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

Latest Posts

The CDC’s Social Media Toolkit

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published the newest “Health Communicator’s Social Media Toolkit.” From the CDC:

A guide to using social media to improve reach of health messages, increase access to your content, further participation with audiences, and advance transparency to improve health communication efforts.

The guide is truly fantastic, detailed, and comprehensive.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Hospitals And Social Media

Ed Bennett has been managed a huge and comprehensive list of U.S. hospitals using social media. In the newest update, Hospital accounts on LinkedIn are now also tracked in addition to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and blogs.

Current stats:

871 hospitals total

  • 421 YouTube channels
  • 679 Facebook pages
  • 648 Twitter accounts
  • 417 LinkedIn accounts
  • 94 blogs

You can also browse by state. The number of hospitals using each account is below:

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Inherited Health: Building Family Medical Histories

More than a year ago I wrote about AccessDNA, which now changed focus and became Inherited Health. Jordanna Joaquina, M.S., C.G.C., Director of Genetics and Co-Founder of Inherited Health, shared what kind of changes they implemented into the site:

— We have created an easy-to-use and secure tool that allows people and their biological relatives to collectively create and update their family health history together.

— We then analyze the family history information to create a personal health guide, which identifies hereditary disease risks and provide actionable guidance about how to lower these risks for each family member.

— We also provide a summary of the family health history that can be printed and shared with doctors and helps avoid repeatedly filling out health history forms at doctors office and improves the accuracy of the information provided because of collaborative family effort.

Click HERE to see an image of a whole health report, with all the details and disease risks.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

The Rapper Doctor

I just came across ZDoggMD and had to watch some of his videos, which are absolutely fantastic! But I’m speechless now. Anyway, who is this genius?

I’m a hospital physician and a purveyor of fine medical satire. I strive to practice evidence-based comedy…everything on this site has been clinically proven to be slightly funnier than placebo.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

Sounds Of HIV: Genetic Code, Musically Translated

A few months ago, Alexandra Pajak, a graduate student at the University of Georgia, contacted me about an album of music based on the DNA of the HIV virus she was about to release. I feel lucky that the album is just on its way to my CD player right now.

You can buy the album on Amazon (release date is October 26.) Note that some of the proceeds will go to the Emory Vaccine Center, which conducts research for an HIV vaccine. If you wonder how it was made, here’s the explanation:

Sounds of HIV is a musical translation of the genetic code of HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. Every segment of the virus is assigned music pitches that correspond to the segment’s scientific properties. In this way, the sounds reflect the true nature of the virus. When listening from beginning to end, the listener hears the entire genome of HIV.

In English, the nucleotides Adenine, Cytosine, Uracil/Thymine, and Guanine are abbreviated with the letters A, C, T, and G. Since A, C, and G are also musical pitches in the Western melodic scale, these pitches were assigned to the matching nucleotides. To form two perfect fifths (C-G and D-A), “D” was arbitrarily assigned to musically represent Uracil. I assigned the pitches of the A minor scale to the amino acids based on their level of attraction to water.

On Sounds of HIV, depending on the track, only nucleotides and/or amino acids “play” as music. Tracks 1 and 10 are based on the first and last nucleotides of the RNA chain. Tracks 2-9 “play” the proteins and sometimes the nucleotides on top of the proteins.

*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*

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