Can You Tell Your Life Story In 6 Words?

Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser talk to NPR about the fun and the challenge of capturing real-life stories in six little words.

Some examples related to medicine:

Alzheimer's: meeting new people every day.
Phil Skversky

After cancer, I became a semicolon.
Anthony R. Cardno

Normal person becomes psychotic on Twitter.
Robin Slick

Yale at 16, downhill from there.
Anita Kawatra

References:

Can You Tell Your Life Story In Exactly Six Words? NPR, 2010.
FDA Approves "Alzheimer's CT scan" by Eli Lilly - radioactive agent florbetapir tags clumps of sticky amyloid in brain. WSJ, 2012.

Johns Hopkins Medicine podcast now has a blog

The weekly podcast by Johns Hopkins Medicine now has a blog hosted for free at Blogger.com by Google:

http://hopkinspodblog.blogspot.com

I have been a regular listener for years and have found the podcast to be both educational and enjoyable - not a common combination.

The weekly podcast looks at the top medical stories of the week for people who want to become informed participants in their own health care. The presenters are Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Rick Lange M.D., professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and vice chairman of medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

See my list of health podcasts at Google Bookmarks here.

Image source: Johns Hopkins

NPR: Patients Turn To Online Buddies To Help Healing

61% of adults say they look online for health information. There's a term for them: e-patients.

20% of e-patients go to Internet and social-networking sites where they can talk to medical experts and other patients:

"They are posting their first-person accounts of treatments and side effects from medications. They are part of the conversation. And that, I think, is an indicator of where we could be going in terms of the future of participatory medicine", says Susannah Fox, with the Pew Internet and American Life Project, "The Internet now is not just information. There is a social life of information online."



There are an exponentially increasing number of ways to follow, tag, talk, poke, nudge and communicate in the virtual world. The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis (see the expanded flickr image) shows most social media facets:



This "flower" of Internet communication replaces the old starfish of Web 2.0 shown below:


Social Media Starfish created by Darren Barefoot (Creative Commons license).

References:
Patients Turn To Online Buddies For Help Healing. NPR.