Reading Room
The reading room includes articles of potential interest to consumers and medical professionals. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the NC Medical Board, its members and staff.
How do you make a mental health app people actually want to use?
STATNews
July 15, 2019
Making medicines isn’t about aesthetics. Your pill doesn’t need to be pretty to work. But with mental health apps, good design is half the battle. App makers have to be able to translate traditional therapy techniques into easy exercises that people can flip through on their phones.
A family’s medical mystery sheds light on the surprising ways disease-causing genes can be inherited
STATNews
July 8, 2019
To her family, Tatiana Legkiy looked completely healthy when she was born. But a pediatrician who listened to her heart heard something off. So within a few days of being born, she saw a specialist who did an echocardiogram and who, alarmed by the results, called an ambulance to take her to the hospital in Modesto, Calif.
Health tech companies often flop. But this researcher’s track record suggests there’s a strategy for success
STATNews
July 3, 2019
A series of glass cabinets lines the back wall of this Stanford building, the shelves crowded with health technologies dreamed up here. There’s a bottle of thick blue gel that helps drugs stick inside the colon, a heartbeat-tracking patch, an under-the-sheets sensor that buzzes to prevent night terrors, and a baby doll with a dozen redesigned versions of an umbilical catheter lying next to its blanket.
Why You Should Take A Peek At Your Doctor’s Notes On Your Health
Kaiser Health News
June 19, 2019
Liz Salmi’s long battle with brain cancer has included surgery, chemotherapy and many doctors’ visits along the way. When she requested her medical records and read her doctor’s notes, she says, they were like a time capsule of the care she has received. Salmi now works for the Boston-based research project OpenNotes, which encourages health providers to share notes about the visits with patients.
The Case for Walking
Elemental
June 14, 2019
Some people get a little fanatical about their exercise. Take I-Min Lee. She walks routinely instead of driving, and she runs regularly. Lee wears a step counter and is “a little obsessed” with keeping track. “This makes me understand how the little things we do during the day can add up to quite a large total number of steps,” the 59-year-old says. Lee admits she has more motivation than the average person. “After all,” she says, “would you listen to a researcher who does not practice what she studies?”
The Worst Patients in the World
The Atlantic
July 2019 Issue
Americans are hypochondriacs, yet we skip our checkups. We demand drugs we don’t need, and fail to take the ones we do. No wonder the U.S. leads the world in health spending.
