Culture

Social media has become an important way for institutions to communicate - both sending messages and receiving feedback - with clients and with the general public. Hospitals and other health care organizations use social media for a variety of purposes, but there has been little investigation of whether hospitals ratings that patients and other consumers submit via social media accurately reflect patient satisfaction or the quality of care delivered.

Many of us are walking around all the time in a fog caused by "social jetlag." That's what happens when we lose sleep because our daily schedules don't match our bodies' natural rhythms. The condition can be a particular problem for shift workers, who work into the night or on a shifting schedule. Now, researchers report in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on March 12 that sleep and workers' general wellbeing could be improved if work schedules took workers' biological clocks into account.

Where you receive medical care impacts many things - including whether or not you receive inappropriate medical tests, according to a new study.

Researchers from NYU Langone Medical Center and its Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center, in a new retrospective study publishing online March 12th in JAMA Oncology, conclude that patients with low-risk prostate or breast cancer were more likely to receive inappropriate imaging during treatment, based on the region of the country in which they received medical care.

New research has shown that patients having heart surgery do not benefit if doctors wait until a patient has become substantially anaemic before giving a transfusion.

Despite legal and ethical mandates for disclosure, results from most clinical trials of medical products are not reported promptly on a registry specifically created to make results of human studies publically available, according to Duke Medicine researchers.

new study by University of Alberta law researchers reveals sometimes overly optimistic news coverage of clinical translation of stem cell therapies--and as spokespeople, scientists need to be mindful of harnessing public expectations.

A reformulation of OxyContin that makes it harder to abuse has curtailed the drug's illicit use. But some 25 percent of drug abusers entering rehab said they still abused the prescription painkiller despite package labeling that emphasizes its abuse-deterrent properties, new research indicates.

The study, by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is published March 11 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Voices in people's heads are far more varied and complex than previously thought, according to new research by Durham and Stanford universities, published in The Lancet Psychiatry today.

One of the largest and most detailed studies to date on the experience of auditory hallucinations, commonly referred to as voice hearing, found that the majority of voice-hearers hear multiple voices with distinct character-like qualities, with many also experiencing physical effects on their bodies.

Getting into trouble with drugs is one way to derail a promising future, and a lot more than traffickers in hard narcotics are engaging in risky behavior on university campuses. A recent literature review published by researchers at the University of South Carolina shows that one in six college students misuse common stimulant medications prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Each year, millions of people lose billions of dollars in NCAA March Madness basketball pools. Still, most return the following year for another pummeling.

But flipping a coin yields better results than carefully selecting brackets, says Dae Hee Kwak, assistant professor of sport management at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology.

As more animal shelters, primate centers and zoos start to play music for their charges, it's still not clear whether and how human music affects animals.

Now, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that while cats ignore our music, they are highly responsive to "music" written especially for them. The study is online at Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

"We are not actually replicating cat sounds," says lead author Charles Snowdon, an emeritus professor of psychology. "We are trying to create music with a pitch and tempo that appeals to cats."

When it comes to buying things, our brains can't see the big, black-and-white forest for all the tiny, colorful trees, according to marketing scholars at The Ohio State University, who say that people who were shown product images in color were more likely to focus on small product details--even superfluous ones--instead of practical concerns such as cost and functionality.

Where is the line between advocating science and protecting corporate profits? It's usually only clear to people trying to show the other side is involved in wrongdoing. A paper in PLOS Medicine uses sugar industry documents to note how they influenced research priorities for the 1971 US National Caries Program (NCP).

"Free schools are having an important effect on collaboration and raising standards in nearby schools … We can see free schools are both popular but they’re also effective." - Nicky Morgan, secretary of state for education

In an analysis of about 2,600 hospitalizations for severe sepsis, readmissions within 90 days were common, and approximately 40 percent occurred for diagnoses that could potentially be prevented or treated early to avoid hospitalization, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA.