Belated Wellsphere Blowback

You will be added to the collective.

Through the power of collective blogging (and Twittering), yet another storm is brewing about Wellsphere in the face of their being bought out by HealthCentral for an undisclosed millions of dollars. HealthCentral currently has over $50 million in VC funding, so this isn’t chump change. Wellsphere claims thousands of medical “experts” in its network and boasts unique page views in the millions per month through its presence among its network “partners” (ie, unwitting bloggers).

Well, it’s more “penetration” than “presence” in the end, because the kicker here is that Wellsphere not only doesn’t pay their partners a damn thing, but worse, outright steals content from bloggers’ own sites and rebrands it as Wellsphere’s own unique content without any attribution whatsoever. Dr. Val exposes all of this quite plainly in a recent post, and many other stories are coming out on Twitter with the search hashtag of “#wellsphere.”

Full disclosure dictates that I reveal that I too was contacted by them last year; however in a moment of what I can only describe as serendipitous procrastination or distraction–whichever–I let the email sit there for a good while. When I took another look, I just didn’t see the point. I never got so far as to read the heinous Terms of Service agreement, because just on its face it seemed like I wasn’t going to get anything except a pretty badge on my sidebar (woowoo!  not.) and a warm glow for knowing I was going to help promote health information to their general online community. And it’s the last point that makes this whole thing stick in my craw–the CEO heading this whole thing may very well have been a complete and utter scumbag, but the request letters came from the Chief Medical Officer person–a physician named Dr. Geoff Rutledge. Through him, the entire modus operandi was predatory, taking advantage of what would be an accurate soft spot of medical bloggers who would of course feel altruistic about disseminating health information and/or being a part of a health network.  It’s the blogging equivalent of a schoolyard bully offering his protection services for lunch money.

If I could turn back the clock knowing what I know now, I’d have signed up gladly. I would have put the little badge on my page, and watched my page hits go–nowhere.  Meanwhile, my content would be sucked and rebranded as Wellsphere’s own. So I’d make posts like “Wellsphere — You’re a Bunch of Thieving Mongrels” and change my “featured blogger” bio to include heinous, non-consensual acts done to me at the hands of Wellsphere’s handlers.

But if you have more to add on this story, all is not lost! Tonight at 9pm EST The Doctor Anonymous Show on Blogtalk Radio will be devoting a part of tonight’s broadcast to this issue, so please tune into follow more and support the cause.

Because resistance is NOT futile.

Live Blogging “Eleventh Hour” on CBS tomorrow

I’m excited to announce that I will be live-blogging tomorrow’s episode of “Eleventh Hour” on CBS. Airtime is Thursday Dec 22, 10PM EST/9PM CST. I was originally contacted by the show’s PR firm in December to do an episode then but holidays and schedule postponed it to this month. In the interim, I’ve taken advantage of that time to catch up on almost half the season’s 10 episodes and I can honestly recommend the show to anyone who appreciates science, mystery and a touch of the unknown. I can honestly say that this is the first show to have come along in the spirit of The X-Files that does the genre justice (and some of you know about my rather public involvement with that show in the day…hehe)

The setup is that I’m brought in as the science “expert” with another blogger who does this weekly doing the main commentary. In essence, I’ll be the wingman on a two man team providing some scientific backbone in a real-time blogging session that will also take some fan questions along the way. This upcoming episode promises to be a good medically-tilted one about a boy who was seemingly “cured” by drinking some spring water.  I can hardly contain myself if that teaser delivers the medical hoax debunk-fest think it’s going to.

The live web cast for the show is here and I assume it will be active around 15-10 minutes before the show actually starts. If you have time and interest, it would be great if you could join us for some multimedia primetime fun!  Hope to see you there!

