Maine gas prices up 2 cents

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) -- Maine residents are paying more at the pump, as gas prices have risen more than 2 cents per gallon.

Price-monitoring website MaineGasPrices.com reports Monday that the average retail price of a gallon of gas in Maine is up to $3.51.

The good news is that prices nationally have risen more than 6 cents on average in the past week, and Maine residents are paying six cents less per gallon than the national average of $3.57.

In-state prices are now more than 28 cents lower than at this time last year and almost 8 cents lower than a month ago.

The averages are based on a survey of more than 1,200 Maine gas stations.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/maine-gas-prices-2-cents-161510117.html

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Japanese mayor: Wartime sex slaves were necessary

TOKYO (AP) ? An outspoken nationalist mayor said the Japanese military's forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to "maintain discipline" in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.

The comments made Monday are already raising ire in neighboring countries that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime aggression and that have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.

Toru Hashimoto, the young, brash mayor of Osaka who is also co-leader of an emerging conservative political party, also told reporters that there wasn't clear evidence that the Japanese military coerced women to become what are euphemistically called "comfort women."

"To maintain discipline in the military, it must have been necessary at that time," said Hashimoto. "For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That's clear to anyone."

Historians say up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels.

In Seoul, the Foreign Ministry expressed disappointment over what it called a senior Japanese official's serious lack of historical understanding and respect for women's rights. It asked Japan's leadership figures to look back on their country's imperial past, including grave human rights violations that were committed, and correct their anachronistic historical views.

Hashimoto's comments come amid mounting criticism at the prospect of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's conservative government revising Japan's past apologies for wartime atrocities. Before he took office in December, Abe had advocated revising a 1993 statement by then-Prime Minister Yohei Kono acknowledging and expressing remorse for the suffering caused to the sexual slaves of Japanese troops.

Abe has acknowledged "comfort women" existed but has denied they were coerced into prostitution, citing a lack of official evidence.

Recently, top officials in Abe's government have appeared to backpedal on suggestions the government might revise past apologies, apparently to calm tensions with South Korea and China and address U.S. concerns about Abe's nationalist agenda.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga repeated the previous government position and said that those women went through unbearable pain.

"The stance of the Japanese government on the comfort women issue is well known. They have suffered unspeakably painful experiences. The Abe Cabinet has the same sentiments as past Cabinets."

Education Minister Hakubun Shimomura said Hashimoto's remark doesn't help as Japan has faced criticism from its neighboring countries and the U.S. over its interpretation of history.

"A series of remarks related to our interpretation of (wartime) history have been already misunderstood. In that sense, Mr. Hashimoto's remark came at a bad time," Shimomura told reporters. "I wonder if there is any positive meaning to intentionally make such remarks at this particular moment."

Hashimoto, 43, is co-head of the newly formed Japan Restoration Party with former Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, who is a strident nationalist.

Sakihito Ozawa, the party's parliamentary affairs chairman, said he believed Hashimoto's remarks reflected his personal view but expressed concerns about repercussions.

"We should ask his real intentions and stop this at some point," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Elaine Kurtenbach, Miki Toda and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Sam Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/japanese-mayor-wartime-sex-slaves-were-necessary-042050746.html

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Today in History

Today is Sunday, May 12, the 132nd day of 2013. There are 233 days left in the year. This is Mother's Day.

Today's Highlights in History:

On May 12, 1943, during World War II, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The two-week Trident Conference, headed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, opened in Washington.

On this date:

In 1780, during the Revolutionary War, the besieged city of Charleston, S.C., surrendered to British forces.

In 1870, an act creating the Canadian province of Manitoba was given royal assent, to take effect in July.

In 1922, a 20-ton meteor crashed near Blackstone, Va.

In 1932, the body of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the kidnapped son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was found in a wooded area near Hopewell, N.J.

In 1933, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration were established to provide help for the needy and farmers.

In 1937, Britain's King George VI was crowned at Westminster Abbey; his wife, Elizabeth, was crowned as queen consort.

