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Need to Get Screened? Find a Van

By Mara Betsch | March 10, 2009
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At my morning meeting I noticed something peculiar outside the building. Though I’ve seen strange things on our corner—Dalai Lama protests, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition-themed buses, and Radio City Music Hall performances—I’ve never seen a van offering screening tests for deep vein thrombosis. I guess it makes sense, since it is National Deep Vein Thrombosis Screening Day (read our weight loss editor’s reasons why you should be screened). But bringing screening to the public seems to be a rising trend. Read More


CDC Scientists ID New Killer Germ, but What Should They Call It?

By Theresa Tamkins | December 8, 2008
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I just returned from the sprawling campus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. This huge federal agency is on the front line of fighting just about every kind of health threat, from biological weapons to dengue fever to obesity—both in the United States and abroad. (They have 14,000 employees in countries around the world).

But more importantly (for glamour-seeking sci-fi fans), the CDC has played a starring role in just about every apocalyptic movie or book ever made, from Stephen King’s The Stand to Richard Preston’s Hot Zone. Will Smith researched his role in I Am Legend by chatting with CDC scientists. (Yes, he is as nice as he seems, CDC insiders say.)

So is working at the CDC as exciting as the movies make it out to be? Well, yes. On the day I was there for a tour, I met Pierre Rollin, MD, of the Special Pathogens Branch, who had just come from a meeting to discuss a name for a new killer virus. Read More


Have a Happy Holiday, Despite the Gloom

Creative ways to muddle through with less money
By Amy O'Connor | November 26, 2008
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Getty Images

This holiday season is shaping up to be an anxious time for my family because of the lousy economy, and I bet you are feeling the pressure too. Sky-high airfares are keeping my extended family apart for the first time in years (my mom and brother in California, my sister and extended family in Chicago, and us on the East Coast), and we are cutting gift-giving to a bare minimum. My husband has already declared his intention to give me slippers and a robe this year so we can keep the thermostat under 68° to save on our heating bill. Can’t wait, hon. Read More


Is This Your Brain on Cell Phones?

By Sally Chew | July 22, 2008

Have you seen the YouTube video with the cell phones popping popcorn? (Or subsequent videos that appear to repeat the experiment?) What seemed like a viral, grassroots phenomenon in culinary cell phone experimentation was quickly debunked and turned out to be a marketing campaign by the makers of Bluetooth headsets. But it got me thinking: Where are we on assessing the health risks of cell phones? Read More


What Tiger Woods and My 82-Year-Old Mom Have in Common

By Scott Mowbray | June 23, 2008

mrs-mowbray-A few days ago I went to the driving range with my 82-year-old mother and hit 100 golf balls while she hit 50. She drove the ball straight, about 75 yards. I’m hopeless: 200 yards, but the ball flies east, west, north, or straight up in an homage to chaos theory. What’s remarkable is that, a few years ago, my mom couldn’t possibly have hit a golf ball. Her knee replacement surgery changed everything. Read More


Test-Driving the Wii Fit: Whee!

By Scott Mowbray | June 15, 2008

nintendo-wii-yogaTen minutes after we turned on the Nintendo Wii Fit, my 17-year-old daughter and I reached a verdict: This thing is crazy fun and plausibly healthy. You may be hankering for one of these machines already—there has been no shortage of fuss since the late-May release of the Fit—but I’m here to validate the hankering. I’ve never bought a video game—until now. Read More


What Those Fast-Food Calorie Signs Actually Look Like

By Scott Mowbray | June 2, 2008


Check out these pictures and ask yourself if in-your-face calorie information would change your chain-restaurant eating habits. I snapped these shots in the concourse of our office building to show Health.com users how restaurants have responded to New York City’s requirement that calorie counts be prominently posted (something I first blogged about a few weeks ago). The big question is whether point of impulse information can change the impulse, and I’m interested in what you think—the New York City law may be a model for other public health efforts across the country. Read More


YouTube Medical Video: The Weird, the Ugly, and the Sometimes Helpful

By Scott Mowbray | May 30, 2008

Want to take the measure of American health obsessions (and those of the rest of the world, for that matter)? Go fishing in YouTube, the billion-screen multiplex of the video id. The channel contains a deep and often deeply weird vein of health content, ranging from the inspiring to the neurotic, the crackpot to the almost pornographic. The following is part one of a periodic survey—periodic meaning whenever I get around to it.

Creative and inspiring
Linda Van Bael’s “Chronic Pain: A new me” is a homemade stop-motion animation showing hundreds of drug ampules and other chronic pain paraphernalia from a year of treatment. All the medical bits come together by the end of the video to form the image of a human body—the “new me” of the title. Since being posted in January 2007, it’s had an undeservedly meager 720 views in the English version (all viewing numbers were noted the hour I wrote this), compared, say, to the 4,923,931 views of a video of a Scottish Fold kitten in a shoe. Painful lesson here for YouTube artists: I don’t care if it’s about open heart surgery, put a kitten in your medical video.

Read More


Marie Quit Smoking, but the Damage Is Done

By Sally Chew | May 28, 2008

smoking-ad-missing-fingers“I don’t smoke anymore, but the damage is done,” says Marie from the Bronx, holding up two stumpy rows of partially amputated fingers in a new anti-smoking ad campaign on TV and in the New York City subway system.

As attention-grabbers, her hands are like those blackened lungs that wink back at you from Canadian cigarette packs every time you light up: terrifying. But terror seems to work on smokers (New York City claims its in-your-face campaigns helped cut smoking citywide by 20% between 2002 and 2006), especially when the message plays not so much into the fear of dying but the fear of living with one of the painful or disfiguring effects of smoking cigarettes. (Marie, for instance, got Buerger’s disease.)

I credit New York City with helping me quit too, but less through fear than through the subtle effects of the city’s 2003 ban on smoking in bars and restaurants. Although I protested its oppressive reach at the time, by clearing the tempting, delicious smoke from around my face, the law gave me the support I needed to throw the monkey off my back. Certainly it was no surprise to me to learn last week that a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that quitting tends to happen in groups.

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When It Comes to Medical Research, We Are All Lab Rats on the Web

By Scott Mowbray | May 27, 2008

lab-rat-latex-handThe Web is an ecosystem, and you can bet it’s being studied. The creatures who live on the Web—you and me, virtually—leave behind tons of data. One example: online health communities, which, as they grow, amass a body of information that medical researchers can mine.

Science has long looked at disease patterns in populations to find clues about cause and effect. (John Snow famously traced a cholera epidemic to a London community water pump in 1854, proving the value of epidemiology.)

So imagine the patterns that will come to light when 5.5 million people get together every month to discuss, describe, and ask questions about diseases and health issues. That’s what happens at MedHelp, one of the largest health communities online, where users have posted millions of comments and questions about approximately 300 conditions, some dating back all the way to 1994.

Read More




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