For decades, research has suggested that people with positive emotions may live longer and healthier lives. An analysis of the autobiographical writings of 180 Catholic nuns found those with the most positive feelings in their early twenties had the greatest chance of being alive sixty years later. Now, the first study of its kind has linked positive emotions to a lower risk of coronary heart disease. Read more »
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (STC) has released a report, Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, in which they recommend that the NHS stop funding homeopathy. The report is a rare commodity – a thoroughly science-based political document.
The committee went beyond simply stating that homeopathy does not work, and revealed impressive insight into the ethical, practical, and scientific problems caused by NHS support for an implausible and ineffective pseudoscience. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
Quality and safety metrics that will specifically affect neurologists/neurohospitalists are coming in the next few years, and neurohospitalists need to be involved in the discussion of what those metrics are, warned S. Andrew Josephson of USCF during a neurohospitalists session at the Stroke 2010 conference yesterday.
He urged the audience to consider the current metric of “time to antibiotics administration for pneumonia,” which seems like a reasonable quality metric on the surface. To get compliance rates up, many hospitals give antibiotics to anyone with a little sputum, a cough, a fever, etc., as soon as he/she arrives at the ED. Thus, resistance rates have risen along with administration rates, because people are getting the drugs when they have things like bronchitis, not just pneumonia. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
If your teen is seriously considering a college, I now highly recommend setting up an overnight visit with the admissions department. Here is our experience: while on this college visit my daughter spent the night as a guest with two sophomores at the college we are visiting. We thought it would be a great way to get a feel for what it is like to live on campus in this little town and really get a feel for whether or not she “fits in.”
Upon arrival, we read and signed the paper about the rules, she was given her itinerary, meal tickets, appointment with a faculty member in the department she was interested in, and information about the class she was going to visit the following morning. The two young women who were hosting her introduced themselves and off she went – not a glance back – into the next grand adventure. The admission director smiled at me knowing I was holding back the tears – excited for her and knowing my life would never be the same. That evening my younger daughter, her friend and I saw a movie, had dinner and my younger daughter congratulated me when I did not text her older sister to say goodnight. Read more »
This post, Teens Can Give College An Overnight Trial Run, was originally published on Healthine.com by Nancy Brown, Ph.D..
The American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) describes itself as:
Welcome to the American Board of Emergency Medicine (ABEM) public website. ABEM certifies qualifying physicians who specialize in Emergency Medicine and is a member board of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). ABMS certification is sought and earned by physicians on a voluntary basis. ABEM and other ABMS member boards certify only those physicians who meet high educational, professional standing, and examination standards. ABEM and other ABMS member boards are not membership associations.
The thing I’d like to bring your attention to is that it’s a Voluntary organization. For a voluntary organization they’re adding lots of requirements without asking members… Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
