personality types.applies to so many surgeons i know...wondering where i fit

Here are the worst of the toxic personalities out there and how to spot them:

1. Manipulative Mary: These individuals are experts at manipulation tactics. Is a matter of fact, you may not even realize you have been manipulated until it is too late. These individuals figure out what your 'buttons' are, and push them to get what they want.
Why they are toxic: These people have a way of eating away at your belief system and self-esteem. They find ways to make you do things that you don't necessarily want to do and before you know it, you lose your sense of identity, your personal priorities and your ability to see the reality of the situation. The world all of a sudden becomes centered around their needs and their priorities.
2. Narcissistic Nancy: These people have an extreme sense of self-importance and believe that the world revolves around them. They are often not as sly as the Manipulative Marys of the world, but instead, tend to be a bit overt about getting their needs met. You often want to say to them "It isn't always about you."
Why they are toxic: They are solely focused on their needs, leaving your needs in the dust. You are left disappointed and unfulfilled. Further, they zap your energy by getting you to focus so much on them, that you have nothing left for yourself.
3. Debbie Downers: These people can't appreciate the positive in life. If you tell them that it is a beautiful day, they will tell you about the impending dreary forecast. If you tell them you aced a mid-term, they'll tell you about how difficult the final is going to be.
Why they are toxic:They take the joy out of everything. Your rosy outlook on life continues to get squashed with negativity. Before you know it, their negativity consumes you and you start looking at things with gray colored glasses yourself.
4. Judgmental Jims: When you see things as cute and quirky, they see things as strange and unattractive. If you find people's unique perspectives refreshing, they find them 'wrong'. If you like someone's eclectic taste, they find it 'disturbing' or 'bad'.
Why they are toxic: Judgmental people are much like Debbie Downers. In a world where freedom rings, judgment is sooo over. If the world was a homogeneous place, life would be pretty boring. Spending a lot of time with these types can inadvertently convert you into a judgmental person as well.

5. Dream Killing Keiths: Every time you have an idea, these people tell you why you can't do it. As you achieve, they try to pull you down. As you dream, they are the first to tell you it is impossible.
Why they are toxic: These people are stuck in what is instead of what could be. Further, these individuals eat away at your self-esteem and your belief in yourself. Progress and change can only occur from doing new things and innovating, dreaming the impossible and reaching for the stars.
6. Insincere Illissas: You never quite feel that these people are being sincere. You tell a funny story, they give you a polite laugh. You feel depressed and sad and they give you a 'there, there' type response. You tell them you are excited about something and you get a very ho-hum response.
Why they are toxic: People who aren't sincere or genuine build relationships on superficial criteria. This breeds shallow, meaningless relationships. When you are really in need of a friend, they won't be there. When you really need constructive criticism, they would rather tell you that you are great the way you are. When you need support, they would rather see you fail or make a fool of yourself.
7. Disrespectful Dannys: These people will say or do things at the most inappropriate times and in the most inappropriate ways. In essence, they are more subtle, grown up bullies. Maybe this person is a friend who you confided in and usesyour secret against you. Maybe it is a family member who puts their busy-body nose into your affairs when it is none of their business. Or maybe, it is a colleague who says demeaning things to you.
Why they are toxic: These people have no sense of boundaries and don't respect your feelings or, for that matter, your privacy. These people will cause you to feel frustrated and disrespected.
8. Never Enough Nellies: You can never give enough to these people to make them happy. They take you for granted and have unrealistic expectations of you. They find ways to continually fault you and never take responsibility for anything themselves.
Why they are toxic: You will spend so much time trying to please them, that you will end up losing yourself in the process. They will require all of your time and energy, leaving you worn out and your own needs sacrificed.

All of these personalities have several things in common.
1) the more these people get away with their behavior, the more they will continue.
2) Unfortunately, most of these people don't see that what they do is wrong and as a result, talking to them about it will fall on deaf ears, leaving you wondering if you are the crazy one.
3) Most of these people get worse with age, making their impact on you stronger with time.

