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Healthcare “Onstage” at Disney’s Celebration Health
I recently had a chance to visit Celebration, FL, a town initially created by the Walt Disney company as an attempt to realize Walt Disney’s original dream of EPCOT, or the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. EPCOT was Disney’s idea of a perfect community – no crime, no unemployment, and every family with 2.3 above average children. That perfect community was created to some extent at Disney’s EPCOT theme park, but never became what Walt really intended – perhaps because his ideal image was a little too, well, Disney. However, long after Walt’s death a somewhat more realistic, if still a little Truman Show, version of EPCOT came to fruition – Celebration.
Celebration is a fascinating place. In some ways it is bizarre – assuming that one has never seen a town where every lawn is mowed on the same day, there is not a speck of flaking paint, the shrubbery is all perfectly trimmed, and everything is 50% more expensive than it should be. But in other ways, it is an amazing accomplishment – a community truly in the image of the Disney idea. A community Onstage. Particularly at its hospital.
Why doctors have to pay attention the business of medicine.
Traditional Healers, External Fetal Monitoring, and the NICHD
Continuous fetal heart rate monitoring is at its core an almost laughable idea. We are checking a single vital sign and using that vital sign to extrapolate a host of ideas and meanings. OBs that have read strips for years can make some sense of them, but would we give so much meaning to any other single vital sign? Would we do it with an adult? Of course not, but there are people who do. In fact, there are entire countries where this is a major methodology for determining the etiology of illnesses.
But the people doing this are not physicians – they are the healers of various cultures. Throughout the world there are practitioners who claim to divinate illness through feeling a person’s pulse for several minutes. This is particularly prominent in Asia. They describe using the rate, strength, and character of the pulse to make all manner of determinations. This practice is fairly laughable to physicians, as it seems crazy to get so much meaning from feeling someone’s pulse.
But is this so much different than EFM? In fact its quite similar. Given that traditional healers are probably hit and miss with their diagnoses, its no surprise that EFM technology is similarly lacking.
Academic OB/GYN Podcast Episode 24 – The Preemie Primer and Reproductive Infectious Disease Part 2
In this episode we talk to Dr Jennifer Gunter about her new book “The Preemie Primer”. I also pick Dr Gunter’s brain about some difficult problems in reproductive infectious disease. 
Academic OB/GYN Podcast Episode 24 – The Preemie Primer and Reproductive Infectious Disease Part 2
Academic OB/GYN 