In 1949, the Soviet Union lifted the Berlin Blockade, which the Western powers had succeeded in circumventing with their Berlin Airlift.

In 1958, the United States and Canada signed an agreement to create the North American Air Defense Command (later the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD).

In 1963, Betty Miller became the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean as she landed her Piper Apache in Brisbane, Australia, having left Oakland, Calif., on April 30, making three stopovers along the way.

In 1970, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm Harry A. Blackmun as a Supreme Court justice.

In 1982, in Fatima, Portugal, security guards overpowered a Spanish priest armed with a bayonet who attacked Pope John Paul II. (In 2008, the pope's longtime private secretary revealed that the pontiff was slightly wounded in the assault.)

In 2002, Jimmy Carter arrived in Cuba, becoming the first U.S. president in or out of office to visit since the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro in power.

Ten years ago: Suicide bombers attacked foreigners' housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 25 victims. A suicide truck-bomb attack killed at least 60 at a government compound in northern Chechnya. L. Paul Bremer, the new American civilian administrator of Iraq, arrived in Baghdad; coalition forces announced they had taken custody of Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha (TAH'-hah), the Iraqi scientist known as "Dr. Germ." (Taha was later released after no charges were brought.) The Texas House ground to a standstill after 51 Democratic lawmakers left the state in a dispute over a Republican congressional redistricting plan. (The Democrats returned four days later from Oklahoma, having succeeded in killing the bill.)

Five years ago: A devastating earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed some 70,000 people. Nearly 400 workers were arrested in an immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. Irena Sendler, credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust, died in Warsaw, Poland, at age 98. Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg died on Captiva Island, Fla, at age 82. Indians second baseman Asdrubal Cabrera turned the 14th unassisted triple play in major league history during the second game of a doubleheader against Toronto. NBC announced that Jimmy Fallon would succeed Conan O'Brien as host of "Late Night."

One year ago: At least 100,000 Spaniards angered by grim economic prospects and the political handling of the international financial crisis turned out for street demonstrations, marking the one-year anniversary of a spontaneous movement that inspired similar protests elsewhere. Miami's LeBron James became the eighth player in NBA history to win the MVP award three times.

Today's Birthdays: Baseball Hall-of-Famer Yogi Berra is 88. Critic John Simon is 88. Composer Burt Bacharach is 85. Actress Millie Perkins is 75. Rhythm-and-blues singer Jayotis Washington is 72. Country singer Billy Swan is 71. Actress Linda Dano is 70. Musician Ian McLagan is 68. Actress Lindsay Crouse is 65. Singer-musician Steve Winwood is 65. Actor Gabriel Byrne is 63. Actor Bruce Boxleitner is 63. Singer Billy Squier is 63. Country singer Kix Brooks is 58. Actress Kim Greist is 55. Rock musician Eric Singer (KISS) is 55. Actor Ving Rhames is 54. Rock musician Billy Duffy is 52. Actor Emilio Estevez is 51. Actress April Grace is 51. Actress Vanessa A. Williams ("Melrose Place") is 50. Country musician Eddie Kilgallon is 48. Actor Stephen Baldwin is 47. Actor Scott Schwartz is 45. Actress Kim Fields is 44. Actress Samantha Mathis is 43. Actress Jamie Luner is 42. Actor Christian Campbell is 41. Actress Rhea Seehorn is 41. Actor Mackenzie Astin is 40. Actress Malin (MAH'-lin) Akerman is 35. Actor Jason Biggs is 35. Actress Emily VanCamp is 27. Actor Malcolm David Kelley is 21. Actors Sawyer and Sullivan Sweeten ("Everybody Loves Raymond") are 18.

Thought for Today: "A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do." ? Lois Wyse, American advertising executive, author and columnist (1926-2007).

