Are you feeling the post-holidays blues and the days stretching away before you can travel? Winter can be a tough time and there are some good medical strategies. If you don’t spend your days outdoors you should probably be taking vitamin D. Because if you don’t ever go outside, even the greatest free drug isn’t [...]

1. How To Break Bad News
2. Haiti Journey: Clinic time begins
3. This Is Not The Time To Suck It Up

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It is pretty common knowledge that wearing headphones can be bad for your hearing, especially if you don’t take the time to use volume limiting tools, but a new study now also confirms that wearing headphones can be bad for you in other ways.

The study, published [...]

1. Some Bad News About Some Vitamin Supplements
2. Bad Beef An Opportunity For The ‘New’ FDA
3. It’s No Surprise That Training Helps Doctors Communicate Bad News Better

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A recent and shocking ProPublica article looks at a growing trend for suspicious deaths of elderly people to be ignored. Unfortunately, after elderly people pass away, overworked and underfunded coroner and medical examiner’s offices across the country are sometimes missing cases that should be examined more thoroughly or are [...]

1. College Care
2. This Friday – you can ask questions about Haiti LIVE, to people working there now
3. Patients Rating Doctors: Let’s Pay Popular People More!

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I’ve written before about obesity issues - mostly related to soda and diet soda (the message – even diet soda isn’t good for you – try to drink water instead) and also that even being a little overweight can still result in health problems. But a new study, coming out of [...]

1. Patients Rating Doctors: Let’s Pay Popular People More!
2. Is It Racist to Pay Doctors Based on Patient Satisfaction?
3. Obesity Antibiotics: Should your weight determine the drugs you get?

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Healthcare and IT are both really keen and simultaneously reluctant bedfellows. It is well known that there is a huge push towards the use of IT and electronic data in healthcare, highlighted by the push for electronic medical records and of advanced IT systems that can be used to centrally manage [...]

1. Grand Rounds: Technology and Healthcare – and Mystery!
2. Black Future Month
3. Healthcare Reform: Complicated? Or Not…

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A new study shows that one in five Americans, 20%, has some form of hearing loss. That is a huge number and much larger than anyone had previously thought. According to the study, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, that means 48 million Americans hear so poorly that they cannot understand [...]

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Today (November 9th), at 2PM EST and 11AM PST there’s a test of the National Emergency Alert System. Here’s what FEMA has to say about the test.

•It will be transmitted via television and radio stations within the U.S., including Alaska, Hawaii, the territories of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, [...]

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There’s been a lot of talk in the news about the value of mammograms. Not so much as a question of their value in finding breast cancers, but more around whether the benefits are really there for doing them. The argument essentially acknowledges that mammography screening does indeed detect cancers [...]

1. Mammogram Guideline Changes Kickstart Healthcare Politicking
2. Vitamin D Dose Myths – 6 Fun Factoids
3. Grand Rounds – with a dose of healthcare policy

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Two new studies have come out that highlight significant news around HPV – Human Papillomavirus. HPV is known to increase the risk of cervical cancer in women significantly. Now, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that an HPV vaccine that helps prevent HPV in women, can [...]

1. Quit cigs=Double chance of sur…
2. Double Dave!
3. Some Bad News About Some Vitamin Supplements

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The news this week that gas pumps are the dirtiest object people touch commonly during their day (followed by the handles on public mailboxes, escalator rails, ATM buttons, parking meters, crosswalk buttons and vending machine buttons) reminded me about the need for everyone to wash their [...]

1. 10 Creative Ways To Get Your Doctor To Wash His Hands
2. Holding a Death in Your Hands: What Autopsy Reports Tell Us about How Someone Lived
3. Expensive Sterile Saline, or Tapwater? It’s a Wash!