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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
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
Ten 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
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
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.
“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.
The 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.
The Web is basically at the toddler stage of its development when it comes to its potential to make lives easier, healthier, and more interconnected. So we wanted to get into the game with the total site relaunch of Health.com. Sure, it’s a crowded game—there are hundreds of sites, and some very well established ones at that. But here are five things we think you’ll like about us.
As journalists and editors, we have a particular fascination with the way ordinary people (like us, to start with) solve health problems: how we find doctors, deal with insurance, talk to loved ones, process complicated information, cope with stress. In other words, we’re interested in how people do all the important life stuff that falls between the cracks in a strained, hurried, and broken health-care system. If you follow the links in one of our Health Journeys, I think you’ll see that our approach is a bit different.
Second, our approach to video is a bit different too: just experts and patients talking frankly about their experiences in ways we think are useful as you make your own decisions. Our short but fascinating video content includes Dr. Amber Guth talking about the way the breast-cancer experience can enrich the lives of some women. Check out our own Sean Kelley talking about how his kids motivate him to manage his diabetes.
Third, when it comes to healthy living (all the things you do when you’re not actually sick, to prevent getting sick), we love the power of the Web to deliver information in really useful ways. We’ve set up new Healthy Living and Healthy Eating channels. We have thousands of healthy recipes, including these incredible Guilt-Free Chocolate Muffins—they taste like pure fudge but are wheat-free and have only 154 calories. Or try our Cobb Salad, which has half the calories of the classic version but still provides a mouthful of bacon, blue cheese, and avocado in every bite.
Fourth, our approach to the zillion-headline world of health news is to try to answer the questions you really want answered: Is this story about spinach preventing cancer in mice even relevant to me? Should I worry about the controversy around a new drug? One example: Check out Theresa Tamkins’s funny blog on a study that may or may not show that exercise helps Scottish couch potatoes (or as she calls them, “couch haggises”) with depression.
And fifth, yes, we do like to blog. We do like to present diverse voices talking about human issues: pregnancy, struggling with cancer, parenting healthy children, and dealing with healthy food choices in supermarkets and fast-food restaurants.
Oh, one more: The important thing that excites us is the power of the Web to incorporate the voices of the people who use it. You’ll find comment opportunities sprinkled throughout the site. And we hope to hear from you, starting now: If you have comments, suggestions, or criticisms, email me.
Here’s a look at a medical sewing project of mine that I’m sure you’ll find icky and hope you’ll also find cool. After a series of these Frankensteinian surgeries, I’ve accepted my pink-skinned, cancer-prone heritage (and confessed to roasting in baby oil as a teen), but the bandage-free healing process definitely turns heads.
Skin, being on the outside, is both grosser and harder to hide than our other organs when it becomes afflicted. When my own particular bumps come off, it’s sometimes for vanity and sometimes because they are cancerous or are expected to become so. But in none of those situations is there ever any possibility of avoiding the question, “What happened?”
I could answer, swaggering, that I wiped out on my motorcycle, but bumping into my bathroom cabinet is about a million times more likely.
Senator John McCain is trying to explain why buying your own health insurance is better than a national health-care plan, and he even suggests it’s a nice alternative to comprehensive company plans.
Well, I’ve got a close friend who has been through one terrible disease and now is dealing with another. And the only good thing she has to say about her ordeal is: "Thank God I have insurance." Because if she had bought her own or used a tax-deferred savings account—the dual prongs of McCain’s health-care policy—everyone who knows her would be hosting fund raisers to pay for her six figures’ worth of drugs and doctor’s visits.
The basic idea of the McCain plan is to give tax credits of $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families to choose their own insurance. As McCain’s website says, “Families will be able to choose the insurance provider that suits them best and the money would be sent directly to the insurance provider. Those obtaining innovative insurance that costs less than the credit can deposit the remainder in expanded Health Savings Accounts.”
The test of insurance is how good it is when you really, really need it. And it’s often lousy when it comes to plans working people can afford.
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