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 […]
In 2007, Mayor Mick Cornett put Oklahoma City on a diet, after the city made a less-than-flattering appearance on a list of the most obese cities in the United States. In today’s talk, Cornett shares the aha moments that led him to create This City Is Going on a Diet, a somewhat unusual mayoral initiative. […]
David Blaine, the magician, illusionist and endurance artist, is back on prime time TV tonight with the special, David Blaine: Real or Magic. Traveling around the world, the TED speaker (watch his talk, “How I held my breath for 17 minutes“) performs magic and elicits astonished reactions from people on the street — as well as from […]
Extreme swimmer Diana Nyad has completed her longest swim yet … at the age of 64. Over the weekend, Nyad attempted the swim from Havana, Cuba, to the coast of Florida for the fifth time, and this time finished the ambitious 110-mile swim. The swim took Nyad a total of 53 hours — and made […]
In today’s talk, Eli Beer shares an incredible story of how he, as a frustrated 17-year-old ambulance volunteer, was sick of sitting in traffic and getting to patients too late to save them. And so he organized a group of 15 fellow EMTs to respond to calls in their neighborhood, on foot if needed, and […]
In today’s talk, Eli Beer explains how United Hatzalah, his organization of ambucycle-riding volunteer emergency medical responders, has shaved critical minutes off of the average emergency response time — first in Jerusalem, then throughout Israel, and now in several countries around the world. The core mission of United Hatzalah (which is Hebrew for “rescue”) is […]
Surgeon Peter Attia sees a disconcerting paradox at work when it comes to our health: while people are talking about eating healthily and exercising perhaps more than ever, we’re seeing no reduction in the rates of obesity and diabetes. As it stands, more than 8% of Americans are diabetic and an additional 26% are pre-diabetic […]
This morning’s TED Talk from Andrew Solomon asks a deep question about parents and children. Inspired by his own upbringing, Solomon wondered how parents form bonds with extraordinary children — or, in his words, when the “vertical culture” passed from parent to child is different from the “horizontal culture” of the child’s own self-identity. As […]
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 […]
Miguel Nicolelis begins today’s talk by showing you what a brainstorm looks and sounds like. “This is 100 brain cells firing,” says Nicolelis. “Everything that defines what human nature is comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for […]
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 […]
Can music be a medical instrument? In a moving talk from TEDMed, Robert Gupta reveals that it certainly can be. He gives as an example the work of neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug, one of the pioneers of melodic intonation therapy. Schlaug noticed that, while stroke victims with aphasia could not utter a sentence, they could still […]
[ted id=1575] As a doctor, Ben Goldacre likes to have all the available facts about a prescription drug before he even thinks about prescribing it. However, when it comes to medicines, it’s nearly impossible to find all the existing data. As Goldacre described in this impassioned talk given at TEDMed 2012, there is a bias […]
[ted id=1336] This past Monday, swimmer Diana Nyad made her fourth attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. Though this attempt ended when weather and jellyfish conditions took a turn for the worse, we can look back at her talk from TEDMED 2011 to understand how she — and all of us — found “grace in […]
The word ‘microbe’ sounds scary — we associate them with the flu, ebola, flesh-eating disease, you name it. But microbiologist Dr. Jonathan Eisen has given an illuminating TEDTalk that will make you put down the hand sanitizer. As Eisen explains, “We are covered in a cloud of microbes and these microbes actually do us good […]