What's the Most Recent Development?

Renowned scientist and professor of neurology at Brown University, John Donoghue has made incredible advances in interfacing the human brain with computers, allowing paralyzed people to move objects by simply using their imagination. A small chip implanted in the brain picks up the right neural signals and beams them into a computer where they are translated into moving a cursor or controlling a computer keyboard. "By this means, paralysed people can move a robot arm or drive their own wheelchair, just by thinking about it."

What's the Big Idea?

The implications of a brain-computer interface are formidable, from transferring human consciousness onto a computer—in other words, immortality—to using the technology to read people's minds. Military establishments are interested in Dr. Donoghue's research in order to enhance interrogations methods. Were interrogators able to interface the mind of a prisoner with a computer, perhaps information could be extracted they could use to prevent criminal acts and save lives. It seems the next phase of evolution will be synthetic, rather than purely biological. 

Read it at The Guardian

I am so thankful for ideas like this. So much is available to us now that patients could not take advantage of ten years ago or so. What ideas like this will become commonplace in another ten years? Bioness is unbelievably helpful to me, and in a short time it will probably be outdated, just old technology.

Spurred by health care trends and technological advances, telemedicine is growing into a mainstream industry. A fifth of Americans live in places where primary care physicians are scarce, according to government statistics. That need is converging with advances that include lower costs for video-conferencing equipment, more high-speed communications links by satellite, and greater ability to work securely and dependably over the Internet.

This from the business section, so the focus seems to be more on the macroeconomic than individual care, but it's good to see changes that can bring better care to more people at reasonable cost. Today's paper also had an article on crowdsourcing and medicine. 

Cuccinelli said he could not say how much of his staff's time has been devoted to writing Virginia's next filing in the suit--due June 7 but estimated it likely reached "scores of hours, for sure."

This is an important point because Cuccinelli has so far said the suit has cost the state only $350, the court filing fee, and declined to break down how much the state is paying to staff working the issue.

But I guess it's all right to spend the money as long as you're trying to establish that you don't have to spend any money on health care

Steve Jobs got a new liver, the rest of us got an easier way to watch Hulu in bed, and the health-care industry just may have gotten the big break it needed to launch into the 21st century. Following his hush-hush surgery last spring, it's easy to imagine the colossus of Cupertino, Calif., staring at the ceiling tiles in his hospital room and wishing for a way to hop online without having to bother with a laptop.

It's also no stretch to picture him watching doctors, nurses and orderlies peck away at a bevy of poorly designed, intermittently integrated and just plain ugly devices and thinking there had to be a better way.

So while the rest of the world texts, tweets and generally fawns over the thing, that's muted compared with the reception the iPad is getting in the health-care universe.

Well, I've got doctors who show no apparent interest in using a computer and a cardiologist who blows me away every time I see him come into the examination room with a tablet computer--I want to know exactly what he's doing with that device and how it's integrated into his practice. I'm frustrated that I can't use a computer to communicate directly with my doctors, frustrated that there's no standard for sharing medical information--every practice seems to have a different kind of patient questionnaire that makes initial visits harder than they need to be. (It really bugs me that most practices I've visited insist on a questionnaire but don't make it available on the web ahead of time, so most initial visits are more time consuming than they need to be. Since I've got use of only one hand, it would be a great convenience to me o have a form I culd fill out on a computer.)  It would be great if I could keep (and update) my basic information in one place and have it available in a second for me and a doctor. Here's something to look forward to in medicine and tehnology.

Imagine no waiting room at the doctor's office. Scratch that. Now picture no doctor's office at all. In this practice, you make appointments via text, video chat or email, and sometimes your doctor makes house calls. Oh, and you deal directly with the insurance company, because there's no staff for that. Meet Dr. Jay Parkinson. After completing his residency at Johns Hopkins University, the pediatrician was unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. So he founded Hello Health, a newfangled practice in Brooklyn that promises to streamline the process of health care. Is it working? 

"Evidence says that about 50 percent of all doctor visits are unnecessary. But they only get paid to bring you into the office, so that's what they do. So, if you don't have that incentive, that means 50 percent of problems can be taken care of without physically seeing you, but augmented with good communication," says Parkinson. He describes the genesis of his idea, and his thoughts on how we can reform the U.S. health care system. What about developing a Facebook for health care? "How much would it cost to Facebook if it were designed to power medicine to sign up all 11 million healthcare workers in America? It surely wouldn't cost $20 billion."

Finally, Parkinson weighs in on the consequences of the potential death of primary care in America. Plus, should we stop taking prescription drugs? You might rethink filling that prescription when you find out what some medications could be doing to you.