If you want to improve the health of Americans, why not look around the world for places where people live the longest, healthiest lives and try to copy whatever it is they’re doing? That’s exactly what Dan Buettner has done. He is the author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.
Examples of areas he calls “blue zones” are Sardinia, Okinawa, Costa Rica (the Nicoya Peninsula), Ikaria (a Greek island), and Loma Linda, California. Things residents have in common include exercising regularly, eating more vegetables and less meat, engaging in social networking, and having a sense of purpose. Read more »
Thanks to a tip from FOX Business Network, Bill Gates has just announced that his Foundation is doubling its financial support ($10 billion over the next 10 years) to save children from vaccine-preventable illnesses on a global scale. This is very good news, and probably the best use of Gates Foundation money from an ROI perspective in healthcare.
Why aren’t Americans in the streets, demanding reform of a health care system that is providing inadequate care for millions, wildly inefficient, and gradually bankrupting our country? A major reason: proponents of reform have lost control over the message because people think it’s too complicated to understand. Confused about important details of the proposals, the public is susceptible to misrepresentations by opponents. Read more »
Nine days after the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti, media attention is beginning to wane. What will happen next, when the cameras are off? Read more »
January is thyroid disease awareness month, and I was invited to educate the good people at Let’s Talk Live about this often-forgotten little gland. For this segment, I used Twitter to poll my friends about interesting thyroid factoids. Thanks to Nick Genes@blogborygmi who reminded me of the connection between carpal tunnel syndrome and hypothyroidism and to Meredith Gould@meredithgould who mentioned that depression sometimes has a thyroid-related cause.
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…
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…
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…
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…
