Category: General Medicine

Biohacking can be described as citizen or do-it-yourself biology. For many “biohackers,” this consists of making small, incremental diet or lifestyle changes to make small improvements in your health and well-being. Biohacks promise anything from quick weight loss to enhanced brain function. But the best biohacking results come from being well-informed and cautious about what keep reading

“Physicians are valued for being brilliant diagnosticians and they now have more information and tools and technology at their disposal than ever before; yet patients don’t feel cared for, and doctors don’t feel like they can care for patients enough.”[i] Abraham Verghese, MD is hardly a household name, but among many doctors he is something keep reading

“…when clinical data are used to provide care, the primary purpose for acquiring the data is fulfilled. At that point, clinical data should be treated as a form of public good, to be used for the benefit of future patients.” From Mar. 2029 Radiological Society of North America’s Special Report[i] How much does your privacy keep reading

The most obvious risk is that AI systems will sometimes be wrong, and that patient injury or other health-care problems may result.[i] There are many levels in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already serving the field of medicine, but two of them involve direct impact on patients: enhance patient information available to doctors (e.g. diagnosis, keep reading

From deep learning algorithms that can read CT scans faster than humans to natural language processing (NLP) that can comb through unstructured data in electronic health records (EHRs), the applications for AI in healthcare seem endless.[i] Endless application implies endless possibilities for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medicine and healthcare. Sounds terrific! So, what’s the downside? keep reading

For this blog, I’m departing from my usual prostate cancer themes. This blog branches out more broadly on how infections may influence the development of cancer in general. We already know that cervical cancer is connected to the human papillomavirus, people with hepatitis B or C are more prone to liver cancer, and the human keep reading

There’s no way around the fact that humans will be technically outsmarted by machines in the near future, so the best thing we can bring to health care is those traits (like empathy and concern) that are uniquely human. – Idea embraced by Eric Topol, M.D. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing information technology, keep reading

Many of us recall our high school history courses as painful memorizing of timelines: empires rising and falling, wars, plagues, names of kings and queens, etc. No doubt the thought crossed our minds at least once: why do I need to know this stuff? Then along came the History Channel, with vivid documentaries filled with keep reading