(Above Advance for Use Sunday, May 12)

Copyright 2013, The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/today-history-050206767.html

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Nano-breakthrough: Solving the case of the herringbone crystal

May 12, 2013 ? Leading nanoscientists created beautiful, tiled patterns with flat nanocrystals, but they were left with a mystery: Why did some sets of crystals arrange themselves in an alternating, herringbone style? To find out, they turned to experts in computer simulation at the University of Michigan and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The result gives nanotechnology researchers a new tool for controlling how objects one-millionth the size of a grain of sand arrange themselves into useful materials -- and a means to discover the rest of the tool chest. A paper on the research is published online May 12 in Nature Chemistry.

"The excitement in this is not in the herringbone pattern, it's about the coupling of experiment and modeling, and how that approach lets us take on a very hard problem," said Christopher Murray, the Richard Perry University Professor and professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.

Murray's group is well-known for making nanocrystals and arranging them into larger crystal superstructures.

Ultimately, researchers want to modify patches on nanoparticles in different ways to coax them into more complex patterns. The goal is a method that will allow people to imagine what they would like to do and then design a material with the right properties for the job.

"By engineering interactions at the nanoscale, we can begin to assemble target structures of great complexity and functionality on the macroscale," said U-M's Sharon Glotzer, the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering.

Glotzer introduced the concept of nanoparticle "patchiness" in 2004. Her group uses computer simulations to understand and design the patches.

Recently, Murray's team made patterns with flat nanocrystals made of heavy metals, known to chemists as lanthanides, and fluorine atoms. Lanthanides have valuable properties for solar energy and medical imaging, such as the ability to convert between high- and low-energy light.

They started by breaking down chemicals containing atoms of a lanthanide metal and fluorine in a solution, and the lanthanide and fluorine naturally began to form crystals. Also in the mix were chains of carbon and hydrogen that stuck to the sides of the crystals, stopping their growth at sizes of around 100 nanometers, or 100 millionths of a millimeter, at the largest dimensions. By using lanthanides with different atomic radii, they could control the top and bottom faces of the hexagonal crystals to be anywhere from much longer than the other four sides to non-existent, resulting in a diamond shape.

To form tiled patterns, the team spread a thin layer of nanocrystals and solvent on top of a thick fluid. As the solvent evaporated, the crystals had less space available, and they began to pack together.

The diamond shapes and the very long hexagons lined up as expected, the diamonds forming an Argyle-style grid and the hexagons matching up their longest edges like a foreshortened honeycomb. The hexagons whose sides were all nearly the same length should have formed a similar squashed honeycomb pattern, but instead, they lined up in more complicated, alternating herringbone style.

"Whenever we see something that isn't taking the simplest pattern possible, we have to ask why," Murray said.

They posed the question to Glotzer's team.

"They've been world leaders in understanding how these shapes could work on nanometer scales, and there aren't many groups that can make the crystals we make," Murray said. "It seemed natural to bring these strengths together."

Glotzer and her group built a computer model that could recreate the self-assembly of the same range of shapes that Murray had produced. The simulations showed that if the equilateral hexagons interacted with one another only through their shapes, most of the crystals formed the foreshortened honeycomb pattern -- not the herringbone.

"That's when we said, 'Okay, there must be something else going on. It's not just a packing problem,'" Glotzer said.

Her team, which included U-M graduate student Andres Millan and research scientist Michael Engel, then began playing with interactions between the edges of the particles. They found that that if the edges that formed the points were stickier than the other two sides, the hexagons would naturally arrange in the herringbone pattern.

The teams suspected that the source of the stickiness was those carbon and hydrogen chains -- perhaps they attached to the point edges more easily. Since experimentation doesn't yet offer a way to measure the number of hydrocarbon chains on the sides of such tiny particles, Murray asked Ju Li, now the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to calculate how the chains would attach to the edges at a quantum mechanical level.

Li's group confirmed that because of the way that the different facets cut across the lattice of the metal and fluorine atoms, more hydrocarbon chains could stick to the four edges that led to points than the remaining two sides. As a result, the particles become patchy.

"Our study shows a way forward making very subtle changes in building block architecture and getting a very profound change in the larger self-assembled pattern," Glotzer said. "The goal is to have knobs that you can change just a little and get a big change in structure, and this is one of the first papers that shows a way forward for how to do that."

