A note last week to the BIDMC staff. Readers of this blog can join in, too!
To: BIDMC CommunityFrom:Eric Buehrens, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice PresidentLisa Zankman, Senior Vice President, Human ResourcesSubject: New Team Fund Raising for Haiti Relief
Earlier this week, our Development staff presented a check for $33,616 to Partners in Health for [...]

On a very cold day, ice takes on unusual forms at the Plum Island beach near Newburyport, MA. Meanwhile, a resting seal looks on.

Image via Wikipedia
We might never really know for sure in my lifetime. I take them because I think my diet isn’t diverse enough.
In any event, here’s an interesting read published by the Washington Post, Evidence is thin that multivitamins are beneficial, but they seem benign. 
Learn more about vitamins:
- in this FDA video, Fortify Your [...]

Practicing Medicine in the Web 2.0 Era
View more presentations from Bertalan Mesko.

Our Medical Executive Committee recently received a report from our Critical Care Committee. I cannot be more proud of our staff and the progress they have made to reduce harm and improve quality of care in our ICUs. I include two of the charts.
Let me translate the implications of the reduction in Ventilator [...]

“Which came first, the chicken or the dinosaur egg? That one’s a cinch. Less obvious is the riddle of kinship. Most scientists think birds evolved from dinosaurs about 150 million years ago. But a sparse fossil record has provided ammunition to those who insist that birds arose independently. A stunning new fossil makes that idea [...]

Bill Shore is founder of Share our Strength. He wrote this dispatch after a mission to Haiti with Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland. They flew down in the company plane with relief supplies. Then, make sure you read the post just below, too, which confirms Bill’s point about heartbreak and heroes.
Haiti’s general [...]

Here is an email from Dr. Selwyn O. Rogers, Jr, Division Chief, Trauma, Burn, and Surgical Critical Care at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to our chief of surgery and me:
Dear President Levy and Dr. Hurst,
As part of a multidisciplinary multihospital team, I had the honor and privilege to work alongside one of BIDMC’s outstanding nursing [...]

“In sharp contrast with template-dependent replication dynamics, we demonstrate here that replication of compositional information is so inaccurate that fitter compositional genomes cannot be maintained by selection and, therefore, the system lacks evolvability (i.e., it cannot substantially depart from the asymptotic steady-state solution already built-in in the dynamical equations). ” Paper @ PNAS.

There’s a lot here. I recommend you view this or download the FDA PDF, CDRH FY 2010 Strategic Priorities.
Here’s what you’ll find:
Executive Summary
Priority 1. Fully Implement a Total Product Life Cycle Approach
Strategy 1.1. Enhance and Integrate Premarket, Postmarket, and Compliance Information and Functions
Strategy 1.2. Improve Guidance and Regulation Development
Strategy 1.3. Develop a Cross-Center [...]