My good pal Franz and I have started a blog that is primarly targeted towards physicians. We have a lot of things in mind we want to share with others out there, but it’s mostly going to be about “how to hack medicine”.

Check it out MedCrunch and let me know what you think. There are also very nice people across the ocean who like what we do.

We want to provide a new form of magazine. The range of topics is broad but not too broad. Aesthetics and simplicty is important to us.

Das heisst wenn man Alter und Tod wie ein Kuchenrezept verstanden hat, dann hat man auf einmal unheimlich viel mehr Zeit und unendlich viel mehr Lebensqualität und ist unendlich viel mehr entspannt…So, ganz einfach ist das.

via Rest in Peace

The nice people over at Help Remedies recently added a plethora of new drugs to their portfolio. When I first came across their products in 2008 I was impressed by the beauty of packaging design, especially in the realm of dead-ugly packages in the US pharmaceutical market. Help Remedies’ smart move is to get rid off all the “extra strenghts” in Helvetica ultra bold, but make it a nice experience to taking medication.

As an MD i miss seeing more of these in a professional-medical environment. Apart from being beautiful, packaging has another – not much talked about – functionality: Allowing physicians to distinguish between meds. There’s not a small amount of cases where Doctors or nurses misinterpret medication and patients get treated with the wrong drug, just because each pharmaceutical company spends a lot of money on how the packages should look like and how to make them “attractive” to doctors.

However, New York based Help remedies, is not intended to be on stock at hospitals (as far as I know) but their business model is a blend of distributing them to design hotels, online shop and B2B collaborations with various companies. I really like that idea and hope to hear from of them in future.

Also, have a closer look of those beautiful and indeed helpful pieces of medicine + art at PSFK

In the midst of a plethora of unqualified news regarding the swine flu and the success of my post on Steve Jobs’ Health I thought I should share my thoughts on that topic as well.

First of all, this entire media-hyped scenario of fear and death is absurd. Am I the only one who sees a connection – in terms of media – to the SARS Coronavirus, where 150 people died in 2003?! It is absolutely stunning that all of a sudden certain people tend to compare lifestyle, environmental status and health-related status between two totally oposing parts of the world.

Roche, which licenses/produces Tamiflu or Relenza, which are both part of the neuraminidase inhibitor family, are very effective and selective treatment options for viral Infections, such as SARS and… the Swine flu. Austria for example has ordererd tons and tons of Tamiflu in order to protect the entire population, furthermore millions of face masks that don’t make any sense at all because viruses are among the smallest organisms and can therefore easily pass such face masks. Yes, there are certain resistances for current neuraminidase inhibitors, but comparable to other problems with face on the planet they are negligable.

Tamiflu – 19,00 $
Face masks – 45,00 $
Doctors being paid a sh*t load of money in order to push Tamiflu and Face masks – Priceless