A fair share of Georgetown University family practitioner Steven Schwartz’s patients can’t name one or more of pills they’re taking.

“But usually they can tell you what it looks like,” he told the Washington Post. “They might say it’s a blue, triangular pill for hypertension.”

So Schwartz whips out his iPhone, accesses Epocrates, one of 674 medicine-related applications for the device sold on iTunes, inputs pill descriptors like color, shape and so forth, and voila! He’s presented with a list of matches from which he can deduce the identity of his patients’ mystery pills.

Schwartz and many tens of thousands of other clinicians also use the handheld device to display instructional diagrams and videos for patients, check for drug-drug interactions, view X-rays and write electronic prescriptions.

About 64% of physicians now use smartphones, according to Manhattan Research, a market research company.

BlackBerrys are also popular. At GW and Johns Hopkins for example, more than 95% of the smartphones used by clinicians are BlackBerrys, Mike McCarty told the Post.

The chief network officer at Hopkins explained that most of the provider’s medical software runs Windows, as does the BlackBerry.

“I think over time we will be replacing pagers with these devices,” McCarty added.

“Every clinician I meet says they want to be carrying one device, rather than two or three.”

Ohio State University’s medical school plans to distribute an iPod Touch to every medical student by fall, according to Catherine Lucey, the vice dean for education.

“It allows residents and students to ask questions at the bedside, and not rely on memory and not guess,” Lucey told the Post. “I predict that in a couple years, all medical schools will be using them.”

UCLA scientists are reporting that certain regions in the brains of longtime meditators are bigger than those who do not engage regularly in the practice.

Eileen Luders and colleagues used high resolution, 3-dimensional MRI to study 22 people that had practiced either Samatha, Vipassana or Zazen meditation for between 5 and 46 years (average 24 years) and 22 controls. Most meditated between 10-90 minutes per day.

They found that the meditators had larger cerebral measurements in the right hippocampus and more gray matter in the right thalamus, the right orbito-frontal cortex and the left inferior temporal lobe. These regions are known to be involved with the regulation of emotions.

In no region did control subjects have larger brain volumes or more gray matter than the meditators.

The study is in Neuroimage.
 
“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability, and engage in mindful behavior,” Luders told BurrillReport. “The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities.”
 
Scientists had previously shown that meditators have better concentration skills and emotional control, reduced stress levels and jacked immune systems, but this is the first study of the link between meditation and brain morphology.
 
According to Luders, the group’s findings might represent the “neuronal underpinnings” through which meditators “regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way.”

She adds however, that her imaging techniques were unable to assess any possible microscopic correlates of the phenomenon, such as increased neuron counts, larger neurons or more neuronal connections.