Good engineering is not good medicine

Gynaecological examinations. Good not bad medicine.

Good Medicine

E arlier this year, I ran into a good friend at an international meeting. I hadn't seen him for quite a while, so I was surprised to see how he had appeared to age. He was walking slowly and looked frail and tired. He spoke slowly and softly, and while his mind was still " with it, " he appeared to be struggling to keep up with the events and issues surrounding him. I wanted to ask him if every...

Good Medicine and Good Healthcare Demand Good Information (Systems).

The demand for evidence-based health informatics and benchmarking of 'good' information systems in health care gives an opportunity to continue reporting on recent papers in the German journal GMS Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (MIBE) here. The publications in focus deal with a comparison of benchmarking initiatives in German-speaking countries, use of communication standards in...

Good and not so good medical ethics.

In this paper, I provide a brief sketch of the purposes that medical ethics serves and what makes for good medical ethics. Medical ethics can guide clinical practice and biomedical research, contribute to the education of clinicians, advance thinking in the field, and direct healthcare policy. Although these are distinct activities, they are alike in several critical respects. Good medical ethi...

Assertion: Prefetching With GET is Not Good

The benefits of Web cache prefetching are well understood, and so prefetching has been implemented in a number of commercial products. This paper argues that the current support for prefetching in HTTP/1.1 is insufficient because prefetching with GET is not good. Existing prefetching implementations can cause problems with undesirable side-effects and server abuse, and the potential for these p...