About These Videos

Health 2.0 commissioned ScribeMedia.Org to interview doctors and patients about how they use Web 2.0 technologies to treat and manage various illnesses and conditions. These videos premiered at this week’s Health 2.0 conference in San Diego.

Future Videos

We plan on continuing this video series and explore the intersection between technology and healthcare. Please contact us if your company would like to sponsor us so we can continue to produce doctor and patient documentaries, or if you can recommend interesting doctors and patients to feature.

For the Internet and technology literate, there is Web 2.0. For all of us, there is Health. What happens when you combine the two? You get Health 2.0…naturally. Increasingly, Patients and Doctors are using Web technologies to diagnose, treat and manage diseases and conditions.

In today’s world, with healthcare being a huge issue for practically everyone, the health care industry has had to struggle to find new ways of keeping up with patients, diseases, charts, and doctor-patient communication. As for the patients, regular people like you and me, we have all become much more educated about our own health, taking matters into our own hands to make sure we get proper care and treatment. One of the ways we do this is by using technology.

Just last week I was asked to fill out an electronic questionnaire online that would be submitted to my doctor before I actually saw her. I’m sure this is as useful to her as it is to me. No more having to verbally stumble and stamper when trying to explain my symptoms. No more wasting time in a waiting room filling out paper work until my hand feels like it’s about to fall off. With a simple 20-minute online questionnaire, I was able to document and submit all of my medical history, current symptoms, and reason for my visit.

As part of the Health 2.0 Conference, held in San Diego, March 3-4, 2008, we interviewed 3 doctors and 3 patients who all use technology to diagnose, treat and manage diseases and conditions. These videos were played at the conference in front of hundreds of leaders in the Health 2.0 space and are now available to watch online.

The Line-Up

Doctor 2.0: Dr. Jay Parkinson walks us around Brooklyn and discusses his Web-centric practice.

On-Call, and Online: Dr. Jordan Schlain of San Francisco’s On Call Medical Group discusses their use of communications technology in the field.

Managing Pain, Managing Expectations: Shiri Sandler discusses how she uses the Web site Relief in Site to manage the chronic pain associated with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy.

A Second Change in Second Life: Alice Krueger discusses the Heron Sanctuary, a Second Life island she founded for for the disabled.

Patient 2.0: I’m Too Young for This founder Matthew Zachary talks about the online community he founded for young people with cancer.

Our goal is to continue to feature patients and doctors around the country (and even the world) who are using innovative tools and technologies. We view this 6 part video series as the beginning of the conversation. If you would like to help out as a sponsor of future documentaries, or if you know a doctor or patient who is using Web technologies in innovative ways, please contact us.

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The American Alpine Club has been promoting the climbing way of life in this country and around the world since 1902. Since its inception, the club has promoted environmental awareness, safety, outdoor education, and has been instrumental in seeing the proud tradition of mountaineering and exploration continue.

As climbing becomes more and more popular, and people are running farther into the mountains and scaling harder and harder cliffs, the presence of a strong organization — a not-for-profit organization, by climbers and for climbers — becomes even more important. And no matter what kind of climbing you’re into — from light-and-fast alpinism to sport climbing to bouldering — the AAC is the place to be. (And please click those links — wiki has some very good entries about climbing.)

On a personal note — I’ve been climbing for a long time, but no one would ever mistake me for a great climber. From the outside looking in, the AAC always seemed a little out of my league. But since I joined a few years ago, I’ve encountered nothing but a friendly, welcoming atmosphere. I’ve been in the presence of some of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met. And I realized that no matter what level you climb at, what all the members of the AAC have in common is a deeply powerful love of the wilder places in the world — and that’s really all you need, especially these days.

So to do my part as the AAC springboards into the digital video age, I’ve created a highlight reel of some of the best climbers of this and past generations. It’s a quick, simple taste of how exciting, fun and life-fulfilling climbing can be, and I hope that after you see it, you’ll visit the Alpine Club’s website, sign up for a membership and become a part of this great climbing organization.

