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Capitalizing on a craze: Medicine on an MP3

The iPod has made its way into modern medicine in creative ways. Here are a few people who took advantage of a popular device and adapted it into a tool for practicing and teaching medicine.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. June 4, 2007.

Tiny, white earbuds became the symbol of a small cult following, mostly fueled by teens and twentysomethings, shortly after the first generation iPod hit the market in 2001.

But the iPod is now creating a niche in modern medicine, as the medical field learns that the iPod has value beyond just playing music or videos.

Medical iPod users now carry everything from the daily news to large digital files inside the pocket-sized machine that now has the capability to play videos. And as more of medicine becomes electronic, more doctors are finding the iPod to be a convenient alternative to carrying around a laptop or paper charts and x-ray films, and a much more convenient way to lecture and teach.

The following collection of stories illustrate some of the trailblazing ideas for the iPod in medicine.

Cardiologist Michael Barrett, MD, thought he was on the cutting edge two years ago when he handed his students at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia a collection of CDs full of heart murmurs and told them to listen to them to improve their stethoscope skills. His students deflated his ego a notch or two by telling him that no one listens to CDs anymore.

Fortunately for Dr. Barrett, the concept he was trying to develop worked with an iPod, too.

The project was inspired from a study by Spanish researcher Mercedes Atienza, PhD, which looked at auditory perceptual learning and the idea that hearing the same sound repetitively increases the memory of that sound.

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