This guest post by Dr. Jessie Gruman was originally published on the Center for Advancing Health’s Prepared Patient blog in February. CFAH was founded by Jessie, who is the author of AfterShock, a book that helps patients navigate their way through the health care system following a serious or life-threatening diagnosis.
As a patient, writer and respected advocate, she sends this open letter to the techmeisters of Silicon Valley.
I hope they’re paying attention.
◊ ◊ ◊ Continue reading
Pity the poor marketer. As reported in Forbes earlier this year, a lot of us simply do not trust advertising. For example, a study called ‘Does It Really Ad Up’ from Lab 42, a Chicago-based research firm, revealed:
And that pervasive sense of mistrust (except for those guys watching beauty ads) helps to explain why industry has jumped all over the advertising concept called “branded content”. Continue reading
I am clueless about many things. As in the definition: “Lacking understanding or knowledge.” As in the sentence: “I have no clue!” As in the 20+ years I spent living with a research scientist and enduring mind-numbingly torturous dinner conversations on zinc and copper sediment in the Fraser River estuary.
That kind of clueless.
Oh, sure, there are some things about which I do have a clue, as is true with even the most profoundly clueless among us. For instance, with decades of experience working in public relations behind me, I know quite a bit about organizing news conferences, writing speeches, doing media interviews, or whipping up communications plans. And as a Mayo Clinic-trained survivor of a widow maker heart attack, I know a wee bit about cardiology in general, and quite a bit more about my particular obsession: women’s heart disease. As such, I do have a clue about what it’s like to live with a chronic and progressive illness.
So I can’t help but notice that the difference between me and a surprising number of other people out there seems to be that I am exquisitely aware of both what I do have a clue about, and what I have no clue whatsoever about on any given subject. So I usually try to keep my mouth shut as much as possible whenever encountering the latter.
The same cannot be said, alas, of some tech-types working in the digital health field of self-tracking – and here’s why I dare to make that observation. 
Continue reading
There’s a pervasive haze of “If you build it, they will come!” in tech circles these days. Technology, as Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improving life – but only if we keep “solutionism” in check.
The author of To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism describes the ideology of solutionism as being essential to helping Silicon Valley maintain its image. For example: Continue reading
