Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Medical News Of The Obvious: Music Impacts Behavior

Students exposed to songs with a positive message were more likely to help others after listening. A British study randomized students into groups who listened to socially conscious songs or those with negative or nonsense meanings. Then, a researcher pretended to knock pencils off the table by accident. Those who’d listened to positive songs helped more quickly and picked up almost five times as many pencils. Other subjects were asked to help with another research project, and three times as many volunteered.

Help! by the Beatles and Michael Jackson’s Heal the World were cited in the study, which is in press at the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Let us know your favorite “help” songs that get you through the day.

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

ACP News Highlights: Healthcare Reform And Primary Care Shortages

ACP Internist’s wrap-up of current events continues with ping-pong for health care reform, how the recession curbed health care spending and how legislation preventing patient-dumping can hurt the physicians required to provide treatment.

Health care reform
Ping pong project by mknowles via FlickrNegotiations for health care reform will avoid the formal conference procedure and instead negotiate directly. The “ping-pong” talks, which don’t have to be public, will send the bill back-and-forth between the House and Senate until both chambers agree. C-SPAN wants to televise the negotiations. The goal is to pass the legislation by a State of the Union speech scheduled for February. (Los Angeles Times, C-SPAN, Baltimore Sun)

The recession did what Congress has struggled to do–slow spending for health care. Spending on physicians and services rose by 4.4% in 2008 over the previous year, the slowest increase in 50 years of tracking by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Still, spending totaled $2.3 trillion, or more than 16% of the entire economy. The credit freeze in the most recent recession may have dissuaded people from paying large deductibles. (AP, USA Today) Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles