I'm concerned about online attempts to solicit subjects for medication trials with the enticement of free medications.

Mark Frisse offers some compelling questions (and a few answers) on medical informatics in this month's Academic Medicine. At the AAMC meeting this past October, I was fortunate enough to hear Mark give a talk. Of the growing number of budding medical informaticists I meet these days, mark is one of a remarkably small number who "gets it." He understands enough medicine, informatics, and medical education to see clearly what will work and what won't. Mark also has the powerpoint slides from this talk available on his website: http://medicine.wustl.edu/~frisse

I got my new Stethoscope from stethoscopes.to today. They shipped the same day that I ordered. A safe place to buy a new stethy if you lose one like I did.

CBS and medscape have joined together to create CBS Healthwatch This emphasizes how the big media companies (big $$) view medicine as something worthwhile investing in. The site features "my health manager" which allows members to chat with "health mates" who may have similar medical concerns. There is also a "daily diary," a calendar, and several other features. I think these features add little to what is actually a rather good source of clear patient-oriented health information. I found a nice link to a self-assessment tool for seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

emedicine is getting better. This site started over a year ago and had very little content. The content is still sparse — and primary care topics are especially absent from the list of completed topics. This is a good ieda though: A collaborative project to build up-to-date online medical information. I still look to dynamed first if I need good, current online medical information.

Medsite offers journaltracker .. a service that provides automatic TOC and abstracts to be forwarded to you by email. This is a nice service .. but costs $99. I don't suggest subscribging in light of the cost … many journals offer such a service for free (pediatrics, for example.)

I've added MedEdNews to the links at the top of the page. It's the only other medical weblog that I know of. David Theige's links are complimentary to those that you see here and he's got a searchable archive. His site runs on Manila. If I have time over the next week, I'll migrate docnotes to Manila as well. I'm currently using Blogger which has many features that make weblog creation and maintenance very easy.

See the link from yesterday's MedEdNews on the NetNote project at MGH. It is impressive.

More good stuff from across the pond: Shaken, not stirred: bioanalytical study of the antioxidant activities of martinis

Alliance for the prudent use of antibiotics

Antibiotic resistance.