Grand Rounds will be hosted right here at “home” at Better Health on Tuesday, March 22th, 2011.
Please send your blog-post submissions via e-mail by 12:00AM midnight CT on Saturday, March 19th, to: maria.gifford@getbetterhealth.com.
Please include:
“Submission for Grand Rounds” in the subject line of your e-mail.
Your name (blog author), the name of your blog, and the URL of your specific blog-post submission.
A short summary (1 to 3 sentences) of your blog post.
There’s no specific theme for this edition of Grand Rounds — just send us something really smart or deep or profound that will move us and make us all think harder about health and medicine.
For more information, please see the Grand Rounds Submissions Guidelines. We look forward to receiving your submissions and featuring them here next week. Thank you!
– Maria Gifford, Director of Content, Better Health
Regular readers of the Better Health blog are familiar with the shoddy science behind homeopathy (an outdated system of “medical” treatment that relies on water dilution and shaking to ‘”strengthen” the effects of drugs). But because homeopathic placebos have been marketed so successfully (even receiving paid endorsements from hockey teams), the Ontario government has decided to regulate homeopathic practices.
In this terrific news exposé, reporters ask if it’s appropriate for the government to regulate health scams. In doing so, are they not lending credibility to modern-day snake oil? Check out these videos and let me know what you think. Is there a roll for government in regulating homeopathy?
I’m very pleased to announce that Harvard Health Publications (HHP) is Better Health’s newest content resource. Soon readers of the Better Health blog will enjoy contributions from the HHP team. We believe that their insight and perspectives will be a great addition to our unique collection of healthcare voices online.
The Better Health blog is a continuation of “Dr. Val And The Voice Of Reason,” first launched in 2006. At the time, I was inspired to start a blog because of the baffling amount of misinformation that my patients were finding on the Internet. It was a David-versus-Goliath enterprise, but I felt duty-bound to do what I could to provide a counterpoint to media hype, fear mongering, and snake oil salesmen.
Over the past four years I’ve been humbled by the number of others who have chosen to join me on my quest. I’m no longer a single voice, but rather a facilitator of a movement designed to empower patients with trustworthy health commentary. Currently the Better Health blog offers content from over 100 contributing authors, most of whom also manage their own blog sites. In addition, I am a proud contributor to Science-Based Medicine, a blog devoted to an in-depth review of controversial therapies and practices.
HHP shares my desire to promote evidence-based information in an accessible format. Their goal is:
” …to bring people around the world the most current health information that is authoritative, trustworthy, and accessible, drawing on the expertise of the 9,000 faculty physicians at Harvard Medical School.”
I applaud this commitment to journalistic excellence and medical integrity and I’m proud to promote their efforts to empower patients on a national and global scale.
A warm welcome to the HHP team, and a big “thank you” to the readers who have inspired me to keep writing all these years.
The event, coinciding with ADD/ADHD Awareness Week, was a panel discussion about the impact ADHD has on our society. It was sponsored by Shire, in partnership with the Entertainment Industries Council (EIC) and the Lab School of Washington [Disclosure: I received a stipend for covering the event.]
Below are interviews Rob and I did with some of the panelists.
Kevin Pho interview with Michele Novotni, Ph.D., ADHD Expert and Former Attention Deficit Disorder Association (ADDA) President:
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…
Grand Rounds will be hosted right here at “home” at Better Health on Tuesday, March 22th, 2011.
