Search Results for: Medicine

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.

Can Technology End Poverty?

Longreads Pick

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.

Source: Boston Review
Published: Nov 20, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,340 words)

Dr. Gasol? Pau’s love outside basketball

Longreads Pick

He focused on his studies, but as the years passed, he grew to 6-feet-nothing and then 6-foot-something. The sport of basketball had always been in the equation, but now that he was pushing 7 feet, now that he towered over most everyone in Barcelona, he would have a decision to make soon. He tried balancing both basketball and medicine at first — and, the truth is, he wasn’t the better for it. By day, he was an 18-year-old, first-year med student at the University of Barcelona; by night, he was a pivot man on the FC Barcelona club team.

Author: Tom Friend
Source: ESPN
Published: Aug 6, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,289 words)

Letting Go

Longreads Pick

What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 2, 2010
Length: 47 minutes (11,989 words)

Making Health Care Better

Longreads Pick

When I have asked them whether they have any hope that medicine will change, they have tended to say yes. When I have asked them whether anybody has already begun to succeed, they have tended to mention the same name: Brent James.

Published: Nov 3, 2009
Length: 34 minutes (8,636 words)