It sounds simple enough: If you’re sick, you make an appointment with a doctor, and if it’s an emergency, you head to the nearest hospital. But for more than a billion people around the world, it’s a real challenge — because they live too far from a medical facility. Where Raj Panjabi’s nonprofit, Last Mile […]
“Women’s health is an equal rights issue as important as equal pay.” When Paula Johnson uttered this sentence on the TEDWomen 2013 stage, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. “At that moment, it said to me they got it,” she says. Johnson has been working for decades to raise awareness about how diseases behave differently […]
For some of us, it’s easy to choose to be healthy — to eat well, to exercise, to live in a part of town with trees and parks. But for many more of us, it isn’t easy, and we don’t have that choice. We live in unsafe neighborhoods. Nutritious food is hard to buy. We don’t have strong families to help us through life’s challenges. A guest essay on building a culture of health.
This week, Apple turned the iPhone into a medical research tool with the launch of ResearchKit. This open-source framework, described in the video above, lets a medical researcher set up a project to gather anonymous patient data on diseases like asthma, breast cancer and diabetes. Using their own smartphones, patients who join a project can […]
In the small village of Roka in western Cambodia, 272 people have tested positive for HIV since the end of 2014. Among those diagnosed: an 82-year-old celibate Buddhist monk, several babies and 19 members of the same family. This tragic outbreak has been traced to a source: Yem Chrin, a popular medical practitioner who operated […]
Around 39 million people in the world are affected by blindness — 80% of which could be avoided if people had timely access to diagnosis and proper treatment. The problem is that in many developing countries, most eye care providers are in cities, while the majority of patients live in hard-to-reach rural areas. To bridge this gap, London-based opthalmologist Andrew Bastawrous created Peek — an app […]
BRCK is best described as a “backup generator for the internet.” When it was announced, the idea of a rugged, rechargeable, mobile wifi device captured imaginations as a good way to bring robust connectivity to people in places with spotty infrastructure – particularly in developing countries. The device is the brainchild of Nairobi-based technology company Ushahidi, and was created partly out of […]
Three years ago, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana suffered a rare brain stem stroke that left him fully conscious, yet his entire body paralyzed. It’s a condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” Last month, TED Fellow Kitra Cahana spoke of her father’s experience at TEDMED (watch her talk, “My father, locked in his body but soaring free”), revealing […]
Ten years ago, epidemiologist Chikwe Ihekweazu helped fight an outbreak in South Sudan. This TED Fellow now runs the health consultancy EpiAFRIC, writes about public health issues in his native Nigeria, and is soon to start a four-week rotation on the ground fighting the Ebola epidemic. So as the outbreak continues, he sat down for […]
Prosthetics as sculpture, the maternal benefits of breast milk, Cuba’s radical approach to free medical education. These are just a few of the subjects tackled at TEDMED 2014: Unlocking Imagination, hosted last week simultaneously in San Francisco and Washington, DC, with a stage program directed by TED Fellow, physician, novelist and activist Nassim Assefi. On two stages […]
Global health expert Alanna Shaikh gave an unexpected and moving talk at TEDGlobal 2012, called “How I’m preparing to get Alzheimer’s.” In it, she told the story of her father’s struggle with the disease, and outlined some strategies she’d devised in case dementia struck her later in life, too. The TED Blog was curious: How is her experiment […]
Wendy Chung of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative says that she is constantly asked the same question by parents: “Why does my child have autism?” It’s a question that plagues them whether their child has a severe form of autism, to the point of being non-verbal, or a mild one. “Autism isn’t a single condition. It’s […]
The ancient Egyptians went to great pains to preserve the body for the afterlife. But there was one part of the body they didn’t bother with: the brain. Instead, they mashed it up, pulled it out of the nose and discarded it. Rob Knight wonders: Is there a part of our bodies that has just as […]
Today is World Rare Disease Day – an event launched in 2008 to galvanize public awareness and research momentum for rare diseases. In the United States, a disease is considered rare if it affects fewer than 200,000 people. Yet there are more than 7,000 known rare diseases. This ratio means that there’s little funding for […]
Growing up in the UK and coming of age in Pakistan, TEDIndia Fellow Asher Hasan observed a vast discrepancy: those with and without access to basic healthcare, and the devastating social consequences of this disparity. He tells TED Blog the story of how he witnessed a single health disaster ruin the hopes of his childhood […]
My needle phobia goes back to when I was 5 years old. I was at the doctor’s office with my younger sister, Lizz, when our doctor had a brilliant idea: “Why don’t we give Kate her shot first so Lizz can see how easy it is?” I was fine being asked to play the part […]