Alex Epstein – The Health Care Blog

Vesalius, Hooke, Hood and Steve Jobs

Dec 1, 2018• 0

By ALEX EPSTEIN

Has Steve Jobs and his company altered the practice of medicine as significantly as Vesalius, Hooke, Hood and other giants in the field?

A radical supposition perhaps. One that I am not altogether comfortable with. Yet there is no denying the impact of the technologies adopted as a result of his touch.

Medical practitioners these days employ easy to use mobile/connected devices to learn, to stream, to take CME, or monitor patients, prescribe, ensure compliance, download and consume digital media, or just communicate and collaborate more robustly. Even crowd sourcing solutions to medical conundrums has become a concept mainstream institutions are embracing.

That the world’s data more and more exists in the palm of your hand – instantly accessible from the office to the operating room to any remote corner of the world – is due in large measure to devices and markets either pioneered by or made user friendly by Steve Jobs and Apple.

Augmenting My Reality

Nov 19, 2010• 0

By ALEX EPSTEIN

When I first heard about Augmented Reality, I thought – this is really cool. Let me try and augment mine.

And I had a vision that included Scarlett Johannson (just kidding, sweetheart) and a home totally free of weekend honey-do’s and totally full of perfectly happy, compliant teenage children.

Hell, if I am going to augment reality… I might as well go for it.

How naive.

Imagine this – in the not too distant future a wearable device will display a seamless series of “helpful” tags on top of what you are actually seeing, so as to make your viewsing more effective.

Maybe you are part of surgical team involved in a complicated intervention, and your technology is superimposing real-time CT scans over your actual view of the operating field, hopefully improving outcomes. O0ps, that is happening now! The tags, and decision support, which will make things even mo betta will happen later.

Or say you are 18 and a Marine trying to repair a complicated hunk of your war machine (or maybe just a flat tire) in the desert or the jungle – special goggles will augment your reality with a layer of digital information that shows you how to fix your stuff in real time.

Paper Is Good … Pass It On

Nov 13, 2010• 8

By ALEX EPSTEIN

I nearly dropped my spoon into my fibery breakfast cereal last Sunday, because as I was reading the paper, I noticed a a full page ad that read in part…

“It’s Easier to Learn on Paper”

Seems a Paper Company – called Domtar, has been taking out full page ads in the New York Times Magazine, among others, to tell the world – words go better with paper.

I was reading about the virtues of paper, in a paper, printed on paper. A paper trifecta.

Another of their claims: Reading on Paper is 10-30% faster than reading online, plus reviewing notes and highlights is significantly more effective.

Now I don’t know if any of that stuff is really true. Or if it is the dying gasp of a dying medium.

Speaking of dying, did the guys who made papyrus tell the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls that the scrolls would be an easier read if read on their vegetable based medium rather than the animal medium of parchment?

I remember way back when I was a kid growing up Brooklyn, and my teachers at P.S. 241 put our class on the subway for a class trip to visit the Gray Lady herself. That was when she still printed on West 43rd Street (and you wondered why it’s called Times Square – duh!).

And they gave us a tour and showed us the whole process – from the city room to the banks of men typing the stories on gargantuan machines that molded type out of lead – to the printing presses to the trucks.

Anyhow, I wonder whether the Linotype Operators union was telling its people then…words go better with lead?

Now people actually have to remind us – Paper is Good??