Ian Weston SVP, Special Projects Dow Jones NY

US health care is expensive because the free market with
low price elasticity ensures that the standards and expectations are set
by those with the most to spend.

Tiered services and price differentiation are not really practical
propositions in health care owing to the nature of the cost structures
and services provided—so we have a system that provides exemplary
health care to those that can pay for it, but struggles to provide
acceptable ‘regular’ service that is affordable to the average
citizen.


So much clarity of thought..in the western elite..quite surprised to note that

this is a response to MC Kinsey report.on how health care spending in the poor is increasing in the states...

a nice one liner from my child hood friend Preetinder Brar from chandigarh ..

I'm often a loser because winning over fools is impossible.....

a nice one liner from my child hood friend Preetinder Brar from chandigarh ..

I'm often a loser because winning over fools is impossible.....

Straight back from MECOM 09

the whole meeting was a sham ...fortunately three talks got canceled ......i couldn't have taken them either..fortunately bumped into some interesting people...a Mrs Medha Bhaskar..whos a health care writer...a Mr Bilal Mahommad ...an technocrat whos come up with a startup to provide mobile healthcare...thats is healthcare with the use of mobile phones...some major biggy at DU who wants to give everybody in the hospital a free black berry........a guy called mike with Ascom who claims 60 percent of dutch hospitals use their mobile gadgets..

all in all a very fruitful day ..met up with a bunch of bombay ites...Ajay ..something a mallu who is the vice chairman for BS technologies...bald shetty look alike with a pleasant smile..they flew in from bombay to attend this meeting...

cant say more about the day ..

More from Andrew Prozes: CEO Lexis Nexis

You can’t simply intuit what customers want, or rely on sporadic, undisciplined feedback. You’ve got to have a methodology. We’re big believers in an approach for measuring customer service called Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which I introduced into the organization to measure just how happy customers are.
NPS is much more straightforward and simple than other ways of measuring customer satisfaction. Surveyed customers offer a response, on a 1 to 10 scale, to the question, Would you recommend us to others? They are then grouped into three categories: Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. The percentage of Detractors is subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to arrive at the NPS. The simplicity of the methodology leads to clarity on what steps need to be taken to improve quality.


Isnt that how we should manage our social and buisness relationships on a day to day basis............

Andrew Prozes : CEO LexisNexis

'Dont look at information as a the product itself.What you have to offer is a 'workflow solution ',which incorporates all type of content into a single source that can be assessed from any number of search parameters.'

This is what i think the GIPM project should head towards....

ill talk more on the GIPM ..the graphic interface for patient management as we learn more and apply more..

Nimesh Mehta : Batch of 09 ISB Hyderabad

'It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit........'

I bumped into Nimesh at Bombay University .For some reason we sat down and had a pepsi together.We' ve been online pals since then .Nimesh has a penchant for putting up quippy one liners on his Gmail chat pop up ....this is one of the many ..ill put more as he continues to spill gyan ...

C K Prahalad : A good article from Fast Company

"If you want new ideas, you have to push yourself into the periphery," he says.