And after you’ve done that, get out and climb.

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We want to give a big New York hello to Matthew Holt, Indu Subaiya and all the good folk attending the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Fard Johnmar is representing the greater ScribeMedia family and shooting an episode for the Digital Health Revolution, a new show we’re producing that chronicles how the Internet, computers, mobile phones and other technologies are impacting health globally.

Here at the home front, we had a flurry of late nights putting together a video to open the Health 2.0 conference. You can see it above: A Brief History of Medicine… . We could/should add, “American Style.”

A lot was left on the cutting room floor in order to keep this within the few minute time frame we were operating under. However, new favorite person in medical history is Andreas Vesalius. His anatomical sketches are amazing.

For those who’ve seen it, the video’s an obvious homage to Michael Wesch’s Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us.

The music’s by Luxxury (hilarious video and site), the words are based off a ream of notes sent our way, and the video’s the work of Alexandra Lerman… some of you might know her as Pharma Girl.

Enjoy.

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My sister and I just arrived in Buenos Aires, the starting point to our adventures in Argentina. Next stop, Las Lenas, where we’ll be skiing for the next seven days. My phrase of the day so far has been “déme la vaca”, which i will use frequently in the restaurants. This is all part of my research into Argentinian beef versus American beef.

So far the argentinian wine, a 2002 Tupungato from Mendoza, cigarrettes and beef have passed muster. They get the muy bueno.

The picture above is my response to my brother telling me to stop working and enjoy my vacation. Michael, so far so good….

- Peter

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In the state where Terry Schiavo was eventually allowed to die, privacy is being challenged again. Alzheimer’s Community Cares, based in West Palm Beach, Florida, has agreed to test the use of an electronic tag inserted under a patients skin to see if it will improve medical care. Protocols for the pilot program, the first of its kind in the United States, are still being developed, said Mary Barnes, CEO at ACC.

The technology, called Radio Frequency Identification Devices, is not new. RFIDs have been used as tracking and security devices for years. They’re the tags used on retail items like clothing and over-the-counter medications that make security alarms beep when people walk out the door with them. However, they’ve never been used in this way in humans.

So why now?

“Alzheimer’s is doing to privacy, what 9/11 did to civil liberties,” according to Barnes. “I don’t want to see images in Florida like I saw at the Super Dome.” She stresses that this is a story about safety. “The people laying dead on the stairwells were probably unable to communicate because of Alzheimer’s or a similar mental disorder,” said Barnes.

VeriChip, the manufacturer of the VeriMed chip, traces its own roots to disaster. After 9/11, when the World Trade Center lay smoldering in a pile of rubble, rescue workers scrawled ID numbers across themselves for fear they would go missing in the fray. According to VeriChip, “it was evident there was a desperate need for personal information in emergency situations.” A short-time later VeriChip was founded and the idea to use RFIDs in humans was hatched.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the use of VeriMed in December 2004. Today, over 600 hospitals across the U.S. have the equipment to use VeriMed, supplied to them at little or no cost by VeriChip. In February 2007, VeriChip also went public. The stock rose from a low of $4.27 to a high of over $9.00 in less than six months.

A singer and volunteer at ACC, Richard Ribner thinks the chips could be a great help to patients. “Anything you can do to help these guys would be great,” said Ribner. “They can’t remember much.” Ribner moved to Florida after working in New York City his whole life. He sounds like Tony Soprano, “I ran a biz-ness,” he said. Ribner, who’s been using a computer to sing Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra tunes at ACC, said he doesn’t fear technology. “If it’s 80 percent helpful and only 20 percent a risk, why not?”

It’s an opportune time for VeriChip to push VeriMed. Health care costs continue to climb at twice the rate of inflation and policy experts are recommending technology be integrated into health care. They believe technology has the potential to cut costs and medical errors by as much as 20 percent. President Bush seems to agree, having signed an Executive Order last year designed to get health care providers to use Electronic Health Records by 2012. However, there are still no privacy guidelines to steer the creation of EHRs.

