An assumption of my new web show, CBSDOC.COM, is that people are aching for mature discussions about health. This week I went to Central Park in New York City to talk to passersby about their sexuality, hoping to strike the right tone. I brought along two female gynecologists – Dr. Lori Warren and Dr. Rebecca Booth – experts who flew all the way from Louisville, Kentucky to help me out. Dr. Booth has written a book called “The Venus Week: Discover the Powerful Secret of Your Cycle At Any Age” that explains how hormones affect women from adolescence to menopause. Each has an active clinical practice and extensive experience talking to their patients about everything from memory loss following pregnancy (“my memory went out with the placenta”) to plummeting libido. And as luck would have it, total strangers we met at Columbus Circle talked to us quite openly about those very problems, eager to hear some practical advice. I hope we accomplished our goal of talking about a sensitive subject in a grown-up manner.
**Better Health readers: please let us know what you think of this new video series with Dr. LaPook. Leave a comment below. Thanks!**
Would you know what to do if you needed an ambulance or if you had to go to an emergency room? During 2005, an estimated 115 million visits were made to emergency rooms in the United States – up 31 percent from 1995. About 14 percent of patients arrive via ambulance. Emergency rooms across America are overloaded – partly because many of the almost 50 million uninsured use the emergency room as their primary physician (and partly because we tend to focus on treatment of illness rather than prevention – but that’s another blog post).
During the next two segments, I will take you way behind the scenes and give you tips on how to be prepared in case the unexpected happens and you end up on your way to an emergency room. This week I play the part of a patient with chest pain and take you inside a New York City ambulance with paramedics Ray Cordi and Hanan Cohen. Next week my colleague, Richard Schlesinger, and I continue your tour inside the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, the first time this institution (where I am on staff) has ever allowed such inside access to the media.
In this week’s CBSdoc.com video, Dr. Jon LaPook conducts a two-part interview with a colleague who thinks he might be a hypochondriac. I miss New York.
I’d like to welcome Dr. Jon LaPook, medical correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, to the Better Health team of bloggers. Jon will be contributing video interviews on engaging consumer health topics on a weekly basis. This first contribution is a video interview with male fertility expert Dr. Harry Fisch, combined with some entertaining “man on the street” discussions in Columbus Circle, NYC. Let me know what you think!
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