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

Latest Posts

Millions Watch YouTube Videos Of Teens Cutting Themselves

Millions of people watch YouTube videos depicting teens injuring and cutting themselves, according to a new study. The authors conclude that the videos may serve to legitimize the behaviors as acceptable, even normal.

selfinjury 300x163 Self Injury Videos on YouTubeTo assess the scope and accessibility of self-injury videos on the Internet, Stephen Lewis of the University of Guelph, and colleagues searched YouTube for keywords like “self-harm,” and “self-injury.”

They found that the top 100 most frequently viewed videos were watched more than 2.3 million times. Ninety-five percent of the viewers were female. Their average age was 25, although Lewis’ group suspects their actual average age was lower, since some YouTube viewers provide restricted content only to older viewers. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*

Should You Worry About Your Baby’s Flat Head?

Figure 1

This post was contributed by guest blogger, Edward Ahn, M.D.

The head coach of a Division 1 champion women’s sports team brought her baby daughter in to me for evaluation of her flat head at the recommendation of her pediatrician.

While I was examining her baby, I started to say, “Well, I’ll tell you what she has —

She quickly interrupted, “Is it bad?”

I looked up to see fear written on this tough coach’s face. I was struck by how this benign condition can cause apprehension in so many parents.

Often, pediatric neurosurgeons like me or plastic surgeons are asked to assess babies with a flat head, also known as positional plagiocephaly. Usually, parents have developed a fair amount of anxiety, often with the underlying fear that their baby will need surgery or the brain will grow abnormally. These fears are not warranted. Read more »

Dogs, Hospitals, And Unintended Consequences

Every day I go to the emergency room to admit my adults, I can hear the screaming babies and toddlers. Sometimes, the screams are actually from their parents after realizing  how much their visit is going to  cost.  But most of the time it’s really frightened kids in an unfamiliar environment.

Happy’s hospital used to hand out hospital stickers so kids would associate emergency rooms with a fun place to hang out.  It turns out, after  intense behind the scenes discussions with administration, that this policy was a covert attempt to increase the volume of our pediatric emergency room volumes.

After looking at the numbers, and understanding how hospitals get paid,I have now come on board and am part of a committee think tank that does nothing more than think of ways to get more people through the doors.   We invited the intelligence behind the 50% rise in pediatric ICU volumes after implementing the pediatric ICU art project. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*

Facing Death: A Little Child Will Lead Them

This week I lost one of my patients, Cooper. He was a feisty 4-year-old with mitochondrial depletion syndrome.  I began looking after him as an infant when he wouldn’t stop screaming.  I saw him through surgeries, diagnostic rabbit trails, and ultimately helped with the painful decision to undergo small bowel transplantation.  Inexplicable symptoms and strange complications defined his short life.  While he spent his final days in considerable pain, his lucid moments were spent throwing marshmallows at his siblings.  It sort of encapsulates who he was.  Great spirit.

Independent of the circumstances, a child’s death is always brutally difficult to process.  It’s counterintuitive.  And facing Cooper’s parents for the first time after his passing was strangely difficult for me.  When he was alive I always had a plan.  Every sign, symptom, and problem had a systematic approach.  But when faced with the most inconceivable process, I found myself awkwardly at odds with how to handle the dialog.  In a hospital my calculated clinical role has a way of sheltering me from a parent’s reality.  At a funeral it’s different. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at 33 Charts*

Asymptomatic Strep Throat: Should We Treat It?

Occasionally, I see patients who have received throat swabs for strep that have come back positive… even if they have no signs or symptoms of pharyngitis.

In this situation, there are 2 main actions a physician may take (I am biased towards one):

1) Prescribe antibiotics until throat cultures are normal
2) Do nothing

Personally, if a patient is without throat symptoms and has no history of rheumatic fever or kidney damage, I would not have even bothered obtaining a strep test. What for??? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*

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