When I was working I never watched daytime TV. Even now I don’t watch much TV, usually just some news shows. Nevertheless recently I had occasion to watch some daytime television and I happened on the Maury Povich Show. Disobeying my better instincts to change the channel, I spent some time watching it, and the similar… Continue reading Weekdays with Maury
Author: mannd
I am a retired cardiac electrophysiologist who has worked both in private practice in Louisville, Kentucky and as a Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado in Denver. I am interested not only in medicine, but also in computer programming, music, science fiction, fantasy, 30s pulp literature, and a whole lot more.
Can Writing About Medicine Change Medicine?
I’m getting to the point where I think it might be time to stop or at least decelerate the pace of my writing on medicine. When I retired from medical practice almost a year ago there were a lot of pent up experiences that I felt a need write about. But now I have already written about… Continue reading Can Writing About Medicine Change Medicine?
Whatever Happened to Netiquette?
Let’s harken back to the early days of the Internet, say the 1990s. In those days of yore, characterized by limited bandwidth and lack of flash animations, people by trial and error attempted to work out the dos and don’ts of online communication. This was before Facebook messaging and tweeting, before SMS and MMS. Communication… Continue reading Whatever Happened to Netiquette?
Lost in EPIC Land
One of the many unanswered questions about the handling of the first Ebola case in the United States is the role of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Initial reports put at least some of the blame for the patient’s being sent home from the hospital despite a high risk travel history on a failure of… Continue reading Lost in EPIC Land
How Much Money Do Academic Experts Get From Drug and Device Companies?
Now that Open Payments data is available to the public I decided to do some snooping around. It’s not hard to do. I was curious as to how much drug and device company money academic experts receive. As a cardiologist specializing in electrophysiology I have been to many national meetings, and it is always the same… Continue reading How Much Money Do Academic Experts Get From Drug and Device Companies?
How to View Your Doctor’s Drug Company Payments
The CMS Open Payments database is up for the public to view, but the site is difficult to navigate. Here is a step by step guide to using the site. Go to openpaymentsdata.cms.gov From the list of databases, click on the General Payment Data with Identifying Recipient Information – Detailed Dataset 2013 Reporting Year (or skip step one… Continue reading How to View Your Doctor’s Drug Company Payments
Ebola – Missing the Diagnosis
The first “wild” Ebola case in the United States has occurred in Dallas, Texas. The patient, who is from Liberia and had contact with a pregnant Ebola victim in his native country, was initially sent away from the Emergency Department (ED) of a Dallas hospital after reporting there with viral symptoms. He told the triage… Continue reading Ebola – Missing the Diagnosis
AutoLayout Revisited
My initial experiences with Apple’s iOS AutoLayout were pretty negative. Using Interface Builder’s (IB) ability to generate AutoLayout constraints automatically based on the positioning of views turned out to be frustrating, as it would generate constraints that were incompatible with iOS 7. As iOS 8 has only been out for a few weeks, I definitely… Continue reading AutoLayout Revisited
How Secure is Your Medical Data?
With the recent discovery of the ShellShock vulnerability affecting a large number of computers, the question comes up again: how secure is medical data? Thanks to the federally mandated push to transfer medical data from paper charts to computer databases, most if not all of this data is now fertile ground for hackers. As pointed… Continue reading How Secure is Your Medical Data?
The Approaching Sunshine Apocalypse
On September 30, a week from today as I write this, the US government will release the long-anticipated Sunshine Act Open Payments data to the general public. Or at least some of it, maybe two thirds. It’s not clear. What is clear is that Open Payments has gotten off to a rocky start, reminiscent of… Continue reading The Approaching Sunshine Apocalypse