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Elizabeth Taylor And Understanding Heart Failure

Elizabeth-Taylor

The condition that took Elizabeth Taylor’s life affects millions of Americans.

Reports of Elizabeth Taylor’s death focused, as they should, on her life, not on her death from heart failure. But given how common this condition is—the American Heart Association says nearly 6 million Americans are living with heart failure and it kills about 300,000 each year—a little attention to it might be a good idea.

What is heart failure?

The term “heart failure” is a scary one, conjuring up images of a heart that is suddenly unable to work. In truth, it represents a gradual decline in the heart’s ability to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. As the heart weakens, all parts of the body suffer the consequences. Read more »

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

How Are Physicians Using Social Media?

The time is approaching when businesses will want to capture the eyes and minds of physicians in the social world.  Throwaways and mailouts will give way to more current channels of communication.  Friends in the health
industry ask how they should connect with physicians using social media channels.

The rules really aren’t much different but here are a couple of things the consultants will never tell you:

I’m not on Sermo.  While Sermo and Ozmosis may seem like obvious targets, physician specific verticals are tricky.   The road to the successful physician network is littered with the skeletons of startups who went broke trying to capture our eyeballs.  While its hard to ignore Forrester’s bullish analysis of services like Sermo, I don’t
expect
the enthusiasm to be sustained.  Look to the next iteration of IMedExchange to possibly be a game changer
in this area.  Until then, the connectors who are going to get you where you want to go aren’t necessarily hangin’
with other doctors.  They’re found in the wild. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Children’s Health Fact Sheets: Californian Kids Not Doing Well

The National Initiative for Children’s HealthCare Quality (NICHQ) has a website where you can find fact sheets about the state of children’s health in each state. The State Fact Sheets provide the most recent national and state-based data regarding health in addition to childhood overweight and obesity prevalence from data collected in 2007 by the National Survey of Children’s Health.

For overall health in California the (2007) fact sheet suggests that compared to national averages, children in CA are:

  • less likely to be in excellent or good health; Read more »

This post, Children’s Health Fact Sheets: Californian Kids Not Doing Well, was originally published on Healthine.com by Nancy Brown, Ph.D..

Orac Needs A Movie Deal. . .

. . .or a spread in Playgirl.

Huh?

Orac has a nice essay today for your Christmas Eve reading about a USA Today article yesterday by Liz Szabo that called out celebrities for their pseudoscientific proclamations and advice entitled, “Are celebrities crossing the line on medical advice?”

So that’s where I came up with this thought: it would be great if some folks who talked science-based sense became celebrities so they’d at least have the same platform to counter people like Jenny McCarthy. On his comment thread, I suggested that we can only hope that Orac someday gets a movie deal and acquires the public celebrity that some of these jokers have. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata*

Being Healthy Means Living Healthy, Not Spending More

I opened a fortune cookie the other day, expecting it to say something relatively nonsensical or meaningless, only to have it read:

“Money is not everything. You can buy a doctor but not heath.”

This fortune tells the story of more people than most of us can count, including ourselves at times. All too often we fall into trap of thinking that the more we spend on health the healthier we will become. Not true. In fact, good health is a state of mind and need not cost more than time for exercise, time to give ourselves the R&R we need to nurture our souls, the price of food to eat for proper weight and overall good health, and the occasional co-pay for our primary care physician and needed prescriptions.

We can toss money at vitamins, pricey health clubs, personal trainers, diets, alternative health treatments, doctors, second opinions, medications, prescription and nonprescription, as many people do, but those things can’t get us healthy. More times than not, they only produce the facade of good health. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr Gwenn Is In*

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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