Friday nano fun: “Everything you need to know about the wonders of nanotechnology… as a musical… with puppets.”
Archive for June, 2009
The Nano Song
Friday, June 26th, 2009The GE Reading List
Friday, June 26th, 2009So a few weeks ago we asked folks at GE what they were reading. They gave us lots of great books and we’ve now compiled them into a little Amazon reading list to make it easy for you to buy anything on the list. We’d like to keep expanding this, so feel free to add your books in the comments.
And without any further ado: What’s GE Reading? (On Amazon)
Unfounded Truths
Monday, June 22nd, 2009Reading this short article about the value of health data to combat unfounded best practices reminded me of another story from How Doctors Think:
One of the most common congenital abnormalities of the heart is a hole between the two upper chambers, between the right atrium and the left atrium. Since the pressure in the left side of the heart is higher than in the right, blood will flow from the left atrium through the hole into the right atrium. This aberrant blood flow is called a shunt and can overload the right side of the heart, leading to heart failure and other complications. Lock told me that doctors send children for surgery to close these holes if there is a two-to-one shunt, meaning that twice as much blood flows through the right side of the heart than the left.
“Do you know where that two-to-one number came from?” [Dr. James] Lock [, chief of cardiology at Boston's Children's Hospital,] asked. I imagined ti was from careful clinical studies of children with the hold. “You would think so. But you’d be wrong. At a medical meeting in the 1960s, a pediatrician presented the question ‘When should the hold be closed?’ to a group of cardiologists. There was a heated debate about how much shunting required a surgical fix. So the meeting organizers, out of desperation, took a vote. Some voted for a lower number, some for a higher number. The median ended up being two-to-one. This was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. So now all textbooks have as the truth that you should close a hole when the shunt is two-to-one.
In reality, Children with a two-to-one shunt can live a healthy life without ever requiring treatment. Heart surgery, as one can imagine, is always a dangerous proposition that carries risks for the patients.
Primary Care vs Specialists
Friday, June 19th, 2009Another entry inspired by How Doctors Think for your (in case you missed the last it was about confirmation bias). This time it’s about the differences between primary care physicians and specialists and the way they’re viewed by society.
I just loved this long quote from Dr. Eric Cassell’s book Doctoring: The Nature of Primary Care Medicine:
One should not confuse highly technical, even complicated, medical knowledge — special practical knowledge about an unusual disease, treatment (complex chemotherapy, for example), condition or technology — with the complex, many-sized worldy-wise knowledge we expect of the best physicians.
The narrowest subspecialist, the reasoning goes, should also be able to provide this range of medical services. This naive idea arises, as do so many other wrong beliefs about primary care, because of the concept that doctors take care of diseases. Diseases, the idea goes on, form a hierarchy from simple to difficult. Specialists take care of difficult diseases, so, of course, they will naturally do a good job on simple diseases. Wrong. Doctors take care of people, some of whom have diseases and all of whom have some problem. People used to doing complicated things usually do complicated things in simple situations–for example, ordering tests or x-rays when waiting a few days might suffice–thus overtreating people with simple illnesses and overlooking the clues about other problems that might have brought the patient to the doctor.
Never really thought of it that way but it makes a whole lot of sense.
Visualizing Shipping
Thursday, June 18th, 2009When we visited the Global Research Center one of the coolest stops was the Trailer of the Future to see all the Veriwise stuff. Basically GE is helping to track much of the cargo that gets shipped around the country in 18-wheelers.
With all that data coming in the first thing we all thought of was visualizations: What kind of awesome patterns and trends could we show by mapping the data?
Though it’s not so exciting to look at, this map of cargo by Hellenic Shipping News is pretty rad (via MetaFilter).
And since we’re talking about visualizing lots of data from stuff traveling, here’s the now-famous Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin.
Helping Doctors Think
Thursday, June 18th, 2009Over the weekend I finally finished the book How Doctors Think (which will be on our inaugural GE reading list since it was recommended by someone in healthcare). The book is excellent and I’d highly recommend it if you’re into this sort of stuff, it’s basically a study of the cognitive biases of doctors.
Anyhow, I’ve got about half of it underlined and will probably write a few posts from those over the next few weeks, the first of which is this one.
