Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Latest Posts

Drugs To Prevent Cancer? The NYT Misses The Devil In The Details

In yet another article addressing the war on cancer, The New York Times today tackles cancer prevention, focusing on alternative and mainstream Pharma products marketed to reduce the risk for cancer.

While author Gina Kolata seems to have done her homework when it comes to the failure of alternative medicine to prevent cancer, she has missed the story completely when it comes to telling why the medical profession and patients may have failed to embrace Big Pharma’s push to use their drugs to prevent breast and prostate cancer. Of course, that’s not surprising since almost exclusively, the experts she interviewed were those who conducted the clinical trials of these drugs. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Blog that Ate Manhattan*

Managing Your Blood Sugars: Pregnant With Type 1 Diabetes

Yesterday was World Diabetes Day.  While my best friend’s baby shower is this weekend and I’ll be busy preparing for and helping with that event, I know there are lots of events taking place to celebrate the big, blue circle (including the Big Blue Test … more on that later).

But today is just another day in diabetes management, and it happens to be another endocrinologist appointment for me and the ol’ BSparl.  BSparl is getting bigger, as evidenced here: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Homebirth Risks: Babies Three Times More Likely To Die

By Amy Tuteur, MD

More than 10,000 American women each year choose planned homebirth with a homebirth midwife in the mistaken belief that it is a safe choice. In fact, homebirth with a homebirth midwife is the most dangerous form of planned birth in the US.

In 2003 the US standard birth certificate form was revised to include place of birth and attendant at birth. In both the 2003 and 2004 Linked Birth Infant Death Statistics, mention was made of this data, but it was not included in the reports. Now the CDC has made the entire dataset available for review and the statistics for homebirth are quite remarkable. Homebirth increases the risk of neonatal death to double or triple the neonatal death rate at hospital birth. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

Pregnant Women: 1 in 25 With H1N1 Flu Will Die Of It

by Amy Tuteur, MD

Doctors are often compelled to make quick decisions in life threatening cases with only limited information. Unfortunately, pregnant women are now going to be put in the same situation.

The H1N1 flu has taken an extraordinary toll among pregnant women. A new vaccine is now available. Because of the nature of the emergency, there has not been time to do any long term studies of the vaccine. Yet pregnant women will need to make a decision as soon as possible on whether to be vaccinated. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*

Type 1 Diabetes & Pregnancy: What It Feels Like

Do you know how hard it was to not tell you guys I am pregnant?  Sitting on that information for three months was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.  There were SO MANY questions I wanted to ask, and so many stories I wanted to share, but I knew it was best to keep my mouth shut until we were past a certain point.  And it is still early in our pregnancy, all things considered, so I shared our news with hopeful optimism and in hopes of some positive thoughts being sent our way.

And holy crap do you guys deliver.  I’ve read every comment on the Dear Baby post, even though I’ve had to take breaks to grab tissues because you made me tear up quite a bit.  My husband, my mom, and my mother-in-law are reading the comments, too.  And they say thanks for the support as well.  🙂

So now you know.  And now I can talk about what the past three months have been like.  (Video to come this afternoon.) Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

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…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

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…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

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…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles