About

About Better Health

Better Health is a network of popular health bloggers, brought together by Dr. Val Jones, founder and CEO. Participating bloggers maintain their own individual blog sites, but offer a portion of their content to Better Health for syndication purposes.

Better Health’s mission is to support and promote healthcare professional bloggers, provide insightful and trustworthy health commentary, and help to inform health policy makers about the provider point of view on healthcare reform, science, research, and patient care.

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 others.  Charitable donations have been made to:

    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 They do not publish press releases or content from sponsors as if it were our own writing, and they do not allow sponsors to edit or otherwise influence their blog posts.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, a medical blogging network that has included content partners such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American College of Physicians, and Harvard Health Publications. 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.

    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 was a regular contributor to ABC News Channel 8 in Washington, DC, a national nutrition coach for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, a part-time telemedicine physician with eDocAmerica, the host of a radio show and podcast called “Healthy Vision with Dr. Val Jones,” and is a member of DocTalker Family Medicine. She is board certified in Physical Medicine And Rehabilitation and travels across the country providing care for hospitalized patients through various locum tenens agencies.

    Disclosures: Dr. Jones is a paid consultant for Johnson & Johnson Vision Care.