Upgrading Wordpress with Subversion

As many of bloggers are no doubt aware, a major update to Wordpress was released this week. I  like many others, eagerly upgraded my installation to take advantage of many new long-awaited features (particularly on the admin/management end). However for many, upgrading WP means downloading the latest .zip archive, unpacking on one’s local disk, then uploading the entire contents of the unpacked archive (see the irony here?) through an [S]FTP client, wondering why so many micro-tiny files would take soooo long to transfer (it’s easily explainable, but that’s for another discussion). During this protracted upload, one’s WP installation can become instantly unstable as files are being upgraded in place, creating a real-time oil-and-water mix of two different versions.

So what do I do?  Well, obviously not the above. With shell access to my hosting account (for Windows users, think DOS command prompt), up until a few months ago, I would get the new version as usual, only I’d upload the .zip file (or in my case, the .tar.gz “tarball”), unpack it on the server, and replace the installation in a couple of seconds; the time to upload (which would be vastly shorter because it would be a compressed, continuous file) would have no bearing on the “out of sync” problem above, because I’d unpack the files in a few seconds. This is a tried-and-true workflow that nobody could argue with in terms of simplicity and speed.

However, there is an even more elegant method that I started utilizing as soon as I found out WP supported a version control utility called Subversion. Version control is used in the software industry to track changes on various files so one can roll back to a previous version. People do this all the time with, say, a document in Word by saving multiple copies, but imagine 50 developers all making changes simultaneously to a source tree of hundreds of files. You have to be able to track changes so that you can fix what breaks while not discarding what got better.  Anyway, I don’t want to get overly technical, but I wanted to give a slightly better understanding of what Subversion is more than the simple statements in the video. Speaking of which, here it is:

Video of WP Upgrade

Cool, eh?  It’s important to know that the above was recorded in absolute real-time, no edits, and that it was really, truly my live system. Aside from the file and database backups before recording, you saw my real, unadulterated upgrade process (while I wasn’t worried having done this many times, the fact that it was done on a Sunday afternoon when traffic was low wasn’t an accident, either ). Once your svn tree is in place, tracking updates large and small really is that easy. There are no big installation files to download or upload (the `svn’ client gets the individual files it needs, but it’s a fast server-to-server transfer) and unlike dropping a new installation on top of the old one, the old, deprecated files are cleaned away. Note that this is the workflow for an existing subversion WP repository; how to convert a “standard” (ie, uploaded) WP install to a subversion-enabled one is the topic for a future post (if there’s interest).

Anyway, I this helped, or at least inspired you to look into checking with your hosting provider to enable shell access if you have it. Please, please, give me feedback on this because I have lots of ideas on similar videos on WP ginsu outside of the web dashboard, most notably using MySQL queries (the database that powers 99% of WP instances) and the like. I admit command-line management isn’t for everyone, but for those willing to start adding to their toolkit, it opens up a limitless world of possibilities.

“Grand Rounds” Dr.A. Show Wrap-up

Hello! Above is the video post I did as a wrap-up for last night’s Doctor Anonymous Show in true Dr.A. fashion, except Dr. A. did his before I got to do mine! However, I still did it, because, as Wilford Brimley would say: “It’s the right thing to do.” haha

Thanks again to my star-studded panel: Ramona Bates of Suture for a Living, Mother Jones, RN of Nurse Ratched’s Place, Val Jones of Getting Better with Dr. Val, and Bongi of Other Things Amanzi. I am still in awe that these A-list bloggers all took 90+ minutes out of their Thursday to spend with me.  Awesome.

Also thanks to Vijay of Scanman’s Notes for calling in all the way from India; you made it a cross-contiental event x2!

Whether  you were there or missed the show, go the link above so you can listen to the archive, download it to your computer/music player, whatever you like.

Reminder: Hosting Dr.A. Radio Show

Just a quick reminder that I’ll be hosting Dr. Anonymous’ show tonight on BlogTalkRadio at 9EST/8CST. You can find more details from DrA’s promo today and a video version from Tuesday.

I know I haven’t posted anything since Grand Rounds on Tuesday, but I had to catch up on “real life” things and then get ready for tonight, so it’s been a bit hectic! I promise I have some cool stuff in the pipeline, so when things slow down this weekend on the “more popular” blogs (heh), come on back and I’ll have goodies for ya.

