My good friend and mentor, Kevin Clauson, just published a great slideshow:

In the last few weeks, I’ve given several presentations to European pharma companies about what kind of strategy they should endorse in order to use social media properly. And when it comes to regulations, we are all in trouble, because without exact answers, it’s hard to implement any kind of strategies. But now!

On November 12-13, the FDA will hold a hearing on how pharmaceutical companies use the web and social-media tools to market their products  the first step to providing guidelines around this type of marketing. Sixty-two speakers from pharmaceutical companies, media companies, agencies, and others have been asked to give their viewpoints.

The reason why I’m writing about it is the perfect online coverage of the event. See FDASM for more details:

I’ve recently come across Ecosphere which is a really creative idea for those who would like to see something different from an aquarium or a terrarium on their desks.

Inside each EcoSphere are active micro-organisms, bright red shrimp and algae, each existing in filtered sea water. Because the EcoSphere is a self-sustaining ecosystem, you never have to feed the life within. Simply provide your EcoSphere with a source of indirect natural or artificial light and enjoy this aesthetic blend of art and science, beauty and balance.

How does it work?

The shrimp produce carbon dioxide by “breathing”; the algae use the carbon dioxide and light to produce oxygen. Algae can only produce oxygen when there’s light. When it is dark, the shrimp and bacteria are consuming the oxygen while none is being made. The EcoSphere would die with too many plants and animals, because they would run out of oxygen at night.

Medgadget reported about the walking humanoid, PETMAN, developed by Boston Dynamics. I have never seen such a realistic movement from a robot.

I tried to find other similar videos just to highlight the difference:

And a walking robotic dog:

Do you remember Personas that visualizes the map of your online presence? Here is a better solution. From one point of view, it’s great to have such a useful tool as Google Social Search. A short video about what it is and how it works.

Social Search taps into a user’s social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user’s own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.

From another point of view, it becomes even easier to find inappropriate content about us online. We know medical students sometimes breach patient privacy on Twitter, Facebook. We know doctors sometimes get sued because of their blogs. I think it’s not their fault. I think this crucial issue must be included in medical education. For example, in my “Medicine and Web 2.0” university credit course, there is a slideshow dedicated to the topic (how to avoid such issues).

We have to let doctors and students know about it. And not for the reason that patients will find these pieces of information easier from now via Google Social Search.

I just published a summary about the last week of my “Medicine and Web 2.0” university credit course. This time I focused on how virtual worlds can be used in medicine and healthcare.

I also have a detailed guide dedicated to this topic on Webicina.

And I have recently had a virtual presentation for a course of the Nova Southeastern University (including audiocast):

Yesterday I found out I had 20 invitations for a Google Wave account. I asked my followers on Twitter whether anyone needed one, and I got over 80 requests. It seems people would like to give it a try. But what about other developments that also aim to change the way we communicate. Here is one example, Raindrop from Mozilla.

Raindrop’s mission: make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend’s blog or as part of a social networking site.

Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome).

Google Wave or RainDrop, at the end, both will revolutionize the way we communicate with our collegues or with patients.

There is a huge number of online resources focusing on allergy and it’s hard to find the best ones so it’s a pleasure to present the newest collection on Webicina, the first medical web 2.0 guidance service. Allergy 2.0 is a free comprehensive resource containing all the web 2.0 tools from quality blogs and communities to online slideshows and mobile applications focusing on allergy.

Many thanks to Ves Dimov at Allergy Notes for helping me select the best resources.

Please take a look at the table of contents:

• News and Information
• Allergy in the Blogosphere
• Allergy-related Podcasts and Interviews
• Allergy-related Community sites, Forums and Facebook groups
• Microblogging: Twitter and Friendfeed
• Allergy Wikis
• Mobile Applications
• Slideshows about Allergy
• Social Bookmarking
• Allergy Videos, animations and videocasts
• Medical Search Engines

Also here is PeRSSonalized Allergy with all the quality news sites, blogs, peer-reviewed journals and web 2.0 tools focusing on allergy. PeRSSonalized Medicine is an easy-to-use, free aggregator of quality medical information that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles about a medical specialty or a medical condition in one personalized place.

Please feel free to sign up for our newsletter.

I would like to share my favourite and ongoing projects with you so I can give you a proper introduction to Scienceroll.com. You can also find me on Twitter or on Friendfeed.

For news and articles about the impact of web 2.0 on medicine and healthcare, please follow the Medicine 2.0 Friendfood room.

For news and articles about personalized medicine and genetics, please follow the Gene Genie Friendfeed room.

Medicine 2.0 University Course: This is the third semester of the first university course that focuses on web 2.0 and medicine for medical students. Now, almost 100 students attend the 20 slideshows through 10 weeks and they fill a survey out before and after the course.

Medicine 2.0 Collection: I maintain the biggest collection of links and posts focusing on web 2.0 and medicine.

Webicina.com is my service that aims to help medical professionals and patients enter the web 2.0 era by providing them with e-courses, consulting and personalized packages.

PeRSSonalized Medicine is a free tool that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place. You can create your own “medical journal” and as we are totally open to suggestions, let us add the journals, blogs and websites that you would like to follow.

Scienceroll Search is a personalized medical search engine powered by PolyMeta search and clustering engine. You can choose which databases to search in and which one to exclude from your list. It works with well-known medical search engines and databases and we’re totally open to add new ones or remove those you don’t really like.

