Madisons Foundation

Madisons Foundation is dedicated to improving the quality and quantity of information available to parents of children with rare, life-threatening diseases, and to facilitating effective communication among parents, physicians and medical experts through:

http://www.madisonsfoundation.org/

How to be a Doctor for Kids
http://www.madisonsfoundation.org/index.php/content/view/16/93/

Kid to Kid
Madison's second book, authored at the age of ten, speaks to other children about what to expect during a hospital stay. Being hospitalized can be a scary thing, and Madison felt it was important to give other children a fellow child's perspective on what they will expect during their visit.
http://www.madisonsfoundation.org/index.php/content/view/19/95/

Surgeons Get Help Counting Sponges

Surgery is tough enough even when everything goes perfectly. But if the surgeon leaves something inside you, well, that's just plain bad.

Those leftovers can lead to infections, pain and other complications. Then there's the possibility of another operation to retrieve the stuff. Now, more operating rooms are being equipped with new gadgets to avoid misplaced equipment.

Some research indicates about 1 in around 1,000 patients undergoing abdominal surgeries wind up with an unintended souvenir. A push to improve quality has put mistakes like those on a list of "never events," errors that just shouldn't happen — ever.

NPR Blogs October 6, 2010
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/10/06/130379163/better-safe-than-sorry-surgeons-get-help-counting-sponges?ft=1&f=1128&sc=tw

L.A. Times October 5, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-sponge-20101005,0,7993203.story?track=rss

Plain Language Medical Dictionaries

Last week, University of Michigan Taubman Medical Library won the MLA Midwest Chapter's Jean Sayre Innovation Award for their Plain Language Medical Dictionary widget at http://www.lib.umich.edu/plain-language-dictionary.

It is based on CDC document, Plain Language Thesaurus for Health Communications, which I found online at http://depts.washington.edu/respcare/public/info/Plain_Language_Thesaurus_for_Health_Communications.pdf

More on how to use this widget is described in Patricia Andersen's blog at http://etechlib.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/plain-language-medical-dictionary-igoogle-gadgets-beyond-google/.

You can easily add to your iGoogle page.

Thanks to the University of Michigan and PF Anderson for this information.

Physician Revives a Dying Art: The Physical

Medical schools in the United States have let the exam slide, Dr. Verghese says, noting that over time he has encountered more and more interns and residents who do not know how to test a patient’s reflexes or palpate a spleen. He likes to joke that a person could show up at the hospital with a finger missing, and doctors would insist on an M.R.I., a CT scan and an orthopedic consult to confirm it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/health/12profile.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

CAPHIS-Consumer and Patient Health Information Section

CAPHIS
CAPHIS, the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section, is a section of the Medical Library Association, an association of health information professionals with more than 5,000 individual and institution members. MLA fosters excellence in the professional achievement and leadership of health sciences library and information professionals to enhance the quality of health care, education, and research.

http://caphis.mlanet.org/

Brain cancer vaccine promising in test results

An experimental brain cancer vaccine has been found to nearly double the life expectancy of some patients with the most aggressive form of the disease.

This study comes from research at Duke university medical center and M-D Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. Karen Vaneman has one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer -- a glioblastoma, which usually claims its victims within about 15 months after diagnosis.

WebMD Brain Cancer Vaccine video
http://www.webmd.com/video/brain-tumor-vaccine

For UHM users only:

Immunotherapy of Malignant Gliomas Using Autologous and Allogenic Tissue Cells.
PMID: 20879986

http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu/ezproxy/details.php?dbId=2095

Brain cancer vaccine doubles survival
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39505662/ns/health-cancer/

Health Daily videos added to Consumer Health Complete

Consumer Health Complete is a comprehensive resource for consumer-oriented health content. It is designed to support patients' information needs and foster an overall understanding of health-related topics. And now they have added an array of 2,286 Health Daily videos from NBC Digital Health Network Medical Video & Animation Collection. The wide ranging topics in the Health Daily feed include such information as diverse as Allergies, Diabetes and Workplace Health.

Consumer Health Complete
For UHM only:
http://micro189.lib3.hawaii.edu/ezproxy/details.php?dbId=54700

CDC Vital Signs-Tobacco Use

CDC Vital Signs offers recent data on the important health
topics of key diseases,conditions, or risk factors. Data is
gathered  from CDC's national monitoring systems to show
progress in important  areas of public health, and the ways
people can increase their health,  prevent or control disease. 

http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/TobaccoUse/Smoking/

http://www.cdc.gov/VitalSigns/pdf/2010-09-vitalsigns.pdf