A letter sent by the General Accounting Office to Mike Levitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, highlights the problem. Levitt was reprimanded for allowing technology companies to enter the market without privacy guidelines in place (there are about 20 technology companies selling the hardware and software for EHRs - including Microsoft). The Health Insurance Privacy Protection Act (HIPPA), passed in 1996, does not cover internet and electronic technologies, an integral part of EHR’s.

Paul Tagliaferri, another Florida retiree, said he’s concerned the wrong people will get access to private medical information. “Who’s to say how private medical information could be used to discriminate,” said Tagliaferri. Tagliaferri worked as a comptroller in Philadelphia until retirement. He’s unsure how the chips will ultimately be used, especially by the government. “Can you imagine the day the government requires Medicaid or Medicare enrollees to get implanted with a chip? It won’t be mandatory, but I can hear it,” said Tagliaferri, in a sardonic-troubling way, “No chip, no caid.”

Surprisingly, the one group consistently opposed to RFIDs is End-Timers: people who believe future events will unfold as described in the Bible. Most conservative Christians think the devices are the “the Mark of the Beast.” According to the Bible, it’s is a sign the world is coming to an end.

Ironically, it was pressure from conservative Christians that lead key Republicans to pass a law blocking Terry Schiavo’s husband from removing her feeding tube. Lawmakers were criticized at the time by members of both parties for meddling in the affairs of a private citizen. If the VeriMed pilot program proves a success, politicians may again feel the heat from Florida, caught between the need for personal privacy, and the President’s goals for EHRs.

John Mikytuck is a Scribemedia health reporter. He currently hosts Reporting AIDS, the only WebTV show devoted exclusively to covering the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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About Norman Doidge

Norman Doidge, M.D., is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, researcher, author, essayist and poet. He is on the Research Faculty at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York and the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry. You can visit his website at NormanDoidge.com.

Did you that your brain can grow new cells, reorganize its networks, and improve with time? This is not the immutable organ you learned about in high school biology class. The human brain is in fact a living, changing structure with immense potential for development.

If you find this notion interesting, you must read The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. It’s one of the most exciting books of 2007.

In the podcast above, ScribeMedia.Org had the opportunity to discuss his ideas above the current revolution going on in neuroscience.

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“Could anyone have imagined six million Jews would be exterminated during World War II,” says Andrew Velez, Chair of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power Action Committee during the recent taping of our web TV series Reporting AIDS. “Nor did I think AIDS would become a world-wide epidemic killing millions of people.”

In 1981, recognized as the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, gay men mysteriously started getting sick and dying from rarely before seen forms of pneumonia and cancer. San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Key West — all gay-Meccas in the 1970’s, became paralyzed as thousands of men succumbed to the disease.

GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency), as it was called at the time, destroyed immune systems and left those afflicted powerless to fight the most minor infection.

Public health officials, doctors, nurses — those entrusted to help — retreated in fear, leaving the sick and suffering to die without basic care or dignity.

By 1987, when ACT-UP was formed, people were desperate.

I was fresh out college working in a restaurant on Market Street in San Francisco when I witnessed for the first time what AIDS was doing to people. There were scant ways to see the scope of the suffering from AIDS if you didn’t live in a city where people were dying.

Media attention and government information was sparce. Nothing had given me an understanding of the problem. Until I saw it.

A young man, maybe 35, walked into my restaurant around lunch-time. He seemed confused and slightly disheveled. It looked like he was unaware and unconcerned about being in the restaurant, but rather purposefully found a seat and waited for someone to approach him. He seemed to recognize the waiter helping him and somewhat acknowledge, though not warmly, what was happening. Nothing was said, but over a twenty minute interplay, he got food, ate, and left.

I asked a co-worker what was happening. I was told the man was suffering from Dementia, a symptom of AIDS much like the late stages of Alzheimer’s. It turned out the man had once been a waiter at the restaurant and knew it was a place where he could come to get food, no questions asked.

