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

Latest Posts

Dr. Val’s Health Tips: Causes And Cures For Childhood Insomnia

Thanks to support from OTCSafety.org, I’ve created a series of health tips for common medical concerns. This week’s article is about how to diagnose and treat sleep difficulties in children and adolescents. There are many possible causes of insomnia, which include everything from emotional distress to bad dreams, breathing problems, stomach pains, medical conditions or behavioral problems.

In my article I discuss how you can work with a healthcare professional to determine the cause of your child’s sleep difficulties (this includes details on how to keep a sleep diary). I offer instructive do’s and don’ts to promote healthy sleep, and offer examples of symptoms that may require medical intervention.

For the full article, please click here. I promise it won’t put you to sleep! šŸ˜‰

Robot Performs Surgery For Obstructive Sleep Apnea: Is It Over The Top?

I came across this article the other day regarding use of the daVinci robot to perform base of tongue surgery for obstructive sleep apnea.

For those who don’t know, the daVinci robot system made by Intuitive Surgical is a robotic system whereby the surgeon directs the arms of the robot to perform surgery in difficult-to-access areas of the body.

My feeling is that using a robot to perform sleep apnea surgery is way overkill akin to using a $50,000 sniper rifle to kill an ant on the wall.

Everything the daVinci robot can do can also be done without the robot with equivalent patient outcomes. In fact, Read more »

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

Tired Health Care Workers And Patient Safety: Tips To Avoid Fatigue

Health care facilities should take five steps to ensure staff aren’t becoming sleep fatigued, according to a Sentinel Event Alert from The Joint Commission.

Shift length and work schedules impact job performance, and in health care, that means patient safety, the alert stated. A study of 393 nurses over more than 5,300 shifts showed that nurses who work shifts of 12.5 hours or longer are three times more likely to make an error in patient care.

Furthermore, residents who work traditional schedules with recurrent 24-hour shifts:
–make 36 percent more serious preventable adverse events than individuals who work fewer than 16 consecutive hours,
–make five times as many serious diagnostic errors,
–have twice as many Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*

Understanding Melatonin: Are People Taking Too Much?

Screen_shot_2011-12-10_at_1

Many of my patients, over the years, have taken melatonin. Many other patients have asked me about it, but Iā€™ve never had much to say. I hadnā€™t heard anything particularly bad about it, but couldnā€™t really recommend it. ā€œResearch melatoninā€ has been on my ā€œTo Doā€ list for a long time.

So hereā€™s what Iā€™ve discovered: Melatonin is a hormone. Iā€™ve known that since medical school, of course, but that fact has struck me as peculiar these past few weeks. Why? Because itā€™s sold over the counter, and many people take massive amounts of it. No other hormone is available like this. The use of other hormones, such as insulin and thyroid hormone, need careful monitoring. Is melatonin so universally safe that it can be taken at any dose, for however long? The more we learn about melatonin, the less that seems to be the case. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Making Sense of Medicine*

Video Describes Procedure To Determine The Cause Of Your Snoring

Our office has produced a new video describing “where” snoring comes from determined by a simple procedure known as sedated or sleep endoscopy. At its most basic definition, snoring is noise produced from a vibrating mucosal surface in the upper airway.

Though snoring can be defined simply, the tough question is WHERE are these vibrating mucosal surfaces? Because unless one can define WHERE the snoring is coming from, successful treatment can’t be pursued definitively.

An office exam performed while a patient is awake is suboptimal as the patient is awake… and not snoring. As such, it is an educated guess where the snoring problem is stemming from.

To this end, Read more »

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

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

Itā€™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 authorsā€™ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles