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Effective use of social media in health care can be elusive.  It is one thing to say 'Be our friend on Facebook' or 'Follow us on Twitter', but quite another to foster a community.  As Steve Smith, CEO of AAHPM Tweeted tonight:

  ssmithaahpm Martha Twaddle spoke to the AAHPM staff this week about "finding her tribe" in palliative care; this feels like the Twitter equivalent! #hpm -8:50 PM Jul 14th, 2010

The Twitter equivalent Steve is referring to is the first Twitterchat for Hospice and Palliative Medicine which took place Wednesday night.  I never announced it on the blog, but instead Tuesday night sent out a tweet announcing the event less than 24 hours away:

ctsinclair Official Announcement of the first ever Hospice and Palliative Medicine TweetChat Wed at 8p CST use hashtag #hpm
11:11 PM Jul 13th via web

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We are glad to have you here at Pallimed if you have come to us from the recent Mashable post on 5 Ways Social Media Promote Good Health.  (For our regular Pallimed readers, Mashable is the top site for all things social media and the #3 ranked blog by Technorati.)

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Ahhhh....we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief now that the World Cup is over.  The soccer football lovers are no longer anxious and missing work watching games at 930am. The soccer haters can be happy they no longer have to hear about Ronaldinho, Xavi, Bafana Bafana, Vuvuzela, pitches, kits, Jabulani balls and other such inanity. And everyone else can just let out a big sigh, because it helps you feel better and surely  the World Cup is stressing you out.

But the thing I can't get over is the story of the octopus in Germany who 'predicted' the correct winner of 7 games featuring Germany and the final between Spain and the Netherlands.  He has been called Paul the Psychic Octopus but since he really can't read people's minds (like a psychic), most reputable news outlets switched to the somewhat more accurate 'prognosticating' octopus.

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Palliative Care Grand Rounds was posted last week at Geripal by Eric Widera.  He did a great job making a game out of it using 3 seemingly random things mentioned in each post as the heading for each submission.  Head over to the always thought provoking Geripal and get the best of the hospice and palliative care blogosphere.

As always go comment on the blogs you read to keep encouraging good content!

And if you want to go one better you can email palliative care grand rounds to your teams, post it to your Facebook page and share great palliative care writing.

See past postings of Palliative Care Grand Rounds at the PCGR blog.

Photo credit: (Flickr user catcubed)

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American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJoRaCCM!) has published a randomized trial of two methods of prognostic disclosure about critically ill patients.  The exclamation points represent artifacts of my slack-jawed shock when I read the article's title:  a controlled trial evaluating how we should talk with patients is a very rare thing.  Although while after reading the trial, my reaction is more of a (!) - more questions than answers dammit! - why does it always have to be this way! - one wasn't of course expecting big answers, and the trial highlights some important questions. 

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This is a reminder that the deadline for submissions for the Educational Exchange at AAHPM 2011 is next week - July 16.  See my prior post.  It's a really good thing.  Link to more information is here.

And a few editorials/commentaries recently that I loved, or didn't love, but I thought were worth mentioning, acknowledging that I probably won't be blogging about them in any depth.

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[ATTENTION: If you are apathetic or antagonistic towards social media of if I (or someone else) have ever turned you off with all this social media talk, I beg you to please read this one blog post if you care an ounce about hospice and palliative medicine.]

[DISCLAIMER: Yes I am giving a webinar in a July 21st with CAPC on social media in palliative care, and yes I would encourage you and your team/agency to sign up. And I hope this post tells you why you should do that.]

Now that we have that stuff out of the way, I will ask you one simple question to show you why you should be part of a palliative care movement with social media.

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In reviewing the hospice and palliative medicine (HPM) fellowship lecture series for our upcoming academic year, Karin (the fellowship director) and I (hospice site director) talked a bit about self-care as part of a well-rounded curriculum.  We have 6 hours of the nearly 100 hours of lecture/small group dedicated to self-care sessions with the faculty, fellows, and community professionals who attend the lectures.  It may seem like a small percentage but when compared to other specialties this is a lot of time dedicated solely to avoiding burnout beyond the normal de-briefings that occur at the point of care during the clinical week.

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Hi. I'm back from my interstate-moving hiatus, and I thought I'd get right back into the loving of perplexing, data-challenged articles which must (must!) tell us something about what we do to/say to our patients.  They must, right, or why else would I be blogging about them?  This is the sort of radical new thinking that these northern latitudes are inspiring in me.


Neurology has two articles about the long-term prognosis, and the phenomenon of late-recovery, for patients with severe brain injuries (patients in the vegetative state - VS - and the minimally conscious state - MCS).

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'There's a statue of an ice cream, with a cherry on a spoon, in the park Dad!'  Such is the nature of memory, inventing details of the reality that you wish existed, even if it doesn't.  This is my 4 year old son's description of seeing Claes Oldenburg's Spoonbridge & Cherry piece at the Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis.  There's no ice cream, but it's still present.

As I've alluded to on the blog before, my sort-of hiatus from Pallimed has been due to me packing up my family and moving to Minneapolis, where I'm now working as