One of the themes of the book is that a patient should help their doctor snap out of confirmation bias (“confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information”). The book suggests two simple questions to ask your doctor if you suspect this is what’s going on:
- What’s the worst thing this could be? “By asking that question, a patient, friend, or family member can slow down the doctor’s pace and help him think more broadly.”
- What body parts are near where I am having my symptom? This helps expand a conversation that might be stalled by pain in or around a chronic condition for example. By thinking about the nearby organs a doctor might be pushed to ask some new questions.
In telling Benjamin about this we got to thinking about how we could turn these questions/answers into little applications, maybe even for the phone, so you can take them with you and be armed with questions to ask your doctor.
QALY: Quality Adjusted Life Score
Friday, June 12th, 2009So a big part of our conversation with David Lee (one of GE’s health economists) last week was talk about QALYs:
QALY: Quality adjusted life year, a year of life adjusted for its quality or its value. A year in perfect health is considered equal to 1.0 QALY. The value of a year in ill health would be discounted. For example, a year bedridden might have a value equal to 0.5 QALY.
Much of David’s work is in this realm, as he explained:
We try and evaluate benefits and costs. The way we measure that is a QALY, quality adjusted life year, we try to figure out what the QALY for certain technologies are. Is the gain in QALYs to the gain in costs worth it. The UK has something like £30,000 per QALY. If the technology can deliver at less than that they’ll pay for it, if it’s more than that they won’t. … What it’s telling technology developers is that if you’ve got a high cost with low medical benefit product your chances of getting into market are lower. If you’re a cancer patient that stands to benefit from an additional three months of life that will cost the NHS $70k is it worth it or not?
This is especially interesting to me because it’s puts a value on human life. In some cases it’s going to be decided that the treatment isn’t worth the cost and while that’s a tough decision to make, it’s an understandable one (at least from an outsider rational standpoint … imagine it’s a different story if you’re the one who wants the treatment). Basically there has to be some way to measure this stuff otherwise it would all spiral out of control. Anyway, lots to think about.
I’ll continue digging into our chat with David over the coming days, going to try to break it down into bite-sized chunks.
Why Don’t More Men Go to the Doctor?
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Hrm …. A very interesting question from The Guardian. As they point out, men are generally less healthy than women, yet they see their doctors less often.
A few hypotheses are included (”They see it as a question of maintenance, whereas men see it as a question of repair. Men treat their bodies a bit like a car: once it’s burnt out they’ll fix it, but until then they power on.”) but it’s a great question. Any thoughts?
What is GE Reading?
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009So I’ve had this idea ever since we went up to the Global Research Center and Benjamin suggested I post it rather than just let it stew.
So … I’d really like to know what GE’s scientists and engineers are reading. Whether it’s blogs, newspaper articles or books, I just think it would make for an amazing list. You’d read that right? Anyway, would be great if we could make it happen.
And, in the spirit of sharing, here are a few of my favorite blogs as of late:
Frontal Cortex: Amazing neuroscience blog by Seed editor Jonah Lehrer
Snarkmarket: Just interesting stuff.
Cheap Talk: Economics blog mostly about game theory by two economics professors.
Jay Parkinson Blog: Since I’ve been getting into all this GE stuff Jay’s blog about health has become more and more interesting.
Sociological Images: A blog about how imagery shapes culture.
Self Surveillance
Monday, June 8th, 2009Just ran across an interesting essay(ish) about Self Surveillance, the act of keeping track of yourself using the tools around you. This is something that popped into my head after visiting the hospital of the future folks at the Global Research Center. One of the things they’re working on is home monitoring equipment and I wondered how you could make this feel more normal for folks that need it by getting people to voluntarily use it to monitor (and optimize) their own behavior.
As this article points out, collecting data around health is pretty natural:
Self-surveillance naturally lends itself to tracking physical health and biometrics. If we think of our bodies as fine-tuned machines, then it is perhaps best we pay close attention to how we take care of them with a healthy lifestyle. Numerous studies have shown that the food we eat and the amount of time we exercise plays a major role in how we feel, and preliminary research suggests that self-monitoring increases awareness, which leads to better decisions.