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Harvard Medical School Provides Tips For Improving Bladder Control

I was hiking in the woods recently with a group of women friends when something caught my attention. It wasn’t an interesting bird or plant, but the surprising number of “pit stops” my friends needed to make.

Their frequent detours into the bushes struck me because I had just finished working on Better Bladder and Bowel Control, the latest Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School. According to the report, incontinence is the unintended loss of urine or feces that is significant enough to make it difficult to do ordinary activities without frequent trips to the restroom. In the United States, about 32 million men and women have some degree of incontinence. For women, incontinence is a common but rarely discussed result of childbirth and aging—that could explain the pit stops of my hiking friends, who were all mid-life mothers. For men, incontinence is most often a side effect of treatment for prostate disorders.

Many things can go wrong with the complex system that allows us to control urination. Read more »

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

Managing Diabetes: Dealing With The Lows

For a good, long time, I ran higher than usual on purpose because of my focus on the baby and my fear of low blood sugars while I was responsible for her care.  In the last few months, I’ve started to lower my blood sugar goals to reclaim a little more control and tighten up that freaking standard deviation.

Which also means that my sensitivity to low blood sugars is tossed out the window once again, along with any whisper of a symptom.  (“Pssssst.  You’re low.”)

So these lows are starting to creep back into rotation.  For a few weeks, it was Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Why Hospitals And Physicians Should Get Serious About Patient-Centered Care

Health care professionals are a cynical lot.   We joke about the “fad or buzz word of the month”…usually some vague concept heralded by the powers on high.   Our job is to promote the idea…knowing full well that the “next big thing” is probably right around the corner.

Take “Patient-Centered”…it sure feels like a buzz word.   I suspect most hospital and physician executives, and their ad agency partners, would agree.  But this time things are very different.

Why Hospitals and Physicians Should Get Serious About Patient-Centered Care

Reason #1 – Patients Are Starting To Discover That Their Doctors & Hospitals Are Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*

The Battle Begins Between States And Feds Over Control Of Health Insurance

The battle between the states and federal government begins.

Yesterday, Illinois Insurance Director Michael McRaith told an audience that state insurance regulation is “under attack,” but that the states will prevail because they “do it better.”

Following a line of reasoning I highlighted last week, McRaith suggested adding federal regulation onto the existing state system would be duplicative, burdensome and fraught with the potential for conflict.  McRaith said that insurance was such a uniquely local business that the states were best suited to regulate it. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*

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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