April 27th, 2010 by Nancy Brown, Ph.D. in Announcements, Better Health Network, Health Tips
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The Wellness Assessment for Youth to Get Organized! (WAY2GO!) is an online survey for teens that asks questions about their nutrition, exercise, sexual, safety, substance use, emotional and social health, and provides an immediate individually-tailored report with resources.
The report also links teens to free Vive health coaching that teens can use to develop a personal wellness plan that includes regular messages sent to their computer or cellphone to support their health goals (e.g., remembering medication, packing a lunch, not using the computer for more than an hour at a time, etc.) Read more »
This post, WAY2GO: New Online Health Assessment For Teens, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Nancy Brown, Ph.D..
March 9th, 2010 by Happy Hospitalist in Better Health Network, Opinion
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The CDC has put out an interactive map of heart disease and stroke so you can compare your state or even county with the rest of the country. It offers data on mortality, hospitalizations and even penetration of generalist and subspecialist availability.
What I found interesting was the lack of definitive association between access to generalists or subspecialists and mortality. While rural areas with a low penetration of physicians generally had a higher mortality than urban centers, many urban centers with a high penetration of generalists and subspecialist also had a high mortality as well. One could presume that rural America has many factors separate and independent of health care that affects their mortality rate. The same could be said for urban America. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Happy Hospitalist*
January 12th, 2010 by DrRob in Better Health Network, Health Tips
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Every year it happens: people come to me telling of what they are going to be doing different in this fresh new year. People are going to stop smoking, start exercising, and (especially) lose weight. This year, I am among the resolvers.
Every year, most people fail.
Which makes me wonder what it is about us humans that allows us to act against what we know is best. Why is it that educating people is rarely enough to fix a problem? Why should we have an obesity “epidemic” when very few people really want to be obese? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*
December 15th, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Health Tips, Video
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Some researchers say that America has “sitting disease” because (on average) we spend 56 hours a week in a seated position. I had the chance to talk to the ABC news team in Washington, DC, about the importance of daily activity to keep our bodies from losing muscle mass. I encouraged us to think of activity not just as going to the gym, but as the daily commitment to NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis, described by Dr. James Levine at the Mayo Clinic). And yes, I confessed to having sitting disease myself… and have made a clear New Year’s resolution to address this problem!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8CWiZYQucA
November 4th, 2009 by DrRich in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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As a class of human beings, cardiologists do not enjoy subtlety or nuance. Indeed, the reason most of them chose to specialize in cardiology, as opposed to specializing in some other organ system, is that the heart is the most unsubtle organ in the body. Unlike, say, the liver or the kidneys or even the brain (which, after all, just sit there), the heart does something quite obvious, and furthermore it does it 50 – 100 times per minute (so that even a physician with a very short attention span is likely to notice).
So perhaps it is not surprising that cardiologists seem to have entirely failed to mark certain emerging – and quite subtle – currents in the “preventive health” movement, and accordingly, continue to unabashedly seek more and more “preventive tools,” whatever the cost, with all the sensitivity and social awareness of the cousin who obliviously shows up at the funeral of the family priest wearing a pro-choice lapel pin. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*
