Meridian Surgical

Atul Gawande to NPR:

Doctors are human, and that their profession is like any other.

“We miss stuff. We are inconsistent and unreliable because of the complexity of care,” Gawande says. “I got a chance to visit Boeing and see how they make things work, and over and over again they fall back on checklists. The pilot’s checklist is a crucial component, not just for how you handle takeoff and landing in normal circumstances, but even how you handle a crisis

Phan Rang, Vietnam-Dr. Joyce Chen, Interplast Webster Fellow.
At the farewell dinner the local government presented each of the team members with

From the Annals of Internal Medicine:

The United States spends more on health care than other nations, yet our health outcomes remain inferior to those of many countries.

Phan Rang, Vietnam-Dr. Joyce Chen, Interplast Webster Fellow.

Sleeping peacefully on a swinging green hammock is six-month-old Tai.  Tai had a unilateral cleft

I selected a few excerpts from a patient information review in the New York Times:

What is osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is

Phan Rang, Vietnam

Here are some more photos from Jeff Speer, Interplast anesthesiology resident from Dartmouth, on his first Interplast trip (see previous blog post). 

The first photo is from the first day at the hospital, when we
held clinic to evaluate patients for surgery. Tags: surgery news, surgical news

From AMedNews:

43% of hospitals and medical clinics sent transcription work out of the country in 2009 – up from 35% that did so in 2008.

Offshore companies charge an average of 13 cents per line of copy, while domestic ones charge an average of 15 cents.

Turnaround time wasn’t much different because, for example, ”In India, they are working while you are

From CNN:

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books. And as electronic reading devices such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and smartphones boost demand for e-books, the problem may only get worse.

Textbooks are frequently pirated, but so are many other categories including professional content, such as medical books and technical

“There’s nothing like foot pain to make you crazy. That’s what an expert at Mayo Clinic says he hears from patients who have a condition called plantar fasciitis [fashee-EYE-tis]. It’s very common and can make walking across the room a miserable experience. What can you do about it?”