One group that opposes the nomination of Sanjay Gupta as the next surgeon general is the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), an organization that promotes the interests of the restaurant and food industries. Anyone who suggests eating less can expect criticism from an industry that wants us to eat more. Gupta took on the topic…
Back in November, following a two-hour meeting in Chicago, president-elect Obama offered Sanjay Gupta the position of Surgeon General. (This from a presumably reliable source: Gupta’s mother, Damayanti.) Gupta has been prudently tight-lipped about the appointment ever since the Washington Post broke the story in early January. Gupta, the chief medical correspondent for CNN, discussed…
It was the UK’s Bryan Appleyard who started me thinking about health and the recession. In an article on what to expect in 2009, he interviewed Chris Ruhm, who stands by his 1996 findings that recessions are good for your health. “People get physically healthier and mortality rates fall during bad economic times,” he tells…
OK. So the economic downturn is really, really bad. We’re worried about being laid off. We may have already lost our jobs. Even if we’re still employed we have financial worries. And hearing about it all the time on the news gets us down. We start to have physical symptoms of poor health: headaches, muscle…
Losing your job is a powerful stressor that can have a long-term impact on health. A 2006 study by Sullivan and Wachter found that, in the 20 years following the loss of a job, your chances of dying increase by 15 to 20 percent. This makes a lot more sense to me than Chris Ruhm’s…
Here’s a good companion thought to HRT and the incredible shrinking brain. It’s from Dr. Alicia White, an employee of Bazian, the evidence-based medicine firm in Great Britain. Bazian does research for the health news on Behind the headlines, the National Health Service site I recommend as a source of health news. If you’ve just…
There was a widely reported story today about hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and a decrease in the size of women’s brains. The headlines were predictably but needlessly sensational. In fact, the study did not measure a decrease in the brain size of any individual woman. Source: Richard Amsel, The Movie Posters First, the headlines. There…
In October the American Psychological Association (APA) released its Annual Stress in America Survey. Compared to 2007, the 2008 survey found an increase in stress related to money, the economy, job stability, housing costs, and family health problems. Stress-related symptoms also increased: fatigue, feeling irritable or angry, lying awake at night, lack of motivation, feeling…
Foreclosures. Layoffs. Retirement savings down the tube. One scary or embarrassing financial disaster after another. Such is life in the Great Recession of 2009. What if anything does this mean for our health? It makes intuitive sense that health would suffer. But some research shows we’re actually ‘healthier’ in economic hard times and that death…
One of life’s most tragic events is the death of child. Whether a child falls unexpectedly and hits his head or suffers from a disorder that progresses inevitably towards the premature end of a life – one cannot measure and compare such experiences. We sometimes think of today’s biomedicine as an impersonal, corporate machine that…
I love music and hope to write more about the relation between music and health in 2009. In the meantime, here’s the video Playing for Change. The Playing for Change Foundation provides resources to musicians and their communities around the world and is dedicated to achieving peace through music. May 2009 bring you health, contentment,…
