Tim Odell

Tim Odell started with Medgadget in 2005 while in graduate school at the University of Southern California. He prided himself on his irreverent tone and Pseudoscience Fridays series. After graduating in 2007, he began his career as a biomedical engineer with a Bioness, a neurorehabilitation start up, then moved on to Stryker in 2011.

Author's Posts

News

July 2nd, 2008 The New York Times has an interesting piece out on the overuse of medical technology. To summarize their five pager: There's not enough data out to suggest that CT Angiography actually reduces costs or improves patient outcomes, but doctors tend to request the tests all the time anyway. They go on to do a so-so job of generalizing the...
News

June 25th, 2008 You know who would make a logical spokesperson for medical liability policy? The guy who starred in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap. That's right, Dennis Quaid is making the case that he should be able to sue pharma giant Baxter over a dosing error that nearly killed his baby twins... Quaid last month urged Congress to preserve...
Art

June 20th, 2008 Do swords and shuriken count as Medgadgets? On Friday they Do! We'd like to introduce you to one of our long time heroes: Dr McNinja (pictured above) McNinja is a general practitioner/podiatrist/dentist. His receptionist is a gorilla named Judy. The rest of the McNinja family is known to show up in the story, and they're happy to remind...
News

Dr Alan Garber, MD PhD's piece in the latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, titled "A Menu Without Prices", highlights the potential benefits of applying more cost effectiveness (efficaciousness?) analysis to medical reimbursement decisions... For the well-insured, obtaining health care in the United States is like dining in a...
Neurology

"Recotana" (aka Osamu Funada)is an individual with a penchant for building body-to-MIDI interfaces. In this case, we've got the "Electric Click," which stimulates the "listener" (there's no sound) in sync with the beat of the music being played... There are more pictures and video in the Flickr set for the device. Be sure to check...
News

June 3rd, 2008 Michael Rosen of the Wisconsin Technology Network (Wisconsin's got lotsa technology, don'tchaknow?) has a great analysis of how and why the medical device industry is growing faster than the drug industry. In short, it's because biomedical engineers are cooler than biochemists. ...ok, he doesn't say that (even if it is true). The real...
Neurology

May 29th, 2008 Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University have managed to configure an implanted electrode array in the brain of a monkey to control a robotic arm. The Daily Mail is reporting on research published in the journal Nature... Researchers implanted a grid of tiny electrodes into the animals' brains, in the...
Rehab

May 5th, 2008 Last October we discovered that Honda of Japan is developing a novel walking assistance device, but the details of its functionality were hazy. Finally the company is revealing more and taking the device on the road. Apparently Honda has managed to translate some of their research from the super-awesome (or is that super-creepy?) ASIMO...
Pediatrics

May 1st, 2008 Kristen Copeland, M.D. of the Cincinnati Children's Hospital is lead author on a study that seeks to determine why kids in day-care aren't playing outside enough. A central culprit was the importance parents place on academic activities (readin', 'ritin', and 'rithmatic) over outdoor playing activities. There were some other surprising...
Cardiac Surgery

April 22nd, 2008 The FDA has approved Thoratec Corporation's PMA for the HeartMate II Left Ventricular Assist System (LVAS). PMA's are hard to get cleared and implantable blood pumping devices are notoriously difficult to successfully engineer, so you can bet the folks in Pleasanton, CA are in high spirits these days. Some highlights from the press...
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