Monday, February 16, 2015

February 2015 End-of-Term Youtube Extravaganza

We come again to the end of another term and as I have traditionally done, I offer up this set of fun and completely unrelated youtube clips for your viewing pleasure. I wish you a wonderful break, short as it is!

1.       Tangerine Dream Live in April 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYywjDWXJsg  Formed by Edgar Froese way back in 1968, dream has been at the cutting edge of electronic music for neatly 50 years. Poignant, since Froese just passed away a month ago at age 70.

2.       Irish Mike and Big Giant Swords: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBGhmvi0yyA  Okay, this is a show on Discovery Channel, but Irish Mike is one of the best new stars on TV. Surrounded by a group of inept helpers, save for female blacksmith Jessie (who really knows her stuff), Irish Mike makes big swords. While his wife and two cuter-than-cute little kids watch in bemusement.

3.       World Land Speed record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2QuOfOGoqU  I was once in a car that drive 110 mph. That was sort of scary since it was night time, I was not driving and I was coming home from a rock concert festival. So let’s go 7 times that fast! Here, you can see what it is like to drive at 743 mph…

4.       Franz Klammer 1976 Downhill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYj9kIxAL_o  This is simply the greatest downhill ski run in Olympic history. Klammer is on the edge of disaster the entire time.

5.       Everest traffic jam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i8WHHySyp4  Remember when it was romantic to climb Mt. Everest? Nowadays you can be led up the mountain, and long lines leave people at risk. Here is a reminder of the risk.

6.       Extreme mountain biking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x76VEPXYaI0  I stand in awe of riders who can do this. I can’t.

7.       Mills Lake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X4Hz4tTB28  This is just a 4-minute clip of one of my favortite spots on earth. In Rocky Mountain national Park, about a 3-mile hike from the Bear lake parking area.

8.       Tornado chasing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Drt2X2a3Mk  Yeah, I’m not going to do this. Reed Timmer is crazy!

9.       Gary Grimshaw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I60JeyG-RfA  Gary Grimshaw was one of the great poster artists. Everyone who knows me knows I love this kind of art, and Grimshaw was the man who created all the posters for the Detroit area when I was growing up. I own the Hendrix poster you will see around 1.30 into the clip.

10.   Leave ‘em laughing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HttF5HVYtlQ  Speaks for itself…

Monday, February 9, 2015

Online Classes from edX

We live in interesting times, to be sure. The very nature of education is changing in ways that I believe few of us could have seen even 10 years ago. Technology is making  a radical difference in the way in which education is delivered. While certainly earning a degree such as chiropractic requires the learner to be present- after all, one cannot learn a psychomotor skill simply by watching a video- the online platform is becoming quite common. And as a result opportunity abounds.

I was directed the following course by one of our faculty members, Dr. Chris Roecker. He found the course through his own search efforts, but the course is one that we all could benefit from. This is a course on blended learning; that is, using online modalities while still teaching a course in person. The course is offered by edX, which is a platform linking readers to online classes offered by leading institutions. And what is interesting is that you can audit a course; that is, take it for free.
So I wanted to provide you with the url for the program. It is: https://www.edx.org/course/blended-learning-edx-edx-blendedx?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social-post&utm_content=BlendedX&utm_campaign=course-promotion#.VNitAJjnYrl

Feel free to check it out and consider signing up for a class.

Monday, February 2, 2015

One More New Paper


Croft P, Altman DG, Deeks JJ, Dunn KM, Hay AD, Hemingway H, LeREsche L, Peat G, Perel P, Petersen SE, Riley RD, Roberts I, Sharpe M, Stevens rj, Van Der Windt DA, Von Korff M, Timmis A. The science of clinical practice: disease diagnosis or patient prognosis? Evidence about “what is likely to happen” should shape clinical practice. BMC Medicine 2015, 13:20, doi:10.1186/s12916-014-0265-4

ABSTRACT
Background: Diagnosis is the traditional basis for decision-making in clinical practice. Evidence is often lacking about future benefits and harms of these decisions for patients diagnosed with and without disease. We propose that a model of clinical practice focused on patient prognosis and predicting the likelihood of future outcomes may be more useful.

Discussion: Disease diagnosis can provide crucial information for clinical decisions that influence outcome in serious acute illness. However, the central role of diagnosis in clinical practice is challenged by evidence that it does not always benefit patients and that factors other than disease are important in determining patient outcome. The concept of disease as a dichotomous ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is challenged by the frequent use of diagnostic indicators with continuous distributions, such as blood sugar, which are better understood as contributing information about the probability of a patient’s future outcome. Moreover, many illnesses, such as chronic fatigue, cannot usefully be labelled from a disease-diagnosis perspective. In such cases, a prognostic model provides an alternative framework for clinical practice that extends beyond disease and diagnosis and incorporates a wide range of information to predict future patient outcomes and to guide decisions to improve them. Such information embraces non-disease factors and genetic and other biomarkers which influence outcome.
Summary: Patient prognosis can provide the framework for modern clinical practice to integrate information from the expanding biological, social, and clinical database for more effective and efficient care.