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Potassium And Exercise: Sports Drink Or Orange Juice?

As I stutter through recovery from LungMutiny2010, I’m paying more attention to my diet. So as I try to go out for my 10-minute walk everyday, I still drink some sports drink — usually Gatorade made from the massive vat of powder you can buy at Costco.

We tend to get plenty of sodium in our diet — far too much in the U.S. actually — but I always worry about potassium when I’m sweating (Disclaimer: I am not an exercise physiologist or a cardiovascular or nephrology physician.)

I always thought that the widely-sold sports drinks were the best sources of potassium outside of eating bananas or some dried fruits. I was surprised to learn that an 8-ounce serving of orange juice contains 18-fold more potassium than an 8-ounce serving of Gatorade® (450 mg vs. 25 mg). Who knew? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata*

Baby-Monitor Bracelets Connect Mommy And Baby

It’s only a concept, but the Sikker (Danish for “safety”) baby monitor is a great idea by designers Jessica Mendoza and Henoc Monte that will likely have both parents and babies alike going gaga.

The bracelets, charged on a docking station during the day, would allow two-way communication between mother and child, as well as the ability for the mother to monitor the baby’s temperature and heart rate. It would also allow the mother to play .mp3 lullabies to the baby.

If built, they’d probably have to ditch the idea of monitoring temperature, since any readings at the wrist would be poor indicators of core body temperature, but connecting parent and child via bracelet is a good idea that has promise, and it’d be great to see this built.

More from Yanko Design: Sikker is for Safety

*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*

The Best States For Teen Drivers

The April issue of U.S. News & World Report will carry a story about the best states for teen drivers as part of a campaign to raise awareness for teen driver safety. The ratings are based on state driving laws and road conditions to determine how much a state is doing to promote safe roads, as well as government statistics on teen driving.

The best states for teen drivers are lead by these top ten (I feel like Letterman):

District of Columbia, California, Colorado, Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, Minnesota, Utah, and Washington.

Car crashes kill more teens each year than anything else. Read more »

This post, The Best States For Teen Drivers, was originally published on Healthine.com by Nancy Brown, Ph.D..

Floaters And Losing The Clarity Of Youthful Vision

“Will you grab that spider web?” my grandmother said abruptly. We were sitting on an old bench overlooking the river. It was September. I had sprung her from the assisted living home earlier that day.

“Which spider web are you talking about, Gram?” I asked her. My eyes were sleepily watching the timeless flow of the big river, the eddies and swirls along the banks, and the gracefully bending boughs of the old oak trees as they waltzed with the wind.

“There to the left!” she said with certainty, reaching her bony hand into the sky and grasping at thin air. “Get it, will you?”

I looked again but there was nothing. I knew that my grandmother’s mind had developed a little static among the signals, a few crackling wires in the electric grid of her brain, and I figured that her eyes were playing tricks on her.

“I don’t see it, Gram. What does it look like?”

She seemed a little disappointed that I did not share her perception. “It’s feathery, and it’s drifting just over the river. It’s actually quite pretty.” Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles*

Slow Love: Job Loss, Depression, Pajamas, And Happiness

Slow Love.jpgFrom the “unsubstantiated evidence” files, I wanted to share with you a quick light that popped on in my head while reading a much-discussed article from last weekend’s New York Times Magazine.

In it, former House & Garden magazine editor Dominique Browning vividly shares her experiences following the folding of the magazine in 2007. This long-form essay is adapted from her upcoming book, Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas, and Found Happiness.

Much can be discussed about her experiences, but I was particularly struck by the account of her response to her newfound freedom:

“In this way, being unemployed is a lot like being depressed. You know how there are millions (O.K., a handful) of things you swear you would do if you only had the time? Now that I had all the time in the world — except for the hours during which I was looking for work — to read, write, watch birds, travel, play minor-key nocturnes, have lunch with friends, train a dog, get a dog, learn to cook, knit a sweater, iron the napkins and even the sheets, I had absolutely no energy for any of it. It made no difference that music and books and nature had long been the mainstays of my spirit. Just thinking about them exhausted me. I had absolutely zero experience in filling weeks — what if it became years? — with activity of my own choosing. Being unemployed meant being unoccupied, literally. I felt hollow.” Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata*

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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