Hope to see you tonight! If you can’t make the show, don’t worry–the archive of the show will be available later tonight at the BlogTalkRadio site about an hour or so after the show ends.  Download it to your iPod and enjoy!

Grand Rounds 5:11 – Death and Transfiguration

Welcome to Grand Rounds! I am privileged to be your host for this week’s edition of the best posts of the medical blogosphere. As in the previous two times I’ve hosted, I will integrate music into this edition, but unlike before, I will focus on one piece of music: Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration) by the German composer Richard Strauss. I said when asking for contributions that adherence to a theme was not necessary; moreover no single theme could really encompass the excellent variety the medblogosphere has to offer. Since this musical selection is quite long–over 20 minutes at least–I have decided to present only excerpts so as to tell the basic story as we go along, placing musical interludes in the list of posts. Hopefully I still keep to the spirit of the piece while not detracting too much from the excellent contributions.

Death and Transfiguration is a “tone poem,” literally, a musical literary depiction. In this case, it is of a dying artist on his deathbed in his last moments, and what is experienced up to, including and after death. A patient in a bed knowing it can be the end is certainly scared, and perhaps even confused. Mother Jones of Nurse Ratched’s Place learned how to comfort a confused, hospitalized elderly woman in a very significant way in the early years of her career. In another mental health story of an elderly lady, Sara at My Sad Alter Ego appropriately rails against a fellow clinician pointing out that depression does not equal lack of competence.

The patient lies in his bed, breathing heavily, his heartbeat marked by syncopated triplet rhythms in both the strings and timpani. Falling sighs contrast against a flute and clarinet asking a wordless question in unison. There is not yet struggle, but there is certainly no peace.

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HEALTH POLICY AND BUSINESS:

The near-code-blue status of primary care has received so much press recently, but in the end what has been done? What needs to be done? DrRich of The Covert Rationing Blog has some excellent insights and advice.

Dr. Val shares her insights at the dubious practice of Fecal Transplants (yes, you read that correctly) at her site, Getting Better with Dr. Val.

Mike Cadogan of The 28 Hour Diet shares his feelings on the general trend towards open peer review in scientific and medical publishing. I think he’s spot on.

Another spot-on editorial, and a shocking discovery for me, was Ramona Bates of Suture for a Living on the subject of medical method patents and the dubious practice of legally patenting something as ephemeral as a surgical technique. Is, say, a left-handed version of one safe from infringement?

Medical costs are skyrocketing, and since many of us are involved on the patient-end of healthcare, it’s sometimes alarming to read and be reminded that not all providers may act in the best interest of the patient, as a sobering post by InsureBlog indicates.

Violence in the ED is a disturbing and increasing problem, particularly in urban settings, as Marjan Siadat of Detroit Receiving writes.

Giving addicts sterile needles and a safe place to inject may seem like enabling on the surface, but Sam Solomon of Canadian Medicine shares there are quite a few good reasons to do so.

Suddenly he is startled awake with agony, struggling. The low strings groan with his pain. Driving rhythms, piercing brass motifs indicate his torment. The timpani, once quietly beating a halting rhythm, now pounds forcefully as though his heart will leap out of his chest. Relief is temporarily granted as he sighs back, exhausted.

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DISCOVERY AND LEARNING:

Jolie Bookspan of The Fitness Fixer in her post 14,000 Miles On a Bike reminds us that most intervertebral disc problems happen over time, and so too over time, they can also be repaired sensibly without invasive intervention.

How to Cope With Pain gives tips on how to be a “Computer Athlete” by showing sensible ergonomic suggestions.

Medicine for the Outdoors’ Paul Auerbach with a post entitled Sawyer Water Filter shows how a simple micron filter attachment to an ordinary bucket allows a pure gravity-enabled water filtration system that makes water from almost any source potable. It’s truly amazing, elegant technology.

Walter Jessen of Highlight Health shares remarkable new research indicating we might be closer to unraveling the genetic basis of autism. Not surprisingly, vaccines are not mentioned in the article.

