There’s More Than One Answer to These Questions

from the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s annual autism conference
That’s a line from an Indigo Girls’ songs.  While I think their questions were probably aimed at Life, the Universe, and Everything, they could just as easily have been talking about autism.  I’ve covered this meeting twice now and both times I’ve been struck by  how many possible [...]

Patient Power

from the annual meeting of the Society for Pediatric Dermatology in Philadelphia
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
This morning I listened to Dr. Fred Kaplan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, talk about [...]

Fair and Balanced News: Too Much of a Good Thing

National Foundation for Infectious Diseases’ 12th Annual Conference on Vaccine Research, Baltimore, Maryland
I often hide my name badge at meetings if it proclaims my status as media. This is almost always to ward off PR flacks. Today, I slunk out of an afternoon session of the NFID’s vaccine research meeting hiding my badge because I [...]

Teaching Autistic Kids the ‘Hidden Rules’

From the Spectrum of Developmental Disabilities XXXI, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
For kids with high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger’s syndrome (AS), “there are lots of hidden rules in the world,” Brian Freedman, Ph.D., said during a talk on interventions to improve social skills. Dr. Freedman is the director of the Center for Autism and [...]

Neuropsychiatry’s Black Box

From the Spectrum of Developmental Disabilities XXXI, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
Think back to those math and science classes that asked you to prove that statement A is equal to statement B or to derive the second law of thermodynamics from the ideal gas law.  If you were a typical student, your approach was [...]

The Gender of Medicine

From the Kennedy Krieger Annual Autism Conference in Baltimore, MD:
EGMN writers have a very unique perspective on medicine.  We cover medical meetings in dozens of specialties every year. This breadth allows us to see patterns that might not be so obvious to anyone, who attends meetings in a single specialty.  One of the things that I [...]