Jay Parkinson + MD + MPH = a doctor in NYC

I’m teaching a class at the Skillshare HQ on May 29th...

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:42:21 -0400

I’m teaching a class at the Skillshare HQ on May 29th called The Business of Health. You all should come. It’s going to be interesting, to say the least! And, it’s through one of my favorite startups ever, Skillshare.

Healthy food isn’t necessarily more expensive than junk food,...

Thu, 17 May 2012 08:54:26 -0400

Healthy food isn’t necessarily more expensive than junk food, according to a new government report.

Bittman was all over this months ago and I certainly agree.

via the WSJ

To the greatest woman in the world, Happy Mother’s Day,...

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:04:33 -0400

To the greatest woman in the world, Happy Mother’s Day, ma!

I’m in North Carolina tonight speaking at a conference. I...

Tue, 08 May 2012 22:06:06 -0400

I’m in North Carolina tonight speaking at a conference. I hear that today, NC passed the amendment to ban gay marriage. It just makes me happy I live in a place that believes in equality and has evolved past institutional and political hatred toward gays. Because if you ask me, NYC is its own entity. We exist somewhere between America and the best country in the world— and it’s called NYC.

Chart via The Guardian

Most assuredly one of the coolest places I’ve ever spoken—...

Tue, 08 May 2012 19:34:53 -0400

Most assuredly one of the coolest places I’ve ever spoken— amongst 30 classic Porsches here in Durham, NC. One of which being the 17th Porsche ever made. Hand hammered aluminum. Pure beauty.

I absolutely love bike shares in cities. If you haven’t...

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:54:00 -0400

I absolutely love bike shares in cities. If you haven’t been to London or Paris to see them absolutely working and creating a whole new layer of healthy transportation within a city’s infrastructure, well, you’re missing out. It’s a beautiful thing to see. And it puts a city on the right path toward legitimizing cycling as an accepted and safe means of transport. As we all know, it is imperative that we get out of our cars and get off our asses and use our own energy to move us around.

I’m happy to hear that NYC had a major breakthrough today:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Citi CEO Vikram Pandit today announced that Citi will be the title sponsor for New York City’s new bike share program, “Citi Bike.” The $41 million agreement will allow the nation’s largest public bike share system to be provided at a low cost to users and at no cost to taxpayers. The program will provide a new, affordable, 24/7 transportation option for New Yorkers and will launch in July 2012 in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. As part of the sponsorship agreement, Citi Bike branding will be displayed on the system’s 10,000 bikes and 600 bike docking stations.

Wonderful stuff.

The photo is my bike this weekend in Prospect Park. So lovely…

RIP Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys: Beastie Boys member Adam...

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:13:00 -0400

RIP Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys:

Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch, also known as MCA, died Friday after a long battle with salivary gland cancer, according to multiple reports. He was 47 years old.

Yauch announced in 2009 that he had been diagnosed and was being treated for cancer of the parotid glands and lymph nodes. There are three major pairs of salivary glands – sublingual, submandibular and parotid, the biggest of the glands.

According to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, salivary gland cancer is very rare, only affecting two out of 100,000 adults each year in the U.S.

“Most of the salivary gland tumors that people get are benign tumors, but rarely they can become malignant,” Dr. Eric Genden, the chief of head and neck surgery at Mount Sanai Hospital in New York City, told Foxnews.com. “And [Yauch] is a particularly rare case because this guy was so young.”

While the causes of this kind of cancer remain unknown, suspected risk factors include old age, receiving radiation therapy to the head or neck and being exposed to certain substances in the work place.

But none of these factors help to explain Yauch’s diagnosis.

“Usually, if you’ve been treated with radiation for another disease, that can be a factor,” said Genden. “But he was never treated with radiation for anything else, to my knowledge. The other potential cause is environmental exposure, but that’s typically for wood workers or people who work with nickel – which also doesn’t apply to him.”

(via Beastie Boys) and Fox

How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone: Maria Rios, 66, woke...

Wed, 02 May 2012 11:47:00 -0400

How the Blind Are Reinventing the iPhone:

Maria Rios, 66, woke up at 6am. She got out of bed in her little second floor apartment on the north side of Central Park, and checked her iPhone for the weather. Then she felt around in her closet, where she had marked her navy blue garments with safety pins, to tell them apart from her black ones. In the adjacent room, her roommate Lynette Tatum, 49, picked out a white sweater and dark denim slacks. She used her VizWiz iPhone app to take a photograph and send it to a customer-service rep who lets her know what color the item is.

For the visually impaired community, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster — the standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant.

But no more. For its fans and advocates in the visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may seem counter-intuitive — but their impact is striking.

Watching Rios and Tatum navigate the world with the aid of their iPhones is a lesson in the transformative and often unpredictable impacts that technology has on our lives. After getting dressed, they strap on their backpacks, canes in hand, and walk out the door. They can’t see the sign someone hung in the elevator, informing them the building is switching to FIOS, but the minute they’re outside the fact they can’t see is a minor detail. They use Sendero — “an app made for the blind, by the blind,” says Tatum — an accessible GPS that announces the user’s current street, city, cross street, and nearby points of interest.

Read more

via theatlantic

Facebook Urges Members to Add Organ Donor Status

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:17:07 -0400

Facebook Urges Members to Add Organ Donor Status:

Nearly 7,000 people in the United States die each year while waiting for an organ transplant. It is a number that Facebook hopes to lower with its vast network of 161 million members in this country.

The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.