The paper is titled "Competition of shape and interaction patchiness for self-assembling nanoplates."

Murray is also a professor of materials science and engineering. Glotzer is also a professor of materials science and engineering, macromolecular science and engineering, physics and applied physics. Li is also a professor of material science and engineering.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/kOnNe91VKq0/130512141206.htm

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Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

May 10, 2013 ? Gone are the days of being able to count the number of known planets on your fingers. Today, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets -- planets that orbit stars beyond our sun -- and more than 2,700 other candidates. What are these exotic planets made of? Unfortunately, you cannot stack them in a jar like marbles and take a closer look. Instead, researchers are coming up with advanced techniques for probing the planets' makeup.

One breakthrough to come in recent years is direct imaging of exoplanets. Ground-based telescopes have begun taking infrared pictures of the planets posing near their stars in family portraits. But to astronomers, a picture is worth even more than a thousand words if its light can be broken apart into a rainbow of different wavelengths.

Those wishes are coming true as researchers are beginning to install infrared cameras on ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs. Spectrographs are instruments that spread an object's light apart, revealing signatures of molecules. Project 1640, partly funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently accomplished this goal using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.

"In just one hour, we were able to get precise composition information about four planets around one overwhelmingly bright star," said Gautam Vasisht of JPL, co-author of the new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal. "The star is a hundred thousand times as bright as the planets, so we've developed ways to remove that starlight and isolate the extremely faint light of the planets."

Along with ground-based infrared imaging, other strategies for combing through the atmospheres of giant planets are being actively pursued as well. For example, NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes monitor planets as they cross in front of their stars, and then disappear behind. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will use a comparable strategy to study the atmospheres of planets only slightly larger than Earth.

In the new study, the researchers examined HR 8799, a large star orbited by at least four known giant, red planets. Three of the planets were among the first ever directly imaged around a star, thanks to observations from the Gemini and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in 2008. The fourth planet, the closest to the star and the hardest to see, was revealed in images taken by the Keck telescope in 2010.

That alone was a tremendous feat considering that all planet discoveries up until then had been made through indirect means, for example by looking for the wobble of a star induced by the tug of planets.

Those images weren't enough, however, to reveal any information about the planets' chemical composition. That's where spectrographs are needed -- to expose the "fingerprints" of molecules in a planet's atmosphere. Capturing a distant world's spectrum requires gathering even more planet light, and that means further blocking the glare of the star.

Project 1640 accomplished this with a collection of instruments, which the team installs on the ground-based telescopes each time they go on "observing runs." The instrument suite includes a coronagraph to mask out the starlight; an advanced adaptive optics system, which removes the blur of our moving atmosphere by making millions of tiny adjustments to two deformable telescope mirrors; an imaging spectrograph that records 30 images in a rainbow of infrared colors simultaneously; and a state-of-the-art wave front sensor that further adjusts the mirrors to compensate for scattered starlight.

"It's like taking a single picture of the Empire State Building from an airplane that reveals a bump on the sidewalk next to it that is as high as an ant," said Ben R. Oppenheimer, lead author of the new study and associate curator and chair of the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y., N.Y.

Their results revealed that all four planets, though nearly the same in temperature, have different compositions. Some, unexpectedly, do not have methane in them, and there may be hints of ammonia or other compounds that would also be surprising. Further theoretical modeling will help to understand the chemistry of these planets.

Meanwhile, the quest to obtain more and better spectra of exoplanets continues. Other researchers have used the Keck telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope near Tucson, Ariz., to study the emission of individual planets in the HR8799 system. In addition to the HR 8799 system, only two others have yielded images of exoplanets. The next step is to find more planets ripe for giving up their chemical secrets. Several ground-based telescopes are being prepared for the hunt, including Keck, Gemini, Palomar and Japan's Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Ideally, the researchers want to find young planets that still have enough heat left over from their formation, and thus more infrared light for the spectrographs to see. They also want to find planets located far from their stars, and out of the blinding starlight. NASA's infrared Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) missions, and its ultraviolet Galaxy Evolution Explorer, now led by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, have helped identify candidate young stars that may host planets meeting these criteria.