Can C.K. Prahalad Pass the Test?
By Jennifer Reingold

It's all the potato's fault. C.K. Prahalad might still be ensconced in his old life as revered management guru. He might still be teaching strategy to rapt MBAs and senior executives at the University of Michigan, still driving home each night to his lush 60-acre spread in suburban Ann Arbor. He might still be charging top dollar to advise companies -- paid richly to scare the bejesus out of powerful CEOs and, in the process, to help save them from ruin.
Instead, about five years ago, Prahalad read a book about the history of the potato and how its eventual spread transformed the world. Somehow, it made him think differently about the Internet. Just as international trade had fostered the potato's growth, the Internet would foster the global diffusion of individual power -- and that would transform the world.
The connection is perhaps obvious only to Prahalad. But that's his way. "If you want new ideas, you have to push yourself into the periphery," he says.
Prahalad's periphery is a nondescript office in San Diego overlooking a parking lot and a dusty dry canyon. Since April 2000, the 60-year-old has been chairman of a small, profitless high-technology company called Praja Inc. And he is doing what many executives of small, profitless high-technology companies do these days: He's working the phones, offering to fly up to the home of a GM executive (a potential customer) for a quick meeting. He's crisscrossing the globe in search of funding. He's agonizing over layoffs. And, oh yeah, one other thing: With this modest, 30-plus-person company, he is also trying to change the world.
This is the story of a man who had it all and decided that it wasn't enough. Instead of slowly lowering the flame on a white-hot career, Prahalad has lit an entirely new flame. He has taken a leave from Michigan, dramatically scaled back his consulting work, put up several million dollars to get Praja going, and moved his family to San Diego. "He's taking financial risk, professional risk, reputational risk, and personal risk," says B. Joseph White, dean of the University of Michigan Business School. And yet, adds White, "it's totally in character."
What Prahalad wanted was a new, huge challenge. Not incidentally, he also wanted to create a laboratory for the application of the ideas that he had been preaching to others.
This is a personal test, the latest step in a search for self-knowledge that has defined Prahalad's life. "I was in a very good zone of comfort," he says. "And I felt that this opportunity was so large that I needed to experiment with it myself. What we're selling is a new way to run a business. Our ultimate motivation is to make a difference."
The collapsing economy has made that job tougher than Prahalad had ever imagined when he abandoned his life in Ann Arbor. Yet now he appears more committed than ever to Praja's ideals and technology. "You have to have faith," he says. "You cannot lead if you don't believe."
"Consumers do not have much share of a voice. Now they do."
What's in a name? In Sanskrit, praja means "common people." Prahalad and cofounder Ramesh Jain, the company's 52-year-old CEO, say that it is the inverse of the word raja, which means "nobility." It is not, they insist, a play on Prahalad and Jain, despite employee jokes to the contrary. At its most basic, Praja is a high-technology company that allows people to personalize their own experiences on the Internet -- whether as a sports fan, a student, a data analyst, or a farmer. Its platform, ExperienceWare, organizes data by context, rather than by time or written words, sorting such information as text, video, audio, and sensory data. Prahalad and Jain think the implications of the process are cosmic.
"The problem so far has been data as information," says Prahalad. "We are still operating as if we never left Gutenberg. If you look at keyword searches, the document is still going to be the organizing idea. But now the metaphor is not going to be the document -- it's going to be the experience."
Prahalad, a mustachioed, bespectacled, slightly round man, fills the room when he speaks. He is a contagiously high-energy guy. His language, while complex and academic, is sprinkled with expressions meant to draw in the listener. "Is it not?" he asks often. "Okay?"
Prahalad says that Praja will facilitate the most profound impact of the Internet: the empowerment of the individual. The Internet is rapidly democratizing information, and the effects are mind-boggling -- from the rise of global antibusiness activism to the organized cells of consumers everywhere. "Consumers did not have much share of voice," he says. "Now they do. There is a fundamental transition that is taking place -- from a firm-centric society to a consumer-centric society."
In a consumer-centric society, says Prahalad, everyone -- even the poorest of the poor -- can gain more control over their own life. "Why don't people have economic opportunities? Because there's no information. You don't know what the price of fish is in the next village. The large-company Internet business models, the Internet poor, the new business models -- they're one big circle. They all interact with one another. But we have to make this a business issue."
And that is exactly what Prahalad has signed on to do.
"What is the next challenge in life?"
