Innovations in Clinical Research
Q: How is a parallel chart different from a diary?
A: It’s a way to remember the other dimensions of care—your own response or concerns. Narrative skills help in articulating a disagreement, help everyone tolerate the reality that there are many ways to look at something. It is a matter of enlarging the perspective, one patient at a time.
Medical Graphology: Symptoms in Script
Not just pop science, handwriting analysis can be a telling diagnostic tool.
Collaborative Care
Could “medical homes,” where every patient has a physician-led support team, improve health and reduce costs? Early evidence says yes.
Evidence-Based Medicine: Burden of Proof
Evidence-based medicine calls for physicians to follow consensus guidelines. But whose consensus?
Inside a Medical Home
A small Vermont practice epitomizes the push for collaborative care. Make a virtual visit with our audio slideshow.
Screening's Strange Math
This hypothetical example of a test illustrates the arithmetic involved with medical screening, false positives, and creating sound guidelines.
Could Electronic Trials Provide Better Evidence?
A mathematical model can expand on clinical results quickly and cheaply. But physicians may be skeptical.
Primary Numbers
What does primary care really cost—in terms of time and money?
Portrait of an ER
All night, every night, like overcrowded emergency rooms across the country, the ER at the Massachusetts General Hospital serves as a haven for the sick and injured.
Between the Lines
Patients on networking sites discuss their illnesses and treatments. Can pattern-recognition software pull insights from the noise?
Maria Troulis, an oral-maxillofacial surgeon and director of the Skeletal Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of several MGH physicians featured in Boston Med, an eight-part documentary starting June 24 on ABC, that goes behind the scenes at some of nation’s best hospitals. Proto featured Troulis in this article about distraction osteogenesis, discussing a surgery that changed one child’s life.
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Tune in to Proto: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Medicine on ReachMD. Host Dr. Bruce Bloom interviews Mass General experts about evidence-based medicine, hormone therapy and more.
3: Average dose of “background radiation,” in millisieverts, a person receives each year from cosmic rays, radon gas and decaying rocks
1: Percentage by which lifetime exposure to background radiation increases cancer risk
64: Years since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the event that provided most of the quantitative information science has on the medical risks of radiation exposure
1895: Year the German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen took the first X-ray, an image of his wife’s hand
