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The Globe’s Health Champions

Newsweek published an interesting and interactive infographic showing the rankings of countries based on different parameters such as quality of life, education, and health. Regarding the healthcare system, guess which country is in the first place?

Here’s the top 10:

1. Japan
2. Switzerland
3. Sweden
4. Spain
5. Italy
6. Australia
7. Singapore
8. Norway
9. New Zealand
10. The Netherlands

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Holding Hands Is Good For The Heart

A trained observer is what most electrophysiologists are. And being a trained observer carries over into real life, as would the handiness of a plumber, or the strength of a brick layer, or the wordsmithing of a journalist.

Will and I drive past our house.

“Where are we going now,” he asks in the exasperated tone of a 13 year old.

I need to take a picture.

Why?

Because middle-aged patients who’ve recently realized that their life is half over often seek clues to longevity.

Let’s take stressed-out, middle-aged patients who’ve somehow been rendered free of AF (maybe by a skillful ablation, or more likely just happenstance). Let’s also say they don’t smoke, drink excessively, have normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar, and aren’t obese. Is there anything else they can do to live longer, they often ask? Yes, I believe there is. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*

The Impact Of Attitude On Life

Life sometimes gets in the way of daily posting. Specifically, the treadmill of life sometimes roars too fast.

But as I strolled through the hospital this morning, there was a plain piece of white paper taped to the wall around the nurses station. Although I’m not overly religious (and even highly conflicted about which rituals are the right ones), these words from a pastor/celebrity stopped me for a moment:

Attitude

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than success, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill.

It will make or break a company, a church, or a home. The remarkable thing is that we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day.

We cannot change the past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is plan on the one thing that we have, and that is our attitude.

I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it.  And so it is with you. We are in charge of our attitudes.

As a cardiologist programmed to “alert” most of the time, words such as these help me. I haven’t seen the studies yet, but I’m guessing that positive attitudes reduce inflammation, which is good for our atria, and our arteries.

JMM

*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*

Healthy And Fit Without Ruining Your Life?

I consider myself a relatively fit person. Of course, “relatively” is still relative. I try to watch what I eat. I usually exercise five days a week. Heck, I’ve even run a couple half-marathons. But the rest of my days are pretty much sedentary. I sit in a climate-controlled office staring at my computer screen. I make dinner in my highly-automated kitchen. After dinner I sit in the living room sipping wine and watching TV or talking to Greta. Then I go to bed and start the process over again.

That’s not a whole lot of activity for a creature that evolved for endurance. Over a 50 mile course, a race between a man and a horse can be quite competitive. Millions of people all over the world do hard manual labor day in and day out. But millions of others don’t set aside any time for exercise. In my half-marathons, I’ve finished in the top half of competitors, so compared to a lot of people, I must be doing something right. Right? Or do my sedentary days outweigh my occasional bursts of activity? I exercise an average of 4 hours per week. That’s less than 4 percent of my total waking time. Is that really enough to stay fit? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Daily Monthly*

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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