From The Back Pages – August 2006: Teasing Out Preeclampsia; Cooking With Ambien; Personalized Medicine
While scanning the headlines for interesting healthcare-related stories, I often find little tidbits of information and save them to blog about in the future. In this series, From the Back Pages I post links and commentary on a few of them. This month’s edition is below.
-Teasing Out Preeclampsia: While television shows like House MD provide crisp, and sometimes gripping entertainment, their portrayal of medical science is sometimes highly inaccurate. Determining the cause of a medical illness takes years, not hours, of painstaking effort.
In late July, the New Yorker magazine published an article, “The Preeclampsia Puzzle,” highlighting the efforts of Dr. Ananth Karumanchi to develop a viable theory explaining why some women develop preeclampsia and others do not. (Preeclampsia is a mysterious illness that can cause significant complications, including kidney failure, in pregnant women.) Reading the article reminds one of the difficulty and excitement of medical research.
Click here to read the article, written by Jerome Groopman.
Commentary: Not much to say here that I didn’t note above. Medical research is difficult and the rewards are sometimes few. However, it is vitally necessary.
-Cooking With Ambien: In a very funny spoof published in the New Yorker, Paul Simms makes light of a strange side effect associated with the sleep-aid Ambien. The drug apparently causes some patients to raid their refrigerators while sleepwalking.
Commentary: Great stuff.
-Toward Predictive Diagnosis: Business Week highlights the work of Dr. Leroy Hood who is pioneering the field of systems biology, which may one day help doctors predict disease in certain patients and prescribe highly individualized treatments.
Commentary: Personalized medicine will have a profound impact on how we treat and communicate about disease. Techniques developed for communicating with the masses will be less effective in a world where a medication only works in a sub-set of the population.
However, one benefit of the fragmentation of the media is that communicators are learning how to speak with smaller slices of the population. This is why it is important for us to learn all we can about social media, which is consumed by small, but highly engaged audiences.
