Medicine &Science Entropy | 17 Jan 2012
The New England Journal of Medicine is the oldest continuously published medical periodical, completing its second century of service to the medical community in 2012. The Journal marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), [...]
Books &Medicine Entropy | 23 Sep 2011
“Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing”– Voltaire Becoming Mindful Of Medical Decision Making.. Even the youngest among us have had to make difficult medical decisions. Perhaps we’ve had to choose between two doctors with [...]
Life &Medicine Entropy | 18 Jul 2011
In 1959, the great biologist René Dubos wrote a book called Mirage of Health, in which he pointed out that “complete and lasting freedom from disease is but a dream remembered from imaginings of a Garden of Eden. But, in the intervening decades, his admonition has largely been ignored by both doctors and society as [...]
Life &Medicine Entropy | 01 Jul 2011
Maggie Breslin came to her career as a designer through a love for stories. Presently she is senior designer/researcher in the Center for Innovation at Mayo Clinic, a role she pioneered in 2005 where she leads teams in collecting stories and using them to re-imagining how health care services will be delivered. She also leads [...]
Life &Medicine Entropy | 03 Jan 2010
In the words of Carl Jung – “Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.” At New York [...]
Medicine Entropy | 07 Jun 2007
Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is [...]