"We're looking for super-Jupiter planets located faraway from their star," said Vasisht. "As our technique develops, we hope to be able to acquire molecular compositions of smaller, and slightly older, gas planets."

Still lower-mass planets, down to the size of Saturn, will be targets for imaging studies by the James Webb Space Telescope.

"Rocky Earth-like planets are too small and close to their stars for the current technology, or even for James Webb to detect. The feat of cracking the chemical compositions of true Earth analogs will come from a future space mission such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder," said Charles Beichman, a co-author of the P1640 result and executive director of NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

Though the larger, gas planets are not hospitable to life, the current studies are teaching astronomers how the smaller, rocky ones form.

"The outer giant planets dictate the fate of rocky ones like Earth. Giant planets can migrate in toward a star, and in the process, tug the smaller, rocky planets around or even kick them out of the system. We're looking at hot Jupiters before they migrate in, and hope to understand more about how and when they might influence the destiny of the rocky, inner planets," said Vasisht.

NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute manages time allocation on the Keck telescope for NASA. JPL manages NASA's Exoplanet Exploration program office. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

A visualization from the American Museum of Natural History showing where the HR 8799 system is in relation to our solar system is online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDNAk0bwLrU .

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/QG7gpFtIIQY/130510192835.htm

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Kids With Autism Quick To Detect Motion

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Children with autism see simple movements twice as fast as other children their age, a new study finds.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Rochester were looking to test a common theory about autism which holds that overwhelming sensory stimulation inhibits other brain functions. The researchers figured they could check that by studying how kids with autism process moving images.

"One can think of autism as a brain impairment, but another way to view autism is as a condition where the balance between different brain processes is impaired," says Duje Tadin, a co-author of the study out this week in the Journal of Neuroscience. "That imbalance could lead to functional impairments, and it often does, but it can also result in enhancements."

Tadin and his colleagues presented 46 children ? 20 with autism and 26 without ? with short video clips of moving black and white vertical bars. The images appeared in three different sizes and all the kids, ranging in age from 8 to 17, had to do was indicate whether the bars were moving right or left.

The scientists ran the experiment twice ? once with high-contrast images and then again with low-contrast ones.

When the black bars were darker and easier to see, the researchers expected the autistic children to do better, figuring they'd be less inhibited by so-called spatial suppression, a mechanism that makes it harder for typical observers to perceive motion as the things they're looking at increase in size.

The autistic children did do a lot better with the higher contrast images than the control group, but not because they lacked spatial suppression, it turns out. As the image size increased, the autistic kids were slower at recognizing motion. But at each size, they were still twice as fast as the control kids.

Children with autism detect simple movement twice as quickly as their typically developing peers.

Duje Tadin, University of Rochester

"That was really surprising," says Jennifer Foss-Feig, another study author. "People have not found this enhanced motion perception before."

Even though the researchers' original hypothesis didn't hold up, they think their findings still fit into the broader causation theory.

"The thought is that sensory systems develop very early on and if you have differences or deficits in terms of the way your brain is responding to sensory input, that would have real cascading effects developmentally," Foss-Feig says. "So there could be higher order cognitive and social and behavioral deficits."

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/09/182717089/kids-with-autism-quick-to-detect-motion?ft=1&f=1007

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Social media and doctors | HealthWorks Collective

Should doctors undergo a formal social media training program? The answer from Mayo Clinic is ?yes.?

The healthcare system?s social media training program,??Social Media Residency," will?for the first time will be offered at another hospital. The program will be held at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City this June.

Although there have been many doctor advocates for social media, there are still limited social media training resources for doctors, especially for young doctors.

One can argue that doctors should use their common sense to guide their online presence. But as social media and digital technologies progress, the implications of these emerging channels are beyond their functions as communication platforms?innovators in healthcare have been exploring social media for other functions such as clinical recruitment, mobile medicine, hospital re-admission reduction and patient adherence. Some of these explorations have shown promising results and physicians may be able to utilize these new tools in a clinical setting soon.

