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

Latest Posts

Do Childless Couples Have An Increased Risk Of Death And Mental Illness?

I hate scientific studies that don’t investigate the assumptions on which they’re based.  They do harm.  The findings slither around and get into the heads of people who treat people for the issues the research purports to understand.  And the misconceptions become protocol.  Here’s one example:

The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health published an article declaring a connection between childlessness and increased risk of death and mental illness.

Among the findings:

  • Having a child cut the risk of early death, particularly among women.
  • The early death rate from circulatory disease, cancers, and accidents among childless women was four times as high as that among those who gave birth to their own child, and 50% lower among women who adopted.
  • Similarly, rates of death were around twice as high among men who did not become parents, either biologically or through adoption.
  • The prevalence of mental illness in couples who adopted kids was around half that of other parents.

What the study states but doesn’t investigate is that for their research they used:  “population-based health and social registers, we conducted a follow-up study of 21 276 childless couples in in vitro fertility treatment.”

Do you hear the sound of “WHAT!??!” beginning to reverberate?

Might it be that couples who have been living in the infertility system for months, maybe years and have had their original life script expectations erased, have had doctors and drugs and timetables invade their intimate time, have spent gobs of money, and have had repeated cycles of devastating disappointment may be in a very different state than couples who have CHOSEN not to have children?

And let me state my assumption up front.  Choosing not to have children is not dysfunctional.  It’s not a psychological condition.  It’s not an ethical/moral lapse.  It’s not a sign of immaturity or selfishness.  It’s a legitimate choice.

It may be that the researchers’ findings do apply to couples who undergo infertility treatment in order to have a child.

But there is harm in assuming that all couples who don’t have children are at higher risk for death and mental illness.

***

This post originally appeared at Barbara’s blog, In Sickness As In Health.

Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Day Is A Success, Provides A Wide Range Of Information

This year’s Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Day was the largest and most successful yet, says event organizer Christine Rein. One hundred fifty participants attended the event, which was held Saturday, November 12, 2011 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia.

The program provided information about the pancreas and its function, genetics, risk stratification and screening, cancer-therapy breakthroughs, surgical options, cysts, pre-cancerous tumors and more.

Lecture topics included: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Columbia University Department of Surgery Blog*

E. Coli Outbreak Is Traced Back To Ready-To-Bake Cookie Dough

The investigation of a multistate outbreak of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O157:H7 (STEC) that sickened 77 people and hospitalized 35 was traced back to ready-to-bake cookie dough, prompting infectious disease specialists to ask for stronger pasteurization and more consumer warnings.

like smack by Robert S. Donovan via Flickr and a Creative Commons licenseA report in Clinical Infectious Diseases outlined the outbreak and the work done by national and local health officials to track down the source.

No single source could be identified for certain for the outbreak. But one brand of dough was present in 94% of cases, and three nonoutbreak STEC strains were isolated from it, leading to a recall of 3.6 million packages of the cookie dough.

The detective work began with May 19, 2009, through PulseNet, the network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by the CDC. It identified Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Army Searches For Rabid Animal That Infected And Killed A Soldier

Wow, that is awful beyond belief.

Army seeking troops bitten by stray animals following rabies death – Army – Stripes.

SEOUL – The Army is redoubling its search for anyone who might have been bitten by a wild animal in Iraq or Afghanistan following the Aug. 31 death of a soldier from rabies, the service’s public health command stated Wednesday.

“The death of this soldier is very tragic, and we are taking actions to Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*

Researchers Use Twitter To Track Diseases And Public Health Issues

A researcher has used social media to track attitudes about vaccination and how they correlate with vaccination rates, in the process creating a novel model to track a variety of disease states.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence that social networking can be used to track diseases and other natural disasters that affect public health. Earlier this year, researchers used Twitter to track rapidly-evolving public sentiment about H1N1 influenza, and found that tweets correlated with actual disease activity. Before that, researchers analyzed how Twitter was used to disseminate information (and misinformation) about flu trends.

In the latest study, 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