One of the few decorations in Prahalad's sparse office is a beautifully illustrated old map -- a gift from friend and collaborator Gary Hamel. "Can you tell me what country that is, Jennifer?" booms Prahalad, always the professor. I'm stumped, as I tend to be continuously with this man. He smiles broadly and turns the map around. Then I see that it is a map of India, tilted at a 90-degree angle. This, I realize, is Prahalad in a nutshell. Turn an idea sideways. It's the theme of his life. It's how you get from potato to Praja.
One of nine children of a well-known Madras judge and Sanskrit scholar who wrote and edited 40 books, Prahalad (that's his first name, actually; C.K. stands for Coimbatore Krishnarao, the names of his town and of his father, respectively) was born to study. But early in his career, he managed people. A brilliant student of physics, he was recruited by the manager of the local Union Carbide battery plant. He promised his father he'd try it for a year, then return to school to get his PhD.
Only 19 at the time, Prahalad turned the factory sideways. One day, after noticing that many temporary workers were using old or torn gloves (managers doled out new gloves according to seniority), Prahalad had a thought: Why not distribute new gloves to the workers who handled the most dangerous stuff instead? Impressed, Prahalad's boss decided to mentor the young upstart, often bringing him management books to read and quizzing him about them later. Prahalad calls his Union Carbide experience a major inflection point in his life, and he still cherishes the gold chain that his workers bought for him when he left -- four years later. "I learned about the extraordinary wisdom of ordinary people," he says.
Prahalad then went to the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), where he fell in love with Gayatri, a young psychology student at a nearby university. After five years spent trying to win their families' approval (the union went against tradition), the couple married and left for Harvard, where Prahalad wrote a PhD thesis on multinational management in just two and a half years. They then returned to India, where he taught at the IIM. But this was the 1970s, and the fervently nationalistic India had little use for a globally oriented thinker. With his ideas under constant political attack, Prahalad decided he had no choice but to return to the United States. The Prahalads arrived in Ann Arbor with $18.
Maybe because he had nothing to lose, Prahalad didn't play it safe. He became known on the Michigan campus as a maverick who avoided publishing in the traditional journals in favor of venues that he thought would have more of an impact. He ruffled feathers. As an assistant professor, he was approached by a major company with an invitation to consult -- an opportunity that every young business academic yearns for, especially if he has two young kids. He agreed, but he demanded $1,000 a day. Shocked, the client withdrew the offer. Gayatri was horrified. "We need the money," she gasped. But for Prahalad, it was a matter of getting the respect that he felt he deserved. A month and a half later, another company sought his services. This time, he asked for $3,000 a day. And he got it.
In 1981, Prahalad met Gary Hamel, then a young student in international business. Their relationship, which would become a remarkable, decade-long collaboration, was much like Felix and Oscar on intellectual crack. Prahalad preferred a full-bodied cabernet and a good book in his study to working a crowd. Hamel was the voluble one, and the two became known around the university for knockdown, drag-out intellectual-sparring sessions that lasted long into dinner.
Much of their most influential work appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Their May 1990 article, "The Core Competence of the Corporation," became one of HBR's most widely reprinted pieces ever. A subsequent book, Competing for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, 1994), was heralded as one of the great business books of the 1990s. The work lifted both men into the top ranks of business thinkers, earning them millions in royalties and speaking fees.
Soon after, Prahalad had his potato epiphany. The timing coincided, more or less, with an invitation from his friend Jain, an entrepreneur and former Michigan professor who, at the time, was teaching at the University of California at San Diego. Jain, who was experimenting with sports television, asked Prahalad to look at his artificial-intelligence technology. The software allowed viewers to watch the Super Bowl from any perspective, even those not actually filmed by the network's cameras. Prahalad had no interest in sports, but the experience enthralled him. "The technology eliminated the tyranny of the few over the many," he says.
Prahalad had put money into Jain's first two companies, Imageware and Virage Inc. Now he was sinking the first installment of an investment that eventually totaled at least $3 million into the newly formed Praja. Jain became CEO. But, he says now, "it was very clear that there were lots of business issues that I didn't understand as well as I could have." Eventually, he asked Prahalad to help him run Praja. "If you want to build the company the way that we want it," he told Prahalad, "the leadership should come from you and me." To his colleague's surprise, Prahalad said yes. "After he decided," Jain recalls, "I said, 'As a friend, I want to know why you are doing this.' He said, 'Ramesh, neither you nor I need a company to maintain our current lifestyle. But what is the next challenge in life?' "
