Calling all forward-thinking, creative doctors…
I first posted this about two months ago. But just as a reminder, please join us.
You’re probably a bit of an outsider. Our medical culture doesn’t really reward innovation and creativity. In fact, it actively stifles it.
But I think that if all of us band together, I’m quite confident that something interesting and positive will happen. I think we can be the leaders that simply make healthcare better for everyone.
We’re all types of doctors— internet geeks, policy wonks, neurosurgeons, pediatricians, young, and old. But the one thing that unites us is our curiosity, creativity, and need to think differently. If that’s you, please join us. We’re humbly just getting started.
This is important.
HBS Student Creates Smartphone App To Detect Malaria
Attach a lens to the back of a Windows 7 phone, take a drop of blood from the patient and you have instant results and huge improvement over the “current ‘state-of-the-art’ malaria detection method used in these areas involves a cotton swap test that results in only 40% accuracy.”
Incredible.
18. Worst Energy Drink
Rockstar Energy Drink (1 can, 16 fl oz)280 calories
0 g fat
62 g sugarsSugar Equivalent: 6 Krispy Kreme Original Glazed Doughnuts
Can Psychiatry Be a Science?
What if your sadness was grief, though? And what if there were a pill that relieved you of the physical pain of bereavement—sleeplessness, weeping, loss of appetite—without diluting your love for or memory of the dead? Assuming that bereavement “naturally” remits after six months, would you take a pill today that will allow you to feel the way you will be feeling six months from now anyway? Probably most people would say no.
Is this because of what the psychiatrist Gerald Klerman once called “pharmacological Calvinism”? Klerman was describing the view, which he thought many Americans hold, that shortcuts to happiness are sinful, that happiness is not worth anything unless you have worked for it. (Klerman misunderstood Calvinist theology, but never mind.) We are proud of our children when they learn to manage their fears and perform in public, and we feel that we would not be so proud of them if they took a pill instead, even though the desired outcome is the same. We think that sucking it up, mastering our fears, is a sign of character. But do we think that people who are naturally fearless lack character? We usually think the opposite. Yet those people are just born lucky. Why should the rest of us have to pay a price in dread, shame, and stomach aches to achieve a state of being that they enjoy for nothing?
Or do we resist the grief pill because we believe that bereavement is doing some work for us? Maybe we think that since we appear to have been naturally selected as creatures that mourn, we shouldn’t short-circuit the process. Or is it that we don’t want to be the kind of person who does not experience profound sorrow when someone we love dies? Questions like these are the reason we have literature and philosophy. No science will ever answer them.