List of biomedical and scientific community sites: More than 30 communities with links, descriptions and screenshots.

List of Biomedical video sites: Almost 40 sites featuring scientific or medical videos and videocasts.

• Midwifery, birth and Second Life

• Can Training in Second Life Teach Doctors to Save Real Lives? (Discover)

• A Virtual Science Environment in Second Life

Mary Anne Clark describes the organization and uses of Genome Island, a virtual laboratory complex constructed in Second Life. Genome Island was created for teaching genetics to university undergraduates but also provides a public space where anyone interested in genetics can spend a few minutes, or a few hours, interacting with genetic objects—from simple experiments with peas to the organization of whole genomes.

• Molecular models in SL

• Virtually Useless #fote09 #fote09vw

I’m not against virtual environments – it’s SL I have a problem with. There are many potential applications, the ones that particularly attract me being travel replacement and carbon footprint reduction. However, I don’t feel that virtual environments are good conferencing tools – I don’t need a 3D representation and the lighter touch of tools such as Eluminate and Skype are much more appropriate for this application.

• Trademarks and the SLeducation Wiki

As some readers probably already know, I received a request from Linden Lab on Wednesday in relation to the Second Life in Education Wiki requesting  ‘not to use our trademark “Second Life” in your name or website name and not to use “SLeducation” in text or in your domain name…’ and to ‘..make the changes to your website name and domain name as soon as possible and let us know when you expect to have this done…’.

I found an article mentioning a promising method for diagnosing diseases without unknown origin.Though it’s still not a realistic option to perform sequencing in clinics and hospitals in many parts of the world.

For the first time, scientists have diagnosed a genetic disease by completely sequencing all of a patient’s genes. Using high-throughput DNA sequencing technology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) researchers successfully identified a gene mutation that was responsible for the patient’s disease, but had not been suspected based on clinical observations.

Starting with DNA from a blood sample from the patient — an infant in Turkey who was persistently dehydrated and failing to gain weight – the team found in 10 days a gene mutation known to affect electrolyte transport in the intestines and cause a condition called congenital chloride diarrhea. Doctors in Turkey confirmed the diagnosis clinically and were able to provide a treatment tailored to the disease.

Barbara Duck at The Medical Quack published an interesting article about new devices that help report health data compliance wirelessly. One example is the VenaHub device:

• The Future of Health Care Is Social

Health care is a personal issue that has become wholly public–as the national debate over reforming our system makes painfully clear. But what’s often lost in the gun-toting Town Hall debates about the issue is a clear vision about how medicine could work in the future. In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog’s ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.

I saw the Dutch version of this video at the recent Reshape conference.

I’ve written numerous entries about how Wikipedia should be or not be used in medicine. Jacqueline at Laikas MedLiblog published a fantastic report in which she analyzed the pros and cons; how students, patients or doctors use Wikipedia and what kind of changes should be made in order to make it a better encyclopaedia.

Wikipedia is an admirable initiative. It is a large online collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia written by contributors around the world.

But the key question is whether you can rely on Wikipedia as the sole source for medical, scientific or even popular information.

I had a nice discussion with David Bradley and Frank Gaillard on Facebook focusing on this issue.

Health on the Net Foundation has been evaluating and rating medical websites for years and it’s sad when we find out there might be some problems and concerns around this highly-respected system.The Bradfield Resident blog published an interesting entry:

…from a review the HONcode guidelines on the Health On the Net Foundation website, it appears that the Australian Dental Association’s site, which currently displays a HONcode seal, does not respect the HONcode principles.

Details of the water fluoridation argument (and safety of mercury in fillings, etc) aside, it is apparent that the current ADA website does not respect a number of the HONcode principles – to an obvious and significant extent – and I imagine this to have been the case for a number of years, if not from the original review in January 2004. This example does not instill confidence in the credibility of the Health On the Net Foundation seal used for medical and health websites. I seek your explanation as to how a site reviewed numerous times with such glaring inconsistencies could be certified. I have not particularly listed examples of the inconsistencies since they appear on almost every page of the ADA website – if you cannot see them, I hold little hope for the HONcode’s reputation at all.

David Rothman shared a useful video that describes the new interface of Pubmed, the database of biomedical information.

• HIPAA’s Broken Promise (e-Patients.net)

• Self-Tracking Wins at the Mayo Clinic (The Quantified Self)

• Physicians Using Twitter (iCons in Medicine)

• The latest Parkinson’s treatment: Wii-hab (Times Online)

Could a real hope of improving the lives of people with Parkinson’s disease — here, now, in their own homes — lie in a computer game? With major drug breakthroughs still tantalisingly out of reach, many health professionals and people with Parkinson’s are suddenly excited by the dramatic improvements in function and wellbeing being brought by simply playing the Nintendo Wii — a games system available on every high street that simulates sports and other activities by transferring your movements to the computer screen.

• Digital tools let doctors see patients via Internet (The Baltimore Sun)

But Broomell, 35, of Rising Sun, never set foot in the specialist’s Baltimore office. Instead, she met him several times by videoconference while she was at an Elkton hospital, saving her the trip down Interstate 95.

Do you remember the report focusing on how young physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center test their own DNA in search of genes linked to various illnesses? I’ve now just come across a great article in PLoS Medicine about how the dawning era of personalized medicine exposes a gap in medical education.