Only 54% of doctors say they would choose a career in medicine again...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:39:00 -0400

Only 54% of doctors say they would choose a career in medicine again...:

Just 11% say they consider themselves “rich” — and 45% agree that “my income probably qualifies me as rich, but I have so many debts and expenses that I don’t feel rich.”

And a pediatric oncologist made an excellent comment:

With regard to the compensation bit, it is important to recognize that the student loan burden is enormous. Not only are you carrying over the loans from college, but your loans from medical school, and all of these tend to be held in limbo (“forbearance”) where they continue to earn interest that is capitalized/principalized, because during residency and fellowship (3-6 years beyond medical school graduation for medical specialists and 5-9 years beyond medical school graduation for surgical specialists) you’re making only $50K or $60K a year for your 80 hours a week work.

But I think one of the hardest bits is that during your school and training there’s never enough money to set aside, and certainly no 401(k) or pension, for retirement savings. So many of us start our “financial adulthood” in our 30s or even early 40s with a huge hole to fill - the need to save for retirement, to pay off the student loans, and at the same time, the need to start living like an adult (kids, house, non-disposable furniture, reliable transportation). And you start to get tired. When you’re 20-something or even in your early 30s, you can do the up-all-night/up-all-day thing, but when you’re in your early or mid 40s, it just gets really hard.

nevver: Systems

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:44:52 -0400

nevver:

Systems

newsweek: pretendy: I’m in love with these kind of old style...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:55:40 -0400

newsweek:

pretendy:

I’m in love with these kind of old style TV science demonstrations.

We’re in love with this gif.

My WWII Red Cross flag arrived. It smells like my...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:52:01 -0400

My WWII Red Cross flag arrived. It smells like my grandparent’s home in Arkansas.

I’m going to see The Weeknd’s debut NYC show...

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:38:46 -0400

I’m going to see The Weeknd’s debut NYC show tonight. It sold out in less than 2 minutes. I guess I’m a lucky man.

"For the first eight years of our marriage, [Michelle and I] were paying more in student loans than..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:12:11 -0400

“For the first eight years of our marriage, [Michelle and I] were paying more in student loans than what we were paying for our mortgage. So we know what this is about.

And we were lucky to land good jobs with a steady income. But we only finished paying off our student loans—check this out, all right, I’m the President of the United States—we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.”

- —President Obama in North Carolina today on why Congress has to act to prevent interest rates on student loans from doubling (via barackobama)

I graduated from medical school in 2002. As of today, I am $202, 012.79 in debt. I pay about $840 a month. I will pay this for the next 29 and a half years and will therefore be 65 when I pay off my medical school loans. I am fortunate that my parents paid for my undergraduate education at Washington University in St. Louis.

Tumblr's Incredible Perk: Sherpaa

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:32:00 -0400

Tumblr's Incredible Perk: Sherpaa:

Tumblr’s added two incredible perks for 2012. Sherpaa, the text and email focused on-demand health plan, and our favorite, the referral program where employees get a funded adventure for each referral hire. But it’s neither the office space nor the clever perks that make Tumblr such an of-the-moment place to work: it’s the people.

Well that sure is lovely The Huffington Post mentions my company Sherpaa. But like they say, it’s the people that make tumblr such a great place. And I’m honored to be working with each and every one of them to keep them as healthy and happy as they can be so they can continue to produce the best thing on the internet.

70% of Americans oppose the individual mandate. Is this...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:52:09 -0400

70% of Americans oppose the individual mandate.

Is this surprising that America wants its cake and wants to eat it too?

But, holy bejeezus, that cake looks mighty tasty.

When I was doing my residency at Hopkins, I lived in the Copycat...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 18:04:00 -0400

When I was doing my residency at Hopkins, I lived in the Copycat Building. I came across this new documentary and book about the building via The Atlantic Cities blog:

Rob Brulinski and Alex Wein are just two of the hundreds of artists who have lived and worked over the past 30 years in Baltimore’s Copycat building, a former bottle cap factory in the recently coined Station North district. But in the decades since it became the center of Baltimore’s avant garde community, they’re the first to document the building’s entire history into a book.

The Copycat Project is a 160-page photographic catalog of current tenants, highlighting the potent creative scene that continuously germinates inside the old industrial space. The book also sheds light on the long and varied past of the building, since, as Brulinski puts it, “everyone knows what the Copycat is, but no one knows the history of it.” The book will be published in June and available for purchase on the artists’ website.

If you know Baltimore, you know the Copycat Building. It’s quite a special place. The contrast between my two worlds— one at Hopkins and one as part of the center of the Baltimore art scene— helped my career in unimaginable ways. For me, designing a practice that focused on the creative scene just made so much sense. Here’s a photo of me in my space.

It was massive and only $700 a month. I took a few ten thousand photographs in that space. Good times. Thank you Rob & Alex for documenting the Copycat.

I just bought this massive WWII Red Cross flag in almost perfect...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:14:00 -0400

I just bought this massive WWII Red Cross flag in almost perfect condition. My goodness, it’s going to be amazing in my place.

This new Spiritualized album, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light, is so...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:50:34 -0400

This new Spiritualized album, Sweet Heart, Sweet Light, is so good. I’ve been a Spiritualized fan for years now and this is surely one of their best records. Back when I was in medical school at Penn State, there were plenty of deserted backwoods roads. One of my greatest memories from that era was blowing off some steam driving in the middle of the summer night in the middle of nowhere with all the windows down blaring Spiritualized as loud as my Jetta could handle. Damn good memories from a quite trying time of life…