"What would happen if this power became commonplace?"
For Prahalad, Praja's challenge -- and so, his -- is twofold. One: Make it through the tough times, build a successful business, and use the technology invented by Jain in a transformational way. Two: See what it's like to take your own management medicine.
At its simplest, Praja's technology offers a very quick way to build applications and to organize all kinds of information, from sensory data to video to text to audio information. Praja is focusing on two areas: knowledge sharing and data analysis. Analysts at General Motors, for example, are using the company's technology to compare sales data from different countries and time periods. Need to contrast, say, Saab sales and Ford Explorer sales in Brazil in March? That's just the sort of calculation that GM used to spend weeks on. With ExperienceWare, it's instantaneous.
Meanwhile, Praja is experimenting with knowledge management at Zurich Financial Services, where it has created a virtual, cross-cultural learning community that brings together senior executives from all over the planet. Participants can use video, text, or other information to compare projects or management problems, untethered by place, time, or even language. "It is still a work in progress, but it has been very well received," says Gunnar Stokholm, head of business development at Zurich Financial Services.
It is one thing, of course, to enable an online executive confab -- and quite another to build something that touches the world. But it is the broadest implications of this concept that get Prahalad excited. In a world where information is available to everyone and not segmented by language or even literacy, Praja's technology could be used to help not just executives but also the rural poor. Strategies for containing breakouts of contagious diseases could be shared, globally and in real time, across languages and technologies. Says Jain: "A lot of things that we are going to be developing will be revolutionizing in different ways. We're making language irrelevant."
This is the vision -- one of bringing the power of information to everyone -- that drives both Prahalad and Jain. "This company was started with the basic assumption that we would empower people to be themselves, to experience life on their terms," says Prahalad. "Then you take the next step and ask, 'What would happen if this power became commonplace, rather than only for the wealthy?' The moment you ask that question, staring in your face are 4.5 billion people. How do you help ordinary people understand how to exercise their power? More interestingly, how do you get large companies to understand that if they don't, they'll have no social legitimacy left?"
Just before joining Praja, Prahalad and fellow professor Stuart Hart, from the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, circulated a draft of a paper called "Raising the Bottom of the Pyramid: Strategies for Sustainable Growth." They argued that the 4 billion poor people at the bottom of the economic structure represented a valid, vibrant market for goods and services -- and that large multinational companies could make big profits by meeting their needs. "The challenge for managers is to visualize an active market when what exists is abject poverty," they wrote. "With all due respect to the importance of wetlands, it is like visualizing a theme park where you see only swamp."
It's kind of a contrarian idea. Until now, the rural poor have been considered unable to sustain a market, unlikely ever to get enough disposable income to buy anything that a big western company would want to sell. But in India, Prahalad found companies making money hand over fist by selling to the poor. The idea that informed capitalism could help the world's downtrodden got him really, really excited. "It brought a fire and a passion to C.K. that goes beyond what I'd seen before," says Hart.
This is, in ways not yet completely clear to anyone, Praja's future. But it's not the present. These days, Praja is marketing exclusively to big companies. Prahalad and Jain are scrambling for a third round of funding. (Together with board members, the two recently kicked in $3 million to keep the company going until the fall.) But Prahalad's grand vision must wait. "You cannot solve the world's problems in a small company," he says. "The goal is not to say that we are going to do it anyway, with or without money. It's a nice, brave thing to say, but very soon you'll be running out of cash."
"They have to go through the valley of death"
For a taste of what it's like to have C.K. Prahalad running your company, flash back to September 1999, at the University of Michigan's Executive Education Center. Prahalad prowls the rows of nervous managers attending Michigan's renowned four-week leadership program, seemingly feeding off of the anxiety in the room. He is lecturing on the 16th-century standoff between Cortes and Montezuma -- a metaphor for the struggle between startups and established companies. A master teacher, Prahalad lulls his students into thinking that they know the answers to his constant barrage of questions. Then, slowly, he removes the veil, allowing them to see that they are wrong.
