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Today Pulse reports that pharmaceutical companies are directly approaching NHS staff to try to get their grubby paws on patient-identifiable data. The story reports that “two staff members had been approached by a pharmaceutical company while at a conference in London, given access to a website and asked to upload patient-identifiable data”. A spokesperson for [...]
I recently wrote a post about how patient privacy can be threatened in blogs written by doctors. Now a new case illustrates another way that healthcare professionals can violate patient privacy online. Yesterday the Associated Press reported that two hospital workers in New Mexico had been fired for taking pictures with their mobile phone cameras [...]
You may have noticed that ‘Vote’ buttons have appeared at the bottom of my blog posts. Clicking on one of these buttons will submit the particular blog entry to Healthcare Today, a new website where users proffer and vote for the best healthcare news and blogs on the internet. The majority of information for doctors [...]
A study recently published in the journal Cancer has suggested that common painkillers such as paracetamol and aspirin might affect blood levels of a marker commonly used to diagnose prostate cancer. In this study, Singer et al. examined levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA) in the bloodstream of 1,319 men aged over 40 years. PSA [...]
Yesterday I went down (no, make that up – up a very steep hill, on my bike) to Jackson’s Lane in Highgate for some neurology theatre – not of the surgical kind but a performance of the play Reminiscence. Inspired by a case study published by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, the play tells the story [...]
Medical blogs, in particular those written by doctors, have come into the spotlight thanks to a study of 271 medical blogs published recently in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, titled ‘Content of Weblogs Written by Health Professional‘. The study found that over half of the medical blogs examined contained enough information to identify the [...]
Today I went to see the Hadrian: Empire and Conflict exhibition at the British Museum, which “explores the life, love and legacy of Rome’s most enigmatic emperor”. The exhibition was fascinating, providing all sorts of detail about how the Roman empire was run and some fascinating perspectives on ancient culture. One particularly interesting poster noted [...]
When searching eTOCs or browsing the web, I can’t help but be drawn to slightly strange or bizarre medical cases. Not the ‘Pregnant man gives birth to a baby girl‘ genre of stories, although I will confess to a morbid fascination, but also disgust, at ‘Urgh look at this freak’ tales. Given that I’m generally [...]