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The Truth About Vitamins And Supplements: How To Protect Yourself

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Prepared Patient Publication Logo Vitamins, herbs and other dietary supplements are sold as natural alternatives to pharmaceuticals and many people turn to them in an attempt to improve their health. Others seek supplements to lose weight or after hearing that they can help with serious medical conditions. These products are now used at least monthly by more than half of all Americans—and their production, marketing and sales have become a $23.7 billion industry, according to the Nutrition Business Journal.

What Are Dietary Supplements and How Are They Regulated?
98-year-old Bob Stewart, a retired podiatrist and senior Olympian, credits his use of supplements for his healthy aging. Writer Betsy McMillan, a mother of two now adult children, however, nearly suffered permanent liver damage due to a supplement that contained potentially fatal levels of niacin.

Unlike pharmaceuticals—which must be FDA-approved as safe and effective before they can be marketed—supplements are considered as foods by regulators and assumed to be safe until proven otherwise. Although pharmaceutical manufacturers face inspections to ensure that the right dose is in the right pill without dangerous contaminants, supplements do not undergo such intense government scrutiny.

Despite many reports of health problems, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*

Study Suggests The Importance Of Maintaining A Low Resting Heart Rate

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When you sit quietly, your heart slips into the slower, steady pace known as your resting heart rate. A new study suggests that an increase in this rate over time may be a signal of heart trouble ahead.

Your heart rate changes from minute to minute. It depends on whether you are standing up or lying down, moving around or sitting still, stressed or relaxed. Your resting heart rate, though, tends to be stable from day to day. The usual range for resting heart rate is anywhere between 60 and 90 beats per minute. Above 90 is considered high.

Many factors influence resting heart rate. Genes play a role. Aging tends to speed it up. Regular exercise tends to slow it down. (In his prime, champion cyclist Lance Armstrong had a resting heart rate of just 32 beats per minute.) Stress, medications, and medical conditions also influence the heart rate.

In today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers from Norway report Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*

Should A Salaried Physician’s Decreased Efficiency Be A Concern?

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For centuries, physician practices have been small  business enterprises built on the sweat equity of intensive medical training.  It was an economic reward system that often had physicians sacrificing family life for patient care.  It continues today as the  foundation of  fee for service.  We know it as the eat what you kill model of health care.

In the last ten years, physician practices have seen a dramatic shift from independent business practices to hospital owned practices. With that shift has come a titanic move toward the salary vs productivity  compensation model.

Is this a good thing?  Is a salaried physician better than a productivity based physician? That question can’t be answered because good depends on which part of the medical industrial complex you belong to and what you consider good.

As a physician, the answer on whether to become a salaried vs productivity based physician can only be answered after one defines what they value most.  We know, across the board, that physicians who work in a 100% productivity model earn Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*

Research Regarding Infant Deaths Linked To Japan’s Fukushima Meets Controversy

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nuclear radiation, reporting on health, fukushima, vicente navarro, michael moyerLast week, I wrote about controversial research linking fallout from Japan’s earthquake-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant to infant deaths in the United States.

The research, which was harshly criticized by Scientific American’s Michael Moyer and others, was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of International Health Services, and I had asked the journal’s editor-in-chief Vicente Navarro for his response to the criticisms.

Navarro, professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, emailed me this comment today: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Reporting on Health - Barbara Feder Ostrov's Health Journalism Blog*

Survey Reveals Just How Stressed Physicians Really Are

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The vast majority of U.S. physicians are moderately to severely stressed or burned out on an average day, with moderate to dramatic increases in the past three years, according to a survey.

Almost 87% of all respondents reported being moderately to severely stressed and/or burned out on an average day using a 10-point Likert scale, and 37.7% specifying severe stress and/or burnout.

Almost 63% of respondents said they were more stressed and/or burned out than three years ago, using a 5-point Likert scale, compared with just 37.1% who reported feeling the same level of stress. The largest number of respondents (34.3%) identified themselves as “much more stressed” than they were three years ago.

The survey of physicians conducted by Physician Wellness Services, a company specializing in employee assistance and intervention services, and Cejka Search, a recruitment firm, was conducted across the U.S., and across all specialties, in September 2011. Respondents Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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