In an hour, the students go from confident blusterers to humbled novices. Only at the end does Prahalad guide them from utter confusion to a new level of understanding. "They have to go through the valley of death," he says. It's another of Prahalad's core beliefs: Only when you are challenged, unsafe, out of your zone, can you find self-knowledge.
This is how Prahalad approaches potential Praja clients, often companies he once advised. "It's amazing, the way he can captivate the upper-level executives -- and tell them that they're crap," says Joe Kosco, director of business development at Praja. "He gets their attention, and then he says, 'This is how we're going to fix it.' " He treats his own employees the same way. Dealing with Prahalad, they say, is like playing chess with Bobby Fischer. " C.K. is an academic with stage prowess," says Robert Martindale, a business-development manager at Praja. "I feel like I'm getting a PhD."
Prahalad is Praja's enforcer-cheerleader, roaming the halls and challenging anyone he meets: "Do you believe yet? You don't believe, do you? Do you?" He is focused in a way that most of his employees can't even fathom.
His idea of time off is taking a long walk with Gayatri -- and then working some more. His enormous new home in Rancho Santa Fe boasts a pool, along with access to a golf course and a tennis court -- none of which he uses very often. He and Jain spend nearly every Saturday together working. Prahalad even tried to convince Jain to move into the mansion next door. "He argued that we could save a lot of time if we didn't drive to work separately," laughs Jain.
All of this leads to a strange dynamic within Praja: What do you do when your boss knows more about every aspect of your job than you do? How do you make a sales presentation if everyone in the room is staring at the other guy? Prahalad is acutely aware of this contradiction. To avoid being perceived as the blowhard executive who knows it all, he is always asking for feedback on what he could have done better. He's sincere about this: It is a way for him to learn -- and learning, after all, is something that Prahalad does well. He even asks me several times during my visit, and again after my return, for a report card: "How can I be a better manager?"
The question betrays Prahalad's own zone of discomfort. He is most at ease when teaching, and he views Praja very much as his classroom. But Praja is, of course, also a business, and the professor has had to wrestle with what it means to actually manage a for-profit organization.
Prahalad admits that the desire of his employees to know exactly what their roles are was one of the things that surprised him most about running a company. And for someone who is used to delivering the message only to top executives, the amount of time that he had to spend explaining his vision took him aback. Some employees fret that with Prahalad's insistence on constant learning, Praja may be moving too slowly.
Prahalad has learned by now that some of his big-company prescriptions don't fit here. "The negative side of a small company is that there are no dampers," he says. "Just because you can make a change quickly, the temptation is to act. Speed is nice to have, but going faster to hell is not how I want to run a company. I want somebody to keep pushing the organization. I also want somebody to say, 'Let's be thoughtful about getting this done right.'
"My role," he continues, "is to balance the tension."
"In great growth times, anyone can lead"
It was a foggy, sleepy day in Seattle, though you wouldn't know it from the electricity surging through the conference hall last October. C.K. Prahalad, professor and entrepreneur, had just described his vision of using technology and innovative strategy to market to the world's poor, and the crowd at the Creating Digital Dividends conference was on its feet. "We have company think, not consumer think," he thundered. "What we make is not what they want."
The problem juices Prahalad -- and it shows. Even as he focuses on strengthening Praja, he speaks regularly on the digital divide. He helped persuade Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, to launch what HP calls its World e-Inclusion initiative. But that's the gauzy future. Right now, Praja faces an environment that's downright poisonous for startups and a capital market that is essentially dead. Many potential customers are slow to commit to buying anything, let alone a new platform that requires a whole new way of thinking.
In late February, Prahalad and Jain refocused the company on marketing its core technology, relying on system integrators to build specific applications. It also laid off more than a third of its staff. "I would be lying if I said that I was emotionally and mentally prepared for this," Prahalad says.
There was a learning experience here too -- but not the kind that Prahalad had hoped to have. "Especially in troubled times, leaders must behave like emotional and intellectual anchors," he says. "You must steady the organization and have a passionate belief that what you are doing is important. I never realized how critical that was in times of turbulence."
What is so fascinating about Prahalad is that amid the gloomy tidings, he seems more energized than ever. Praja may be fighting for survival, but Prahalad has yearned for a test like this: "Leadership is about what you do when the going gets tough.
"It is the bamboo that bends in heavy winds that has another day to live," he continues, reciting an old Indian saying. "The trees that don't bend get uprooted."

