Intentional or not, the iPad creates opportunities for people with Autism to thrive! After reading the article, iHelp for Autism, by Ashley Harrell you have wonder how this is going change what we know and understand about Autism. Can devices like the iPad change treatment for Autism? What can we learn from the interactions people with Autism have with the iPad? Can we use it to track and monitor behaviors of those using it and how their disease regresses or progress? There are so many exciting things to think about when new technology breaks through to patients.

Here is a excerpt from her article:

Leo is Rosa’s 9-year-old son, and when people ask her about him, she is mindful to explain him in a way that will set appropriate expectations. He is a boy with intense autism, she says. He is not conversational, he learns very slowly, and he has been prone to violent outbursts. He is essentially a triple-sized toddler. Leo had shown interest in the iPod Touch, but its 3.5-inch screen was difficult for his fingers to navigate.

For all those reasons, Rosa had no expectations when she handed her son the iPad — a half-inch-thick, touch-screen tablet computer three times the size of its smaller cousin, the iPod. Though scrolling through the icons is easy for most users, the device was not created with special-needs consumers in mind.

So when Leo took it in his small hands as if it were an old friend, and, with almost no training, whizzed through its apps like a technology virtuoso,his mother gasped in amazement. After he began spending 30 minutes at a time on apps designed to teach spelling, counting, drawing, making puzzles, remembering pictures, and more, she sat down at her own computer.

“With the iPad, Leo electrifies the air around him with independence and daily new skills,” Rosa typed into an entry for BlogHer, a blogging network of women for which she edits and writes. Her blog was one of the first to bring widespread public attention to what one expert has
called “a quiet revolution” for the autism community.

Make sure you read the whole article in SFweekly!

According to the Hippocratic Oath all Medical Students have taken we cannot perform such a procedure. This sparks an interesting ethical discussion. The original youtube video and an interview on Headline News are here take a look. Curious to hear all your opinions!

I have been following Dr. Wes for sometime now, I really enjoy his perspective and wanted to repost a blog he wrote today. None of the words from below are my own!

It seems doctors can never do enough. Not only must we diagnose and treat medical illness, this morning in the Chicago Tribune we learn from a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine that used actors posing as patients that seventy-eight percent of doctors make medical errors because we obtain no “contextual history” (another word for “social history?”) and adjust our treatment strategies accordingly:

“A lot of doctors are going to say, ‘God almighty, it’s not enough to be a brilliant clinician? You’re telling me I’ve got to be a financial counselor or social worker on top of that or I’m doing something wrong? Give me a break!’” said John Banja, a medical errors expert at Emory University.

Of course, the lack of social history (or many other aspects of the patient’s history) is the predictable consequence of shortened office visits, increased administrative burdens, shift-style medical care, and the push to see more patients in less time. It’s hard to cover all the bases in seven minutes.

One thing I’m sure of, however, is a doctor’s time with a patient is finite. For every click on a computerized quality check-box, we’re stealing from the face-to-face time with the patient. Instead of appreciating this fact, our governmental overlords have consistently swollen the number of “quality measures” from 74 in 2007, 119 in 2008, 153 in 2009, to a whopping 179 in 2010. I figure at this rate, using linear regression, we will have about 319 measures by 2014, the same year another 30 million uninsured will be joining our new health care system.

And the government will be proud we’re providing such “quality care.”

Click. Click. Click.

Never mind these “quality” clicks might just be doing more harm than good.

-Wes