In the News

Dartmouth’s Geisel School Gets $5M Grant for Study of Human Motivation

NHPR – Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine has received a $5 million Common Fund grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project they hope will lead to better health outcomes and decreased medical costs. The grant will fund an investigation into the psychological and biological factors that motivate individuals to improve their health. (Similar coverage in the Valley News.)

Doctors to FDA: Don’t Call Them ‘Breakthrough’ Drugs

Livescience – Cites a study conducted by researchers at the Geisel School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University, which found that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should avoid using words like “breakthrough” and “promising” to describe new drugs when making announcements aimed at the public because it does not necessarily mean that a drug is effective or that it will help patients live longer.

Patient-Reported Data Can Help People Make Better Health Care Choices

Harvard Business Review – An opinion piece co-authored by William Weeks, professor of psychiatry, community and family medicine, and of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice; and James Weinstein, professor of orthopaedics, community and family medicine, and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, on the value of the development of tools that will allow patients to self-report outcomes data in real time to help other patients anticipate their own course of treatment.

Facebook’s Restrictions on User Data Cast a Long Shadow

The Wall Street Journal – Cites research by Benjamin Crosier, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry, in an article about how Facebook’s restrictions on its user data are rippling through academia, business and presidential politics. Crosier was building an app to look for links between social-media activity and drug addiction, and Facebook’s restrictions on data halted his research. Crosier is petitioning the company to get some of that data back and hopes to salvage his project by asking Facebook for access to eight types of data, including photos in which a user is tagged. He hopes to reconstruct a person’s friend network by seeing who they socialize with through their photos. Dr. Crosier says he won’t be able to see the images themselves, just that a user was tagged and by whom.

Joseph Smith Miracle Scholarship

Deseret News – Quotes Interim Dean of the Geisel School of Medicine Duane Compton in continued coverage of the creation of a $25,000 scholarship by the Descendants of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, to honor the pioneering surgery that Dartmouth’s Dr. Nathan Smith performed on Joseph Smith two centuries ago.

Can Surfing Reprogram the Veteran’s Brain?

Outside – Quotes Paula Schnurr, professor of psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine and executive director of the Veterans Affairs National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), in an article discussing how the physicality and flow of surfing can give victims of PTSD some relief, and how PTSD has been linked to changes in the neurocircuitry and neurotransmitters that balance the retrieval of memories. “People have profound changes in how they think of themselves in the world,” says Schnurr.