Taiwan Tops the Expat Health Care Charts

The island offers the cheapest and best medical facilities of any country in the world, according to a new survey. See the whole story here. By Elizabeth Roberts

REVIEW ARTICLE

200TH ANNIVERSARY ARTICLE

Two Hundred Years of Surgery

Atul Gawande, M.D., M.P.H.

N Engl J Med 2012; 366:1716-1723May 3, 2012DOI: 10.1056/NEJMra1202392

While I was busy preparing for the class I'm going to teach tomorrow, I found this interesting history of surgery.
Share with you!
Chinese Translation Here

The Doctor’s New Dilemma

Suzanne Koven, M.D.

N Engl J Med 2016; 374:608-609February 18, 2016DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1513708

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1513708?query=TOC

I read an article in New England Journal of Medicine today. This article talks about how we could help our patients solving their problem by caring a little bit more about their feeling, despite the fact that time is never enough for doctors. Nevertheless, since I began to practice as a TCM doctor, I enjoy chatting with patients about their life experience and things that bother them, which usually is the cause of their discomfort.

I'll never get bored since the patient who came to see me ranged from 2-96 years old (according to my patients for the past few years), boys and girls, men and women and they do all kinds of jobs. By talking to them, I get to know how their way of life affect their body and mind. I have to find out the real problem and try to fix it accordingly. Not to mention the time we spend on medical record. Usually we have to do all these in 15-20 minutes for new patient in Taiwan. Here comes the doctor's new dilemma.

"Do I ask her what’s really bothering her and risk a time-consuming interaction? Or do I accept what she’s saying at face value and risk missing a chance to truly help her?"

Placebo Effects in Medicine

07 Jul 2015, 00:22

I read an article about placebo effects in the latest NEJM today.

You might learn something new from it. Share with you.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1504023?query=TOC&

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

22 Sep 2015, 22:45

A famous professor, John P.A. Ioannidis, was invited to deliver a speech in Taiwan in recent days. https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/john-ioannidis

Prof. Ioannidis is famous for the article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” published on PLoS Medicine in 2005.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

If the original article is too long for you, you could take a look at these media coverage:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/related/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124

And here’s another one of his research on “How to Make More Published Research True” published in 2014.

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001747

The media coverage of Prof. Ioannidis’ visiting Taiwan is here:

http://goo.gl/S23BRV

My point of view:

Don’t jump into conclusion too soon. Be humble and open minded.