TY  - JOUR
T1  - A matter of time
AU  - Lloyd RC, Goldmann DA
Y1  - 2009/08/26
N1  - 10.1001/jama.2009.1251
JO  - JAMA
SP  - 894
EP  - 895
VL  - 302
IS  - 8
N2  - 
A novel “time eating” clock was recently unveiled at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, England. Sitting atop this clock is Chronophage, a large grasshopper escapement that “eats up every minute of your life, and as soon as one's gone he's salivating for the next.” Health care time is certainly not protected from the voracious appetite of Chronophage, but the passage of time in any medical situation is perceived in different ways, depending on who is doing the watching. At many points in the delivery of health care, time seems to disappear altogether; in other situations, it moves slowly, lags a few beats, races ahead, or even lurches forward in a disconcertingly asynchronous manner. In this Commentary, a new perspective on time—improvement time—is discussed in the context of 3 traditional aspects of medical time: clinical research (knowledge) time, patient (illness) time, and clinical practice (disease) time.

SN  - 0098-7484
M3  - doi: 10.1001/jama.2009.1251
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2009.1251
ER  -