There it was, black and white, AIDS had the power to render a fully-engaged, ambitious, and hopeful human being down to the most basic level of human behavior, instinct. That’s what it was like when ACT-UP was formed.

“It’s amazing what desperate and dying people will do,” says Eric Sawyer, a co-founder of ACT-UP, during the show. Sawyer, along with the entire ACT-UP membership, turned rage and fear into targeted, effective political activism, taking non-violent demonstrations to entirely new levels. Their efforts changed the course of the AIDS epidemic and saved millions of lives.

To mark the 20th Anniversary of the first ACT-UP demonstration, March 24th, 1987, we invited Velez and Sawyer to talk on-camera about some of ACT-UP’s most important demonstrations; shutting down the FDA, protesting the Catholic Church and delivering political funerals.

After watching the show, we hope you’ll take a minute to share your thoughts on ACT-UP. The comments section below should provide enough room for you to be as concise or verbose as you’d like.

Tell us about your experience of ACT-UP, the impact they had on you personally, and how you think they changed our society.

John Mikytuck is a ScribeMedia.Org healthcare reporter. He’s hosting an ongoing series and dialog on HIV/AIDs.

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Leonore Tiefer, Ph.D. introduces an educational campaign that challenges the myths promoted by the pharmaceutical industry and calls for research on the many causes of women’s sexual problems.

The pharmaceutical industry wants women to think that sexual problems are simple and offers drugs as magic fixes. But positive sexual experiences require accurate, unbiased information.

The FSD-Alert campaign is committed to the role of activism and education for women’s sexual empowerment. Check out www.fsd-alert.org for more information.

The New View Campaign alerts the public to how "Female Sexual Dysfunction" (FSD) is being CREATED by Big Pharma and other groups. FSD is a vivid current example of "disease-mongering," the creation of new diseases and anxieties for financial gain. Since the appearance of Viagra in 1998, the pharmaceutical industry has worked to create a blockbuster market for a "pink Viagra."

To understand the big picture, this talk examines different MODELS of sex, the processes of MEDICALIZING sex, and the MARKETING of both sex drugs and sexual disorders.

Is sex more like dancing or digestion? What MODEL of sex is best suited to research, education, clinical work and public health? Is biology the key to pleasurable, skillful, safe, and consensual sex or should we focus on education and cultural values? Who are the appropriate experts? What kind of research suits sex? If sex is more like dancing, then appreciating diversity and individual interests is primary and physiology and healthcare only enter the picture in minor and supporting roles.

MEDICALIZATION frames everyday life experiences as matters of health and disorder. It seems to promise simple, expert solutions based on science, but adverse side effects, uniform ideas of human experience, and individual disempowerment are unintended consequences. Medicalization occurs in stages, as media publicize new biological discoveries and the public develops amnesia for sociocultural research. The medicalization industry, fueled by billions from Big Pharma, is indirectly helped by poor social science funding, rightwing assaults on sexual art and comprehensive sexuality education, and the framing of sexual variety as dangerous and deadly.

Finally, the MARKETING of sex drugs promises sexual perfection and security at the same time as it scares people by depicting awful consequences of sexual failure in a sex-saturated culture. Sex has become BRANDED as a consumer good with doctors as the retail outlet. Years of unethical connections between scientists and Big Pharma has damaged the independence of sexual medicine.

"Female Sexual Dysfunction" was coined in 1997 by the medicalization industry (Big Medicine and Big Pharma) as it looked for something in women comparable to "Erectile Dysfunction" in men. Paid scientific experts and researchers exaggerated the prevalence and biological causes of women’s sexual problems while maintaining the fiction that sociocultural solutions were unscientific or ineffective. Streams of press releases fed gullible media. Although no drug has yet satisfied the FDA’s safety and efficacy requirements, many drugs are now prescribed "off-label" and no outcome studies are required or conducted.

