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.

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:

1. 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.”
2. 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.

In case you’re up for it I’ve uploaded Inside the Atom, Adventures in Jet Power, Adventures in Electricity (7) and Adventure into the Past. I especially liked the explanation of how a turbine works Adventures in Jet Power.

I saw it in a bathroom and it says “This sticker will save up to 100lbs. of paper every year.” It also includes a link to the project’s website, TheseComeFromTrees.com. Just thought it was an interesting, albeit analog, example of communicating consumption to consumers. Maybe something to think about with smart grid/GE energy.

So, here’s a roundup of some highlights from the last month. Of course you’re welcome to click around yourself, but I thought this might be helpful.

Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick roundup of some highlights from the site over the last month:

• We explained why shells don’t break when they’re dropped
• We wrote about the value of computers learning to forget some things rather than just remembering everything.
• We explained how having a baby is one of the only pleasant and planned hospital experiences (and made some sweet animated GIFs).
• We wrote a little about behavioral economics and health
• We posted a video where the folks from Jiminy Peak explain how wind turbines actually work
• We spent some time thinking about the aesthetics of wind
• We had an idea that maybe you could use GE asset management technology to prove that food was local
• We posted a video showing how they got the giant wind turbine to the top of Jiminy Peak
• We explained why it’s so important to keep babies warm (and also showed off the “Baby Susan” in GE’s OmniBed).
• We talked about the age of majority and why hospitals keep medical records for so long