Ves Dimov at Clinical Cases and Images Blog is one of the pioneering physicians using Twitter to share conference proceedings in real-time, as he did at the Annual Meeting of American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Likewise, Twitter can also be used for USMLE Step 1 board preparation. Med students, this is an invaluable resource, since now First Aid can quiz you!

Nancy Brown of Teen Health 411 shares tips on teen oral health that may not be obvious.

Robin from Survive the Journey shares some new research that indicates Cushing’s Disease has a higher prevalence than common wisdom indicates.

At Sharp Brains, Dr. Rabiner talks about a quantitative EEG method for screening ADHD as opposed to observational/behavioral methods. The improvement of this new method is astounding and shows great promise.

PERSONAL STORIES:

Dinah from Shrink Rap talks about how simple medical jargon can be taken the wrong way by patients who don’t have the context clinicians do.

Christine at Corn Allergic shares a story where a conscientious nurse made a simple blood draw less of an anxiety-producing event (and not for the needle, either) by both being resourceful and non-judgmental.

Our patient begins a reverie, remembering his youth. theme. The strings’ rhythms drive forward, so full of exuberance they’re practically tripping over themselves. He must be thinking of a past love, unable to contain the rush of his passion, emotionally climbing higher and higher — until the brass for the first time fully states the “Ideal” theme in the piece (1:44). This represents his soul, the totality of his being, his essence. He has found himself through this 6 note theme, and having done so, can finally move on, secure in himself and who he is, ready to face whatever fate is to come with pride and dignity.

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Cris Cuthbertson from Scalpel’s Edge shares a personal letter spelling out her point of view on the differences between non-MD researchers and physician-scientists. (she also has great tips on preparing medical presentations)

Doctor Anonymous shares his thoughts as part of yesterday’s official observance of World AIDS Day. It is, as he pointed out, the 20th anniversary of the event, and we have made incredible strides in that time.

Bongi at Other Things Amanzi shares a story from his past about not looking down at people on your way up–they just might do the same to you when it’s their turn!

And finally–TRANSFORMATION:

Barbara Kivowitz In Sickness and In Health shares how Gratitude Can Change You. Read how there is transformational power in giving thanks in a tangible way.

ADHD isn’t a disorder, it’s a personality type. That’s what Dr. Rob of Musings of a Distractible Mind writes in “The Doctor is Distracted.” ADD/ADHD confers its own strengths and weaknesses, and just like everyone else, each individual has their own unique aptitudes. The key is adapting and transforming “liability” into leverage.

In Reflections in a Head Mirror, Bruce Campbell shares a beautiful story about how love transforms perceptions, making the previously impossible possible.

Jacqueline at Laika’s MedLibLog really took off with the theme, so I’m saving this for last. She writes a very thorough review of a symposium on fear focusing mainly on a speech by an Israeli lecturer showing many neurological elements in fear processing and response. Post-traumatic stress disorder is featured prominently as an example of how extreme fear eventually can transform a person into someone else. She offers another German composer, J.S. Bach, to accompany her piece as well.

Finally we arrive at the end of our patient’s mortal journey: a pause, another short, violent struggle, and after his last agonal breaths, death arrives (0:52). However, no sooner than the tam-tam signals this event than the harp, low strings, brass, and winds indicate the soul’s release, loosed from his mortal coil, floating finally free. Sumptuous, almost agonizing pedal points stretch out like harmonic taffy as the “Ideal” theme transforms, grows and is passed around the entire orchestra. A final victorious flourish at our triumphant final key of C major (6:06) and our fully transfigured soul now rests quietly in peace.

