“Fewer numbers, more life experiences”

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“I’ve been putting in the effort not to be absorbed by things that don’t improve my daily happiness.”

Kate’s attitude may not make any sense to the self-absorbed who genuinely believe in “self-knowledge through numbers”, as the folks in the Quantified Self movement do.

But after spending two years tracking every single daily calorie and another year weighing herself every day, the author of This Is Not A Diet, It’s my Life wrote in her blog post called Life After Numbers:

“It’s no secret I have changed my mind about some things.  I have moved away from numbers and data and onto a more holistic, experience-based approach.  Continue reading

Can self-tracking drive you crazy?

Information is power! 

You can’t control what you can’t measure!

Data = beautiful!

Such are the battle cries of the empowered self-tracker.

Far behind, bringing up the rear of the limping battalion in our technology-as-saviour ranks are many Real Live Patients and their physicians daring to pose a question that I like to ask of the devotees of the Quantified Self movement:

“But what are you actually going to DO with all your data once you have collected it all?”    Continue reading

Dr. Harriet Hall on the rise of the anti-scientific left

Guest post by Dr. Harriet Hall, Science-Based Medicine

In their book Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell point out how even political progressives can hold opinions that are not based on physical reality, claiming that their beliefs are based on science – even when they are notContinue reading

Want a safer O.R? Shut the !@#& up!

Every so often, a wee media firestorm erupts over surprising issues. Consider surgeons, for example, who sing in the operating room. The latest eruption happened locally with the dismissal of an official complaint from a Canadian patient offended by his eye surgeon’s vocals in the O.R.

According to a report of the hearing published in The Vancouver Sun, the unnamed patient filed a complaint to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia after the eye surgery in May, 2011. The patient (awake for his entire procedure) could hear everything. He not only objected to his surgeon’s singing during the operation, but also the fact that he was casually chatting with others in the O.R. about, for example, his plans to take home the hospital’s linens “so he could wash his car with them.”   Continue reading