Welcome to UpMusing

August, 17th 2017

Welcome to UpMusing, and thank you for visiting our website UpMusing.net. Whether you are a person living with a chronic medical condition, or a friend, or doctor, pharmacist, nurse, entrepreneur, musician, music-lover, artist, academic scientist, or a person working in pharmaceutical or internet or multimedia or health care insurance industry, or UX/UI and software engineer, or just simply curious, we hope you will find UpMusing helpful. We are excited to share with you information on digital medicine technologies.

If you are a doctor, nurse or pharmacist, please imagine that your patient has a prescription for chronic low back pain that comes together with subscription to music streaming and telemedicine app (did you know that yoga was recently recommended by the American College of Physicians for the treatment of chronic low back pain, Qaseem et al, Ann Intern Med 2017; and music as pain treatment was reviewed by Chai et al, J Med Toxicol 2017). In case where a patient experiences a breakthrough pain, can she/he use a medical VR app (“digital analgesic”) providing instant pain relief? Can you imagine doctors prescribing a breathing-exercise mobile app and music streaming for the treatment of depression (Schriewer et al, Front Public Health 2016; McKennon et al, Front Medicine 2017)? Can you imagine doctors prescribing music-based digital intervention for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, or stroke, or epilepsy, or dementia (Sihvonen et al, Lancet Neurology 2017)?

Welcome to digital medicine and prescription medications working together. Digital medicine also offers inevitable opportunities for partnerships between pharmaceutical companies (e.g. Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, GSK, Amgen) and internet and media companies (e.g. Amazon, Spotify, Google, Facebook, Apple, Pandora, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube) which can advance development of streaming self-care, music, yoga, physical exercise and nutritional interventions for specific chronic medical conditions. Facebook interventions for mental health (Naslund et al, Psychiatr Q 2017) and for cancer survivors (Mendoza et al, Pediatr Blood Cancer 2017), or acquiring mySugr digital management platform for diabetes by a pharmaceutical company Roche, are examples of upcoming changes in health care delivery.

We hope that UpMusing.net, including our blog and FB, will help to disseminate knowledge about digital medicine. Thank you for sharing UpMusing with your colleagues and friends.