I convened the New View Campaign in order to expose and monitor the creation and marketing of FSD. Through our website, books, training manuals for educators, professional articles and presentations, media consultation, appearances at the FDA, and scholar/activist conferences, the New View Campaign has helped stall the medicalization of women’s sexuality and redirect attention away from digestion towards dancing as the proper model for sex. We see ourselves as part of the larger public health advocacy movement to expose and change corporate policies that damage health.

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Seven new cases of the H5N1 — or Avian Flu — virus occurred over the past two weeks killing five, Mike Leavitt, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, revealed Thursday.

Just because the Avian Flu no longer generates the media buzz it once did does not make the danger of an outbreak any less real, he added.

“We continue to take this threat seriously,” said Leavitt during a press conference at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta where he was joined by Dr. Julie Gerberding, Director of the CDC, to announce new mitigation guidelines to fight potential pandemic outbreaks.

“Pandemic Influenza is not necessarily imminent but it is inevitable,” Gerberding warned and said that because of this, planning needed to continue across public and private sectors, as well as within families and communities.

As such, the CDC released community guidelines that do not involve medicines and vaccines. These so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions include recommendations on school closures, liberal work leave policies, the reduction of public gatherings and the voluntary quarantining of households where outbreaks occur.

Included with these guidelines is a new Pandemic severity index that borrows from those meteorologists use with hurricanes. For example, a Category 1 pandemic would be a nuisance while a Category 5 would be on the scale of the 1918 flu that killed millions worldwide.

Also included is the release of a new government Web site — www.PandemicFlu.gov — managed by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The nation’s goal is to slow down a pandemic’s spread, she added and, essentially, to buy time.

“We all know that if a pandemic virus occurs the first thing we would do is try to extinguish it but that might not be feasible,” Gerberding conceded, despite various government agencies working together to create what they describe as “early, targeted, layered measures.”

“We’re not likely to have an effective vaccine in the first six months of a pandemic,” she added, reflecting general consensus that US and world supplies of anti-viral medications such as Tamiflu are in short supply.

“This is going to be really hard work,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, Director for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the CDC, about creating tools and strategies to maximize the number of lives saved during a pandemic.

“One thing that would be much harder would be to come up with a solution on the fly in the midst of a pandemic. That would be really hard and almost insufferable.”

The podcast above is a recording of the Center for Disease Control Press Conference on Pandemic Flu Preparedness.

Download the Report: Interim Pre-pandemic Planning Guidance: Community Strategy for Pandemic Influenza Mitigation in the United States - Early Targeted Layered use of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, February 1, 2007 (108 pages, PDF).

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When Richard Branson decides to enter a market, people pay attention. Typically, he picks on industries that are notorious for poor customer service.

One of the more interesting sessions from the Consumer Health World conference was with Chris Boyce, CEO of Virgin life care. I was intrigued to learn what this brand powerhouse had up its sleeve as it takes our fat, bloated healthcare system head on. Virgin uses their understanding of consumers, their desires, experiences and aspirations, and puts the Virgin touch on health care.

From the Virgin life care site:

Studies show that the benefits of corporate health improvement programs can be tremendous:

* lower employer healthcare costs
* reduced absenteeism and disability time
* increased employee productivity
* the ability to attract and retain a talented, healthy workforce; and
* a tangible return on investment

Trouble is, you can’t reap the benefits of these programs if your employees aren’t participating. Capturing and retaining members remains a huge challenge, even when evidence is everywhere supporting the positive relationship between physical activity and health.

That’s where we come in. Let the power of the Virgin brand – known around the world for excitement, innovation and understanding our consumers like no other brand – fuel higher levels of engagement and continued participation. Offer HealthMiles from Virgin Life Care as an add-on to your current benefits package, and you’ll be giving your employees an incredibly fun, easy and community-driven program to help them get and stay active. We’ll give you the tools to motivate them to get out there, get moving, and get rewarded!

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