When you type a search query into Google's web search, a feature called Google Suggest will offer searches that other users have typed that are similar to the one you're typing. Sometimes, this can provide an eye-opening view of how the Internet — or at least, the people who search Google — feel about a particular topic.
For example, here are the Google suggested searches for "Doctors are..."
In case you were wondering — no, thousands are people aren't all searching for "doctors are sadists who like to play god and watch lesser people scream" because they necessarily feel that way — it's a quote from the movie Juno.
Here are some other similar searches from Google Suggest.
Nurses are:
nurses are great
nurses are angels
nurses are mean
nurses are heroes
Medicine is:
medicine is keystone of the arch of socialism
medicine is working but u.s. economy isn't healthy yet
medicine is an art
medicine is not candy
Hospitals are:
hosptials are generally categorized as nonprofit for-profit or governmental
hospitals are cold
hospitals are challenged by competition for paying patients
The study's aim was to better understand how physicians use the internet in their clinical practices. As you'd expect from a study sponsored by Google, it was particularly focused on how physicians use search.
The study surveyed 411 physicians from a range of specialties (PCPs, endocrinologist, cardiologists, psychiatrist) and with a range of experience (2 - 30 years in practice) on their use of the internet in clinical practice. Additionally, various clinical scenarios were presented designed to mimic actual situations the physicians might encounter.
Here are some of the findings. All these percentages seem low to me.
86% of physicians have used the internet to gather health, medical, or prescription drug information.
Only 21% of physicians who use the internet in their clinical setting access the internet for medical information in the patient exam room.
58% of physicians access the internet more than once daily.
Only 81% of physicians use search engines. Of these, 92% use Google (naturally), but only 13% use Google Scholar. (I'm not certain where Pubmed fits into this — I presume it falls under "search engine.")
Physicians most commonly searched online for general condition information and specific drug information.
As a result of online research, physicians made a change in medication or initiated a treatment about 30% of the the time.
78% (only 78%?!) believe the Internet has made practicing medicine easier.
8% of all physicians clicked sponsored links, but21% of psychiatrists clicked on sponsored links. (Analyze that.)
92% of physicians clicked on the first search result.
To delve further into the summary PDF, click here.
The holy grail of resolution is not high definition video, but telepresence — resolution so good it feels like you're looking through a window, not a TV set or a monitor. Resolution so detailed you feel like you are there.
Dr. Steven Palter, an obstetrician/gynecologist and fertility specialist, recently performed the world's first laparoscopic surgery with the RED camera at a resolution equivalent to 4X HD. The procedure was presented on October 20 at the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in Atlanta. According to Dr. Palter,
"The images are the sharpest, most detail-rich and color-correct endoscopic images ever created anywhere. There is not a more accurate view inside the human body... By increasing resolution to this level we allow the surgeon to be actually immersed in images that surpass the live surgical experience. The resolution approaches that of the human eye but it is combined with 10 fold magnification through the telescope which operates just inches away from the disease. The progress from regular surgical film technology is like comparing sitting in an HD home theater to watching a video on a cell phone..."
A little over a year ago, before Twitter was the tech/pop culture phenomenon it is today, doctors like myself had a problem: how do you identify other health professionals on Twitter? (At the time, there must have been at least dozens. Dozens.)
This was the first solution. In retrospect, it was hilariously cobbled-together:
When FriendFeed debuted, I created "The Doctor's Room," which was populated by both Twitter feeds and RSS feeds of physicians. Unfortunately, the "room" feature was poorly designed by FriendFeed (which has since been acquired by Facebook). Like the Yahoo Pipes experiment, the FriendFeed room was an educational failure.
A month ago, Twitter finally debuted the "lists" feature, allowing each user to create subscribable lists of other users. Below is a sample. (For clarity, the second column is the number of users in the list, the third column is the number of users subscribed to the list. Got it?)
While not a perfect solution, lists are a simple way to discover health care practitioners on Twitter. (Finally.) Services like Listorious have also appeared which use the Twitter API to create searchable lists of lists.
For easy reference, here's a list of some of the more popular lists of doctors on Twitter:
(Please note that sometimes these articles are about conditions that are deadly serious, and my intention is not to make fun of anyone, but to show appreciation for humor in scientific writing, which is often dry.)
Hilarious journal articles even have their own awards: the Ig Nobel Prizes, which has been presented at Harvard since 1991. You'll find the complete collection of prize winners here.
And since January of 2009, two Molecular and Cell Biology graduate students at UC Berkeley have written a blog devoted entirely to squirt-milk-out-your-nose grade scientific research. Their website is NCBI ROFL, which stands for National Center for Biotechnology Information — creators of PubMed, where most of the abstracts are published — Rolling On The Floor Laughing.
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