The Wharton Business Plan Competition O9 : Thoughts

Out of the eight finalist in the Wharton Business plan competition 09 ,four had plans for the healthcare sector .A telepresence glucometer which looks like a watch , a software platform to book and re-book patients to increase show rates,a artificial eye whos pupils dilate, an a device to measure wound depth .Guess what thats 50 percent.So is the rest of the sectors sleeping when it comes to innovation or is it that health care innovation has become a fad. More so the latter I think .



The funny thing is that everybody on that side of the atlantic ( read America ) believes that health and health care reform is their prerogative.The populace who suffers the most probably should be the one calling the shots.America today stands as the biggest distributors of calorigenic food to the world.And probably the biggest consumer too.
A country which is squashed by the weight of its obese teenagers ,stands watching for every health care innovation that can earn it a buck on .


It is'nt a surprise then ,that the machine to monitor wound depth got the prize.Why wouldnt it.It is a cash cow.It costs 35000 dollars, has a bunch of patents , probably a researcher whos done is Phd on wound depth , a group of physicians who would love to sell you the idea that if you dont measure wound depth ..how the hell will you heal the wound. A bunch of physicians who want to retrain the whole world and tell the physicians all over that the way you treat diabetic wounds is wrong.Another gimmic to reinvent the wheel for all of us.My sarcasm cant pour out any more........... .These are the new American Association of Diabetic Wound Guidelines ...and these are the recommendations from a Multi Center Randomised Control Trial on wound depth management and .....here is the evidence based current practices for diabetic wounds....and here..is the saviour..the machine to measure wound depth ...a must in a every new clinic ..a must in every new establishment which is accredited .........The new bar is set in wound care.Meet it or you will lose your accredition ..........The 35000 dollars it costs...is incidental expenses. You should be able to foot the bill....If you can t how will we run this trillion dollar economy .



Well the fact that the first prize goes to the NIR diagnostics team which are behind this device just shows the contorted mind set .The man who was selling prevention was over ruled by the man who was selling treatement .The man who was selling the watch with a glucometer to make patients more aware of the narrow breadth of control they have to maintain on their blood sugar ,was the man closer to science .His device costs a lot less and will prevent the huge chain of events which will eventually lead a diabetic to get a diabetic ulcer .But then if you prevent them ..how the hell will the drug companies ..the wound care product companies and all the other intermediaries ( read : VAC pump machine makers, Trial coordinators, Accredition agencies ) who feed off these wounds make enough money .



If this competition represents a populist thought ,its a pity that the ever pervasive capitalist sentiment of the west shines so shamelessly on health care .


The link to the competition site:
http://bpc.wharton.upenn.edu/index.html

Grameen Bank: Alex Counts : President and CEO of Grameen Foundation : Cornell 88 ,Fullbright Scholar to Bangaladesh, Worked for CARE ,Learnt bengali

Those of us who have grown up un the affluence underestimate the abilities of the poor and what is learned in survival mode.

The poor work for themselves or not at all.

Intentional motivation of the poor.

Grameen Bank wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grameen_Bank

Alex Counts : http://www.grameenfoundation.org/who_we_are/our_people/staff/alex_counts_president/