Turn information into meaningful encounters For the last few nights, my 5-year old has asked for the same story. Rumpelstiltskin. If you don’t know it, a young lady is offered to the king for marriage under the pretense that she can weave straw into gold. Given a pile of straw and a deadline of the…

Our bodies think we have a virus that isn’t there. What could that be, I wonder? — Having multiple sclerosis is a raw deal, but it’s not that bad. It’s easy to manage and isn’t going to kill you. This is what your doctors should tell you, but won’t. By far the easiest way to manage MS is through diet and lifestyle. Costs nothing. No injection wounds…

If the subject is mind-numbing, fake some curiosity. — I have two careers. One is as a writer. The other is a marketing manager, so I’ve seen both sides. Here are some of the eye-popping blunders (in my humble opinion) I have seen writers make and what they could have done instead. 1. Not being interested Here is a little-known secret. The more…

Play to your strengths and add a Kill Fee are two things I’ve learned — I had a job I loved but it was going nowhere. I was marketing a member-owned bank and its products. There were generations of rusted-on management standing in my way to any advancement. So after almost eight years of hanging in there, I quit to freelance full-time. When I started…

The Poetry of Alt Text Did you know some blind people have stronger visual functions than sighted people? How is that possible? Vision doesn’t rely on eyes Visual function is not located in the eyes it’s in the occipital lobe in the rear of the brain. The eyes are the camera to capture the information through light onto the rods…

Why the stakes are so high for religious anti-vaxxers Jill* (not her real name) is adamant. She will not be vaccinated. Why? She is a Christian and believes we are now at the end of our civilisation. The vaccine, as she sees it, is the mark of the beast. Jill was brave enough to spell it out for me…

How to spin a mishap into an opportunity to drive loyalty — I put my steaming soy flat white on the desk the other morning. Opened my email. Started crawling through, deleting the daily junk. Yawn. There was one from the company. I opened and skimmed through the announcement from some department with which I was fairly unfamiliar. I scrolled down to…

According to the WHO, mental health disorders affect one in four people. It’s not surprising that the resounding crisis in mental health has also seen an emergence of mental health apps. There are over 315,000 mental health (or mHealth) apps currently available. What are mHealth Apps? Apps are small programs that can be accessed…

Around the world, patient demand is pushing doctors into the digital revolution. But not without some complications. Differences in consumer and practitioner perceptions A comparative survey of how consumers and physicians viewed new technology, including smartphones, genetic testing, privacy, and patient-accessible electronic health records, found that consumers and health professionals differed significantly in their views of…