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One may be wondering why I chose this rather heavy musical topic. For one, it fits in with a healthcare theme. Death and end-of-life issues are ever-present challenges in healthcare. Paul Levy just spearheaded a blog cause on this very issue. Facing our mortality isn’t easy for anyone. However, the main reason I chose it is because, metaphorically, it represents what I’ve gone through this last year. I decided not to tie in my own story along the way so as not to detract further from the contributors, but regular readers and friends know about the limbo status of my scholastic endeavors, unforeseeable health issues that took me out of commission for 9 months, and a divorce forced upon me in the middle of it all. One can allow dreams, relationships, etc. to simply die, or be transformed in the crucible of experience into something new. I hear Strauss and it reminds me I must do the latter. I have to believe this–like the musically idealized portrayal–is how things will turn out eventually. I invite those not already readers to join me in searching for my “C major chord,” speed bumps and all, and I’ll be there to share yours.

Finally, I do want to offer a small dedication to those that lost their lives in the tragedy in Mumbai last week. I think this post is an appropriate place to offer that, even though the topic was already conceived when the horror of those events unfolded. May the souls of the departed as well as the families and friends that mourn them find peace.

Thank you for reading! I hope that beauty and catharsis was found in spite of a weighty topic. I also want to thank Dr. Val and Colin Son for their work on keeping Grand Rounds what is is and giving me the honor to host once again. One of the things that makes Grand Rounds special is the variety of hosting topics and personalities one gets each week. So with that, I pass the baton to next week’s host, Sharp Brains. I look forward to their edition. Cheers and good health to all!

Video Post: Hosting Dr. Anonymous show Dec 4th

Links:
The Dr. Anonymous Show on BlogTalkRadio (this Thursday at 9pmEST)
Grand Rounds 5:11 – Death and Transfiguration

Update 03December: Confirmed panelists are Ramona Bates, Mother Jones, Val Jones, and Bongi (schedule permitting). It’s a star-studded event, ladies and gentlemen! Even Dr. A. is jealous! hehe

Stating the obvious

Just to make sure people landing here today know they are on the right site, YES, I did update my theme. I originally thought I’d like the split 3-column look of the other one but found that the eyes would need to scan extremes of the page to find things.  So then I decided that one column would be all bloggy things and the other social media meta stuff, but I was struggling getting the theme to do anything right. The CSS was beyond insane.

Finally, I installed this one in time for tomorrow and will continue to make tweaks. I’ll replace the mountain graphic with something more personal and start populating the sidebar with all the things I couldn’t in the other theme. I wanted to have it ready all at once, but reality and the 80/20 rule set in.  If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know!

GR: Don’t forget your submissions!!

Just a reminder about the Grand Rounds submission timeframe ending this evening! If you haven’t given me a post and want to be included, time’s running out!  I might consider a post later than the posted time today, but tomorrow will be too late so don’t delay!

Grand Rounds 5:11 here on Dec 2 and Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!! I realized just a bit ago that I neglected to have a “ready” post to formally accept submissions for the upcoming edition of Grand Rounds next Tuesday, December 2nd.  I apologize profusely, and can only offer as my excuse the craziness of two family birthdays, Thanksgiving, and all the family coming and going that occurs during this time.  Mea culpa!

Before I continue, make sure you go see the excellent current edition at Canadian Medicine, featuring last week’s content.  If you submitted a piece that wasn’t included in Dr. Solomon’s edition, re-send to me for consideration.

Please have all articles submitted to me no later than 18:00CST/17:00EST Sunday, November 30th (00:00UTC Monday December 1st) for inclusion by sending an email to enrico -[at]- mexicomedstudent.com. Please put “Grand Rounds” in the subject, and in the body text include the URL and a sentence or two of summary. That summary is important because not everyone’s URL is descriptive, and when I have a table of URLs, etc. when planning the edition, a blurb really helps. 

I do have a tentative theme in mind but don’t want to reveal too much (and want some flexibility to change it ) but these words should be applicable: renewal, metamorphosis, change, transformation. That should be enigmatic enough for everyone.  Do not feel constrained by these, however. There is no judgment about whether to include or not based on any theme; each article is reviewed on its own merit. 

Thank you for your cooperation, and I look forward to reading everyone’s entries!  Good health to all, and for those traveling here in the US this holiday season, be safe.