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

Latest Posts

Mental Health Support For Pregnant Women May Save Two Lives

In a recent medical study, violent deaths of pregnant women outnumber traditional causes of maternal deaths such as post partum hemorrhage or pre-eclampsia . I am not surprised. In September 2010, I wrote an article entitled 7 Reasons Why Pregnancy Becomes a Deadly Affair after an 18 year old college student almost lost her life at the hands of her football-playing boyfriend because she became pregnant. Pregnancy is not a benign act and 50% of them are unplanned.

Dr. Christie Palladino, an ob-gyn physician at the Georgia Health Sciences University and main researcher of the study, looked at data from 17 states and found 94 pregnancy-related suicides and 139 homicides from 2003-2007. Approximately 45 % of suicides occur during pregnancy, often precipitated by Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Linda Burke-Galloway*

How Can iPhone’s Siri Aid The Medical Professional?

Next week,  it will be my turn to write our article for the Clinical Psychiatry News website.  Over there, we try to have our writing more specifically aimed at an audience of psychiatrists.  I’m going to be writing an article on Siri and the Psychiatrist….in honor of my new iPhone 4s and the “personal assistant” function named Siri.  Okay, I’m obsessed.  Everyday, I find new things it can help me with.  Today, I asked it, “What’s the meaning of life.”  What, you don’t ask your cell phone the finer existential questions?  Siri answered, “All available evidence suggests chocolate.”  Wow!  How old is Liza Minelli?  65 years, 7 months, 20 days.  Calculate a tip? No problem.  Convert Celius to Fahrenheit?  A cinch.  And she takes dictation.  “Siri, please text Patient A Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Americans Taking More Antidepressants Than Ever

Remember when the best-selling book Listening to Prozac came out almost 20 years ago?

Now Americans aren’t just reading about Prozac. They are taking it and other antidepressants (Celexa, Effexor, Paxil, Zoloft, to name just a few) in astounding numbers.

According to a report released yesterday by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the rate of antidepressant use in this country among teens and adults (people ages 12 and older) increased by almost 400% between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008.

The federal government’s health statisticians figure that Read more »

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

Psychiatrist Wants To Know Your Thoughts On Bipolar Disorder

I’d like to ask your help for a moment.  I’m going to write a blog post for this week’s Clinical Psychiatry News on Bipolar Disorder.  I’d like to know how you see the term used, or the symptoms that are hallmarks of the illness for you.  If you respond as my favorite commenter, “Anonymous,” could I ask that you define yourself…psychiatrist, psychologist, pediatrician, patient with bipolar disorder, friend of someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder….

Also, please just off the top of your head, I can read DSM or Google myself, and I’m more interested in Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*

Managing Stress With Meditation

In the early 1970s, when Dr. Herbert Benson was defining and testing the techniques he presented to the world in his revolutionary book, The Relaxation Response, I was a hippie teenager learning transcendental meditation (TM). Flash forward about 40 years and I’m sitting in an amphitheater packed with a few hundred medical students, faculty, and staffers from Harvard Medical School listening to the iconic director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute explain the myriad benefits of the relaxation response.

The relaxation response is a self-induced quieting of brain activity. It leads to a body-wide slowdown and a feeling of well-being that have measurably positive effects on disorders caused by stress or made worse by it, including high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms, and many digestive disorders. As Dr. Benson describes in Stress Management, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health 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…

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