Not only can e-mail eliminate the scourge of phone tag, it may also improve communication between nervous patients and their surgeons in the days before surgery. Australian researchers report in the February issue of the Archives of Surgery that patients are more than twice as likely to initiate communication with their surgeon if they are given the surgeon's e-mail address along with their pre-surgical information.

Researchers at the University of Sydney studied 100 patients scheduled for elective thyroid or parathyroid surgery. Half were given the surgeon's e-mail address, phone number, fax number and mailing address as part of the pre-surgical literature. The other half was given the same information, minus the e-mail address.

Overall, 26 of the 100 patients contacted their surgeons before or after the procedure - 19 from the e-mail address group and seven from the other group. In total, 22 of the patients who communicated with their surgeons sent e-mail messages: 18 from the first group and four from the second, who had found the surgeons' e-mail addresses through other means.

While physicians regularly use e-mail to communicate with colleagues, physician-patient e-mails remain controversial due to potential privacy, legal and ethical concerns, researchers note. Few guidelines exist for its use at present. When used properly - it should never be used to deliver bad news, for instance - e-mail can allow thoughtful responses from physicians without interrupting their routines, as the telephone can. "E-mail's promise for improving the delivery for health care remains largely untapped," they write.

Kent Steinriede

Geckos aren't just selling car insurance anymore. The tropical lizards have inspired researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create waterproof adhesive bandages that might soon join suture and staples as a viable option for closing surgical incisions. MIT researchers based the bandage's design on the unique characteristics of a gecko's foot, namely the nanoscale hills and valleys that allow the lizards to stick to walls and ceilings.

The MIT group added a thin coating of a sugar-based glue to a "biorubber" substance shaped like a gecko's foot. Jeff Karp, PhD, an instructor of medicine at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a faculty member at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, says the bandages are biodegradable and effective in wet environments. Those features have improved the gecko-inspired adhesive technology - which has been used for non-medical applications since 2001 - for use in the human body.

The new design is detailed in the Feb. 11 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Karp claims the adhesive tape can be used to reseal intestines after a gastric bypass procedure or after minimally invasive procedures when using suture through a small incision might prove impractical.

"We're not mimicking the gecko," he says. "We are inspired by the gecko to create a patterned interface to enhance the surface area of contact and thus the overall strength of adhesion."

Daniel Cook

Of the 55 time- and money-saving ideas our readers submitted in response to a survey for the "It's Good to Be Frugal" feature story in our February issue, we crowned one to be the most ingenious.

"Behold, the 4-day Workweek," submitted by Rosalind J. Loyd-Chisley, RN, described how, on a rotating basis, five members of a 10-person nursing staff work four 10-hour days, then take either Monday or Friday off.

To thank Ms. Loyd-Chisley, the ambulatory surgery supervisor at the LSU Health Science Center in Monroe, La., for sharing her idea, we sent her a 4GB Apple iPod Nano.

"I'm very excited. My 10-year-old son [Otis] is going to be even more excited," says Ms. Loyd-Chisley.

Dan O'Connor