensitive to allergens if they grow up with a dog. Professor Joachim Heinrich and colleagues found that children raised with a dog had fewer allergy markers, such as antibodies to pollen, house-dust mites, cat and dog dander and mould spores. He told the European Respiratory Journal that a dog’s presence in early childhood encourages the immune system to develop less sensitivity to allergies such as asthma, eczema and hay fever.

- Times online

world book day chapter II

Posted by jonathan - 26/04/08 at 07:04:30 am

Here at google aka neverland ranch, they have a great authors series where guess what authors come to speak about their books. Not only that, they give books away and in return the author gets some youtube video exposure. In honor of world book day on Wednesday I finally made it to a session, Authors@Google NYC Presents: Kelly McMasters, “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town”. I intended to see some others earlier, but last minute capachinos and google terminology investigations always managed to trump them.

I had briefly heard about some environmental issues in long island, obviously not as much as LoveCannal, but as most jersey peeps I tend to ignore anything on the other side of the east river. The author, Kelly was nice and friendly, I could associate with her cast in the shadows of the hamptons mentality as I grew up bordering an open sewer, barely in the boundaries of a super wealthy town.

For anyone who suffers from a chronic illness like myself, there are times when the grass looks greener in the reflection of the medicine cabinet, making another illness appear easier to deal with. This common feeling was confirmed in an article about morgellons I read a few months back, but Kelly’s book has helped me shake these thoughts. Previously I guarded a twinge of jealousy at the success of breast cancer awareness. The pink ribbons, the walk-a-thons, the stamp, all the attention in a zero sum game could only be distracting from the potential cures for my disease. Two days and a book later and I no longer harbor any jealousy of other peoples diseases.

That was a good book!

PBS Tuesday night lineup

Posted by jonathan - 23/04/08 at 08:04:21 am

PBS has captured my attention on Tuesday nights with its primetime line up of Nova and Frontline. Yes I watch tv on tv and I don’t own a tivo, how old fashion of me. Luckily for you pbs, frontline, has a nice online archive of shows for you to watch on your computer. Yesterday’s hot politics earth day message, did not provide many new tidbits for me, but last weeks Sick Around the World did.

Sick Around the World compares our healthcare system with 5 other developed nations, Japan, UK, Germany Switzerland and Taiwan. Most interesting to me and why I want to move into healthcare information management is that the US spends more money as a percentage of gdp on healthcare but we consistently stack rank in the 30s in terms of health care delivered. Moreover our administrative costs for healthcare usually run in the teen to twenty percent range while other developed countries run at a much leaner 5-6% administrative costs. Every time I fill out an almost identical form at the doctors office I am reminded of how last century healthcare delivery is compared to other industries. The battle to modernize not only healthcare administration, but delivery of better care through user generated content is a battle worth fighting.

your test results just came back

Posted by jonathan - 18/04/08 at 11:04:33 am

My pearl does not have the best camera, but this box makes me glad my lab work does not go to shiel. Shouldn’t there be a better way to transport bodily fluids between doctor’s office and lab. These little white boxes don’t inspire much trust.

“The lab test indicated abnormal newspaper consumption.”

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