Stories for "medicine"
Eric Dishman is used to thinking about how technology can transform the world of health care. As an Intel Fellow and general manager of the company’s Health Strategy & Solutions Group, his job is all about finding innovative new approaches to healthcare. And he’s no stranger to talking about them. At TEDMED 2009, in the […]
At TEDMED 2012, Ben Goldacre shared a startling reality: that doctors are not able to read all the studies conducted on a pharmaceutical before prescribing it to their patients. This is because of a bias in medical research toward positive results – while one study confirming a drug’s effectiveness may be published, the results of […]
When you pop a pill, do you know how it works? Most modern drugs target specific molecules, interacting with disease at the molecular level. But while we know the molecular causes of roughly 4,000 diseases, a very slim 6 percent of those diseases have a safe and effective drug to treat them. Why? Because of […]
Today’s talk, “Francis Collins: We need better drugs—now,” comes from TEDMED—our partner conference which gives doctors, surgeons, healthcare experts, medical researchers and people with a passion for health a place to share ideas worth spreading. Both TED and TEDMED were started by Richard Saul Wurman, and while TEDMED is now independently organized by Jay Walker […]
Eleanor Longden did well at school, and gleefully entered student life at university in England. By all appearances, she was a happy, typical student … but it wasn’t true. Underneath it all, Longden was “fundamentally frightened,” and while she did a good job of concealing her fear, she was about to come undone. She […]
From ordering movie tickets to booking a dentist appointment, mobile and web apps have made the tasks of daily life easier. But there are some things that an app can’t do. Standing in line at the pharmacy is one of them. In today’s talk, Lee Cronin asks: “Could we make a really cool universal chemistry […]
At TEDMED 2010, opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick told the story of a revolutionary, life-changing surgery — a double lung transplant. While a doctor had warned her that she would never sing again, she revealed what it felt like to get her voice back. “We need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams,” she […]
Regardless of what you might see on shows like Grey’s Anatomy, teaching surgery is very difficult. This is a fact that Dr. Steven Schwaitzberg stresses in today’s talk. Schwaitzberg, who spoke at TEDxBeaconStreet in November, is a pioneer in the field of minimally invasive surgery, which is less painful for patients and allows them to […]
When Celine, a housewife in West Cameroon, was diagnosed with HIV six years ago, she signed up to be part of a clinical trial that gave her the antiretroviral drugs she needed, for free. However, when doctor and clinical researcher Boghuma Kabisen Titanji met Celine five years later, she had gone without antiretrovirals for a […]
Making this TED-Ed video required (a) a lot of knitting and (b) a ton of boxes of Nerds. When it came time to animate the lesson “How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?” from educator George Zaidan, our TED-Ed animators had a crazy idea for how to make cell division come alive — […]
At TEDGlobal 2012, Max Little (watch his TED Talk) asked the public to contribute voice samples to the Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, a data-gathering project that aims to help develop a way to diagnose the neurological disease quickly, non-invasively and in its early stages. If it succeeds, it could change the quality of care for Parkinson’s […]
The Wright Brothers’ flying machine took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. Credited as the first to successfully fly an airplane, the Wright Brothers were one of several in the early aviation game who were filing patents for their innovations and suing competitors who stepped on their turf. However, the US […]
TED Fellow Nina Tandon has engineered human heart tissue in the lab — that actually beats. Though it may sound like a plot from a science fiction universe, someday, surgeons could use this tissue in the same way that mechanics use spare parts in cars. But there is another potential use for this lab-created tissue […]
In his recent TEDTalk, “What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe,” Ben Goldacre sounded a warning about the vast numbers of pharmaceutical studies that go unpublished. “Positive findings are about twice as likely to be published as negative findings,” said Goldacre, noting that this is a big problem because it means doctors are […]
In the late 1800s, Cuban physician Carlos Finlay had a theory that yellow fever was spread by mosquitos — rather than by dirty clothing, as was the belief of the day. To test his theory, he asked living, breathing human beings to be voluntarily infected with the disease. It was devastating, potentially fatal work. And […]
How technology can empower patients, including 4 diagnostic tools for your iPhone
