jjablkowski's blog

A recent news release from the Rochester Institute of Technology describes a revolutionary product to monitor patients with congestive heart failure in the comfort of their home. Researchers developed toilet seat–based technology to measures biometric data during, well, what we do while sitting on a toilet.

DRR’s March editorial touched me greatly [BCMJ 2019;61:61]. It was about his dementia-touched father’s journey and walking with him on that journey “with grace, love, and laughter.”

Recently I came upon a complex article about the alarmingly low sperm counts and sperm concentrations of some of the 43 000 men measured between 1971 and 2013.[1] Using various statistical methods, the data were compiled from over 750 abstracts and close to 2500 articles published over 42 years. Laboratory results from men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia (called the Western group) were compared and contrasted with results from men from South America, Asia, and Africa.

Reading about the Cleveland Clinic’s predictions of medical innovations for 2019 got me thinking about the medical ideas and practices from the past 100 years that did not turn out well.