Syndicom

Over a year ago now e-patient Dave finished reading a white paper about the nature and status of the e-patient and its connection to participatory medicine. The white paper offered up several main conclusions — that patients are valuable contributors and providers should recognize them as such; that the art of empowering patients is [...]

What does it mean to be a surgeon? And what does it mean to do surgery?
Do you love being in the operating room? Do you like the art of medicine? Do you like the technical side of medicine? Do you like the challenge of medicine? Do you love helping people, perhaps saving people, through [...]

“A culture of separation will collapse of its own incoherence. We need communities of memory that experience time as a continuous flow, a shared rhythm.” -Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart
 
Time is precious. And because doctors provide services to one person after another, it can be a grind. You can lose your larger sense of purpose [...]

“What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all the man hath, his house, his wife, his children.” (William Blake, poet).
If I was to ask you what it meant to be a surgeon [...]

Last week, we wrote about the issues of posting, participation and presence in online communities such as SpineConnect. Recently I was commenting on a blog post about crowdsourcing and participatory medicine and raised the question — what is the difference between crowdsourcing and collaboration? I did so, because over the last few months, I had [...]

“to be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?” Hamlet, act 3, scene 1.
When you arrive at an acquaintance’s party where there are a lot of people unfamiliar [...]

In the last blog, we discussed the impact technology has on participatory medicine and ended with the idea that what was lacking to really bring health 2.0 into full force were the networks of networks. Alongside concerns around technology expressed in the end session of the conference, were concerns about people. As Clay Shirky writes [...]