The Lane Medical Library at Stanford University’s School of Medicine has compiled an extensive gallery of cigarette advertising over the years. Many of these ads date back to the 1950s and earlier. For an especially disturbing experience, look through the collection marked “Then and Now.” This will show you precisely how many ad concepts have never disappeared; they simply get rehashed in the name of nostalgia. 

The WebMD column Sex Matters shared an interesting item recently — televison shows can effectively be used to educate on health issues. Read on…

The Kaiser Family Foundation, in collaboration with the writers and producers of Grey’s Anatomy, conducted a study of how information about health could affect the accuracy of knowledge of the show’s viewers. They decided to pick a topic that had some relevance but was still was obscure enough to offer the possibility of measuring a change in the level of knowledge: HIV-positive women giving birth. 

Throughout an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, two characters repeatedly emphasized the health fact that with proper medical treatment, HIV-positive pregnant women have a 98% chance of giving birth to a healthy baby not infected with HIV. Researchers measured both level of knowledge and attitude of regular viewers of the show with these questions: 

1. As far as you know, if a woman who is HIV positive becomes pregnant and receives the proper treatment, what is the chance that she will give birth to a healthy baby – that is, a baby who is NOT infected with HIV?
2. Do you agree or disagree: it is irresponsible for a woman who knows she is HIV positive to have a baby?

To see whether the education level and attitudes were affected by the show, the study used three different sample waves. Each wave used a separate sample of 500 regular viewers of Grey’s Anatomy. read full article here…

Do-it-all Beta lecture series chair Tim Devane ‘09 writes:

Tomorrow night at 8 pm we are hosting Charles Barber as a speaker. Mr. Barber is formerly a visiting writing professor at Wes as well as an author and lecturer on psychiatry at Yale.

He is also the author of Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, a book that takes a serious, critical look at the volume of anti-depressant use and prescription on the United States.

Mr. Barber will speak at Beta at 8 pm on Monday Nov. 17 about his groundbreaking book and its relation to anti-depressant use on college campuses.

This is the last lecture in the Beta Fall Lecture Series.

Date: Monday, Nov. 17
Time: 8:00 PM
Place: Beta (corner of Church and High)

Diagnosis: NOW!  

regarding health care reform in the United States.  There will be a discussion following the screening with guests from the community, including:

• Paul Wessel, Wesleyan ‘82, Healthcare4every1 campaign
• Suzanne Haviland, Health care policy expert
• A representative from Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s office

Tuesday, Oct. 14^th
7 PM
Woodhead Lounge

Feel free to bring your dinner and your own personal health care story!

Sponsored by HealthCAN

CNN.com’s Empowered Patient series offers these tips on how to be more savvy when surfing the Internet for medical information.

1. Use search engines that screen out the garbage for you
There’s a lot of junk on the Internet. “It’s the wild, wild West out there,” says Alan Spielman, CEO of URAC, a company that certifies health Web sites. “You really have to be alert as you go through these sites.”

To get rid of the junk, use a search engine that looks only at reputable sites that have been vetted by health professionals. Dirline, run by the National Library of Medicine, is one such engine, as are medlineplus.gov and Imedix.com. Healthfinder.gov searches for information on government health Web sites.

2. Find smart bloggers with your disease
Some bloggers do an excellent job of linking to resources specific to your disease. That goes for advocacy groups, too.

3. Invest 30 minutes in the pubmed.gov tutorial
Pubmed.gov searches the medical literature, but it isn’t completely intuitive. It’s worth the time to learn how to use it by doing the tutorial.

Nervous you won’t understand the technical jargon in medical articles? Don’t be, says Guthrie. She advises reading the very beginning of a study and the very end. “The conclusion will tell you whether the treatment they studied was effective, moderately effective, or not at all effective.”

In addition, the Medical Library Association, has brochures called Deciphering Medspeak to help translate some of the more common medical jargon.

Tara Parker-Pope, a health columnist for the New York Times, found it useful to specifically search for review articles on pubmed when she was looking for treatments for her mother’s esophageal cancer. Review articles give an overview of the latest research on a particular subject. “Review articles are an excellent way to get a lay of the land and to get the big picture on a topic,” Parker-Pope says.

To find review articles on pubmed, go to the “limits” tab and then under “type of article”, check “review.”

4. Click on information about annual meetings
For example, let’s say you just got a breast cancer diagnosis. You could go to asco.org, the site for the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and look at information on new breast cancer treatments discussed at last year’s meeting.

This is the way to get cutting-edge information, Guthrie says. “Information on new treatments is presented at conferences six to 12 months before it’s published in a medical journal.”

Guthrie says she managed to find out about a new treatment for tendonitis this way. “It wasn’t even in the medical journals yet. We found one doctor in New York who was doing it. If I had tendonitis, it might’ve been worth traveling to him,” she says.

5. When in doubt about a Web site, click on “about us”
Sometimes it’s clear who runs a Web site. Often it’s not. Clicking on “about us” should explain it. Knowing who’s behind the information you’re reading (especially if they’re trying to sell you something) helps you evaluate whether the information is biased. If you can’t figure out who runs the site, don’t use it.

Keep in mind that most medical information websites will be written with a broad audience in mind and therefore, should not be used to diagnose yourself or another person.

Wesleyan Health Resources:
WesWELL, Office of Health Education
Health Services
Office of Behavioral Health for Students

Wesleyan Students: Contact Health Services at 860.685.2470 to set up your appointment during the academic year to ensure you have the vaccines you need, especially if you plan to study abroad.

The languages included are:

Last month, the London Independent ran a sensationalist story about cell phones causing brain tumors, and the Breast Cancer Fund released a comprehensive report on carcinogenic chemicals women should avoid. Other recent cancer-causing culprits in the news include pesticides, power lines, and solvents.

This thinking cleaves to a popular motif: The natural world is less toxic and more healthful than the industrial one. To avoid cancer, you should buy organic produce, drink unpasteurized milk from specialty dairies, eat more fiber to cleanse the colon of carcinogens, and avoid cheap cosmetics. To protect one’s family, in short, become a paranoid consumer of everyday “artificial” products.

Unwittingly, we’ve seriously impeded cancer prevention with this not-so-useful distinction between the natural and artificial. It’s distracted us from the uncomfortable truth that most cancers are caused by the natural environment around us. As a result, we expend great effort and ink on low-yield strategies to prevent cancer, even though the better ones lie within our grasp.

read full article…

We’re all the products of our environment and our genes. But when it comes to health, which factor is the trump card? Would a woman with a family propensity for ovarian cancer avoid coming down with the disease if she were raised on a macrobiotic diet in pollution-free rural North Dakota? Or on the flip side, could a white woman adopted from a middle-class family in Idaho into a poor Hispanic family in New York suddenly become vulnerable to diabetes or asthma?

Figuring out how the interplay of race, socioeconomic status, schooling and other environmental factors influences