Thus, training physicians on the use of social media is more than about telling them how to maintain a professional online profile when patients search their names; more important, the training should be about the future trends of the online world, and how physicians can bridge the knowledge in medicine and digital techniques to ultimately advance medicine and enhance healthcare delivery.

There are three reasons why a social media training program like ?Social Media Residency? is essential for tomorrow?s physicians.

Physicians will be a driving force in medical innovation ?

Physicians are the stakeholders in healthcare who directly engage patients and touch different segments of the healthcare system?from ordering tests, prescribing medications, checking medical record, coordinating with other specialists and even handling billing. Therefore, insights from physicians are unique and valuable for healthcare innovation.

As the healthcare system is shifting to a patient-centered model, non-medication intervention will play a more important role in patient management. Prevention, early diagnosis, better integration and improved patient communication can all contribute to driving outcomes. Many of these improvements can be driven by social media and digital technologies. As physicians work together to deliver cost-effective healthcare for patients, they not only need to understand how these emerging tools work but also use insights to identify opportunities to improve them.

Social media has redefined the relationship between physicians and patients

With free and easy access to medical information, patients are much more educated today. According to a study published on the Journal of Health Communication, 70 percent of surveyed patients planned to ask their doctor questions about the information they found, and 40 percent had printed the information to take to the appointment. ?Meanwhile, patients are also using online channels and mobile tools to counsel peers, share experience, track progression of their condition and log side effects of treatments. In some disease state with extremely active patient advocates (e.g., diabetes, cancer, rare diseases), patients are powerful enough to influence policy making and business decisions made by pharmaceutical companies.

Physicians who play a leading role in healthcare delivery cannot react to the trend by ignoring it. To manage the new physician-patient relationship properly requires knowledge in social media and digital?where patients are discussing the condition, what websites contain the most reputable medical content, what mobile apps might add value to disease management for patients and what a proper way would be to convince patients about diagnosis or treatment when it is different from what they found online.

The bottom line is about adding value in healthcare delivery

The essence of patient-centered healthcare is about adding value. As Michael Porter discussed in his famous paper What Is Value in Health Care back in 2010, achieving high value for patients must become the overarching goal of healthcare delivery and value should define the framework for performance improvement in healthcare. Thus, the reason why we need to train physicians on social media should also be about adding value.

Although researchers and the industry are still figuring out ways to measure the value of social media in a clinical setting, some indirect or qualitative findings illustrate social media can enhance value in healthcare.

For example, many studies have shown social connections can be beneficial for mental health. Peer counseling and support groups?things patients do in social media each day?foster such connections and help patients to better cope with their conditions. When I was doing research for a client in ALS drug development, I encountered this comment: ?I desperately needed to adjust my ?new life? to this ?new reality.? Social media has helped with that adjustment by empowering me and other patients.? ?This is just one of many revealing patient comments that I have seen in the last couple of years.

Efforts to drive the value of social media in healthcare have also been made by businesses. Forbes reported a company called Healtheo360 has recently launched a patient study designed to measure the advantages of Virtual Social Therapy, a social media-based service developed by the company, in patients with diabetes.

Mayo Clinic?s ?Social Media Residency? program indicates leading healthcare organizations have realized the necessity to incorporate social media into the formal training channel and started to experiment emerging tools in a clinical setting. It is a great starting point, but more still need to be explored from multiple perspectives before physicians can ultimately utilize social media to deliver measurable, meaningful and consistent outcomes.

(image:?social media & physicians /?shutterstock)

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Authored by:

steven shie

Working at Chamberlain Healthcare Public Relations as a digital media strategist, my goal is to?create a culture of connection among patients, physicians, pharmaceutical companies and policymakers, by providing innovative and cost-effective solutions that drive smarter decision-making and advance medicine.I have a BA in Journalism from Peking University and a Master?s degree in ...

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Source: http://healthworkscollective.com/stevenshie/100191/why-social-media-residency-essential-tomorrow-s-physicians

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