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Embrace Life With Your Seatbelt

Watch this gorgeous video from the UK promoting seatbelt use. And buckle up!

*This blog post was originally published at The Blog that Ate Manhattan*

Getting Good Sleep

Our busy lifestyles often aren’t conducive to getting the recommended amount of sleep at night. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep every night.

Dr. Kenneth Berg of the Mayo Clinic states that people who get less than seven hours of sleep per night have a higher mortality than those who have adequate sleeping habits.

Inadequate sleep has been linked to increased risk of motor vehicle accidents, an increase in body mass index and a greater likelihood of obesity due to an increased appetite caused by sleep deprivation, increased risk of diabetes and heart problems, increased risk for psychiatric conditions including depression and substance abuse, and decreased ability to pay attention, react to signals or remember new information. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at eDocAmerica*

Connecting The Dots: Deer, Car Accidents, Lyme Disease, And You

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds over at InstaPundit, I learned that motor vehicle collisions with deer are up 18% compared to 5 years ago.

State Farm calculates the chances of a West Virginia vehicle striking a deer over the next 12 months at 1 in 39. Michigan remains second on that list.  The likelihood of a specific vehicle striking a deer there is 1 in 78.  Pennsylvania (1 in 94) and Iowa (1 in 104) remain third and fourth respectively.  Montana (1 in 104) moved up three places to fifth.

Now, aside from the fact that deer present challenges to our driving friends in West Virgina, Michigan, and beyond – they are also the definitive host for Lyme disease. Ticks feed on the deer (who, by the way, become infected with Lyme spirochetes but suffer no symptoms) and on unsuspecting humans – passing the infection along. And so when deer populations increase, Lyme disease often does too. Read more »

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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