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Physicians Who Exercise Are More Likely To Encourage Patients To Follow Suit

Active, healthy medical students are more likely to prescribe physical activity to patients, according to research presented at a meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

A research team assessed objective markers of cardiometabolic health, including cardiorespiratory fitness and attitudes on physical activity counseling, in 577 freshman medical students in Colombia from 2005 to 2010. Students’ health and fitness were measured by waist circumference, body mass index, fasting glucose levels and lipid profiles, in addition to the 20-meter shuttle run test.

Attitudes toward physical activity counseling were gauged through students’ answers to “How relevant do you think it will be in your future medical practice to counsel your patients on physical activity?” and “I will have the ability to counsel my patients more credibly and effectively if I am physically active.” Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

New WHO Report: More Than 1 Billion People Are Disabled – Could You Be Next?

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank just revealed the first-ever global estimate of disability. The report suggests that at least 1 billion people are currently disabled, and about 1/5 of those are experiencing significant difficulties with their activities of daily living. Since  people with disabilities experience poorer health, lower educational achievements, fewer economic opportunities and higher rates of poverty than people without disabilities, this vulnerable segment of the population needs much closer attention.

I’m a physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) specialist by training, and there are only about 8000 of us in the United States. Some have called PM&R specialists: “primary care physicians for the disabled” and I think that’s a reasonable description. The task before us is daunting – with hundreds of millions of people who are not living their lives at maximum functional capacity, rehab physicians should be in great demand.

My experience is that while the demand is great, funding is limited. I’ve seen tragic cases of children being denied critical wheelchair parts, and Read more »

SCUBA Diving With A Disability

Charles James Shaffer (U.S. Navy) learning to SCUBA | Charles James Shaffer (U.S. Navy) learning to SCUBAOutdoor recreation is intended for everyone, and can be enormously beneficial for persons with disabilities. I am in awe of disabled skiers, climbers, divers, and others who have learned to coordinate their bodies and take great enjoyment and a sense of accomplishment from their wilderness activities.

It behooves everyone in the healthcare profession to be aware of certain special medical concerns for persons who are disabled physically or emotionally. Additionally, family members and friends are often well aware of what they can do to help in providing a joint effort to support the disabled.

At the 2010 Wilderness Medical Society annual meeting in Snowmass, Colorado, JenFu Cheng, MD (a pediatric rehabilitation specialist from NJ), gave a wonderful presentation on the medical aspects of (scuba) diving with a disability. He pointed out that there may be up to nine million certified recreational scuba divers in the United States alone. His presentation, rather than focusing on persons who are fully capable physically and emotionally, examined the lesser-known benefits of being in the water for individuals in need of additional support. For instance, aqua therapy (largely enacted in swimming pools) takes advantage of the buoyancy of water to allow a range of mobility that is not possible on land. For example, aquatic exercise has been shown to improve lung capacity and mobility skills in children with cerebral palsy. Read more »

This post, SCUBA Diving With A Disability, was originally published on Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..

Swearing In Moderation May Ease Pain

Swearing really can relieve pain, but only if one doesn’t do it daily.

Researchers at Keele University in England have considered this topic before, and most recently, they studied whether people who swear more often in everyday life get as much pain relief from cursing as those who swear less frequently.

My Hand, 1992 by styro via Flickr and Creative Commons licenseResearchers recruited 71 participants who completed a questionnaire that assessed how often they swore. Pain tolerance was assessed by how long participants could keep their unclenched hand in icy water (5° C, capped at 5 minutes) while repeating a chosen word. The word was either a swear word (self-selected from a list of five words the person might use after hitting their thumb with a hammer) or a control word (one of five they might use to describe a table). Interestingly, one person was excluded from the study because they did not list a swear word among their five choices.

Results appeared in NeuroReport.

Swearing increased pain tolerance and heart rate, and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing. But, the more often people swear in daily life, the less time they were able to hold their hand in the icy water when swearing compared with when not swearing. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Pimped Out Wheelchairs

atgw4.pngHumor site Cracked.com is profiling stories of five souped-up wheelchair projects. If you already have four wheels and a frame, might as well install a flame thrower on it. Or how about a motorcycle with a wheelchair docking system?

Link: The 5 Most Incredible Stories of Pimped Out Wheelchairs…

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

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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