Better Health: Smart Health Commentary

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Better Health is committed to:

1. Ethical conduct - we are members of the Healthcare Blogger Code of Ethics
2. Scientific integrity - we are professionals committed to science
3. Transparency - we disclose our business model and any potential conflicts of interest
4. Compassion - our concern for patients drives our blogging
5. Charity -  10% of all post-tax profits go directly to non-profit organizations to improve the health and wellbeing of American citizens

About The Better Health Bloggers

1. Bloggers adhere to the Healthcare Blogger code of Ethics. This means that they clearly display their credentials, respect patient confidentiality, disclose all potential commercial conflicts of interest, cite sources where appropriate, and respond to comments with courtesy and respect.
2. Most participating bloggers have advanced degrees or formal training in healthcare or science (including MD, RN, NP, PhD, PharmD, MSc). Better Health occasionally features expert patient points of view, or articles written by science writers.
3. Bloggers are pro-science. All members of the Better Health network respect scientific integrity in healthcare, and strongly support evidence and science-based practices.
4. Bloggers write about health and medicine, not politics or religion (unless there is a direct tie to healthcare).
5. Bloggers are health commentators, not a news source. That means they have opinions, and make the case for them, but are not obligated to “represent both sides” if they don’t feel it’s indicated.
6. Bloggers maintain a strict separation between their written work and Better Health sponsorship and advertising. All blog posts are original work created at the sole discretion of the authors. They do not publish press releases or content from sponsors as if it were our own writing, and they do not allow sponsors to edit or otherwise influence their blog posts.

About Dr. Val Jones

Val Jones, M.D., is the President and CEO of Better Health, LLC. Most recently she was the Senior Medical Director of Revolution Health, a consumer health portal with over 120 million page views per month in its network. Prior to her work with Revolution Health, Dr. Jones served as the founding editor of Clinical Nutrition & Obesity, a peer-reviewed e-section of the online Medscape Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Jones was born in Greenwich, Conn., and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a master’s degree at Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas. She also participated in several research projects in biomedical imaging and vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

She graduated from medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and was a regular contributor to the medical student section of The Journal of the American Medical Association. She received a scholarship to conduct research in the department of plastic surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, as well as a summer research fellowship in pediatric surgery at the University of Southern California, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health. She also completed research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City in its Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

Dr. Jones was the principal investigator of several clinical trials relating to sleep, diabetes and metabolism, and she won first place in the Peter Cyrus Rizzo III research competition. She has worked part-time as a food critic in New York City, a medical cartoonist and Chief Resident of Rehabilitation Medicine at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.

Dr. Jones is the author of the popular blog, “Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason,” which won The Best New Medical Blog award in 2007. She is now the anchor blogger of the Better Health blog. She is also an editor of the Science Based Medicine blog and a contributor to The Health Care Blog. Her cartoons have been featured at Medscape, the P&S Journal, and the Placebo Journal. She was inducted as a member of the National Press Club in Washington, DC in July, 2008.

Dr. Jones has been quoted by various major media outlets, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times. She has been a guest on over 20 different radio shows, and was featured on CBS News. She is a regular contributor to ABC News Channel 8 in Washington, DC, volunteers with the Red Cross, and has recently joined DocTalker Family Medicine as a primary care physician in Vienna, Virginia.

Disclosures: Dr. Jones is a contributing editor for MedPage Today. (Dr. Jones has no other conflicts of interest related to grants, research support, consultant or advisory boards, speaker’s bureaus or stock shareholders.)