March 20th, 2010 by Edwin Leap, M.D. in Better Health Network, Humor, Opinion, True Stories
Tags: General Medicine, Inactivity, Inertia, Overexertion, Personal Life, Relaxation, Stress, Weariness
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Recently, my wife and I went away for a weekend. I can’t remember the last time we packed our bags and left the children with their grandparents for two whole nights. Frankly, our preference is always to do things with them when we can, because in addition to loving them, we like them! But we decided to seize the moment and take that rare opportunity to go on an extended “date.”
I know that it must have been a while since we had been away, because we couldn’t stop smiling. We laughed and shopped. We ate quiet meals together without negotiating the best restaurant for four children and two adults. We held hands, but no one else was touching us, pulling us in different directions, or asking us to find anything. It was positively, delightfully spooky. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
March 19th, 2010 by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
Tags: Addiction Medicine, Cigarettes, Industry, Primary Care, Quitting Smoking, smoking, Tobacco
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The tobacco industry and its products (primarily cigarettes) has caused the premature deaths of over 13 million people in the United States since the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report which concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer. Those health professionals, who are familiar with these statistics, and with the great lengths the industry has gone to to try to cover them up, have little sympathy for the industry’s current decline in the U.S. Many want nothing more than the annihilation of the tobacco industry. This is all the more understandable for those people who have seen patients and loved ones suffer and die from a smoking-caused illness. Some may feel that the tobacco industry and those in it do not deserve to continue to make money from such a deadly business. Read more »
This post, How To Get The Tobacco Industry To Stop Selling Cigarettes, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Jonathan Foulds, Ph.D..
March 19th, 2010 by EvanFalchukJD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
Tags: Britain, Healthcare reform, NHS, P4P, Pay For Performance, QoF, Quality
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The Jobbing Doctor, a primary care doctor in the UK, writes about the British version of what Americans call “Pay for Performance,” or “P4P.”
He says something I’ve said many times before (like here, here, and here). Which is this: incentives fail because they try to treat medicine as an assembly line process, when it’s not.
But what’s most interesting about his post is that it could have been written by a doctor from anyplace on the planet Earth.
The Jobbing Doctor talks about a UK program that started in 2004 called the Quality and Outcomes Framework, or “QoF.” Now, the American “P4P” is a much more catchy name, so score one for American marketing. But it doesn’t matter what you call it – that which we call a rose would, by any other name smell as sweet. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*
March 18th, 2010 by Happy Hospitalist in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
Tags: Dairy, Diet, Food and Nutrition, Lobby, Meat, Vegetables, Washington
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A reader pointed me out to this current food pyramid subsidy model showing what the daily recommended servings are for each category of food compared with how the federal farm subsidy programs actually work against the goal of a healthy nation. You can click on the image to enlarge it and take a close look at how powerful lobby groups have become.
There is no reason why dairy and meat farmers should be getting 50 billion dollars in farm subsidies. And if we are playing the subsidy game (which I think is a fraud), why are vegetables, one of the most healthy things we can put in our mouth, getting slaughtered at the table of entitlement handouts? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*
March 17th, 2010 by Bryan Vartabedian, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion
Tags: Blogging, Engagement, Health, Health 2.0, Sermo, Social Media, Twitter
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The time is approaching when businesses will want to capture the eyes and minds of physicians in the social world. Throwaways and mailouts will give way to more current channels of communication. Friends in the health
industry ask how they should connect with physicians using social media channels.
The rules really aren’t much different but here are a couple of things the consultants will never tell you:
I’m not on Sermo. While Sermo and Ozmosis may seem like obvious targets, physician specific verticals are tricky. The road to the successful physician network is littered with the skeletons of startups who went broke trying to capture our eyeballs. While its hard to ignore Forrester’s bullish analysis of services like Sermo, I don’t
expect the enthusiasm to be sustained. Look to the next iteration of IMedExchange to possibly be a game changer
in this area. Until then, the connectors who are going to get you where you want to go aren’t necessarily hangin’
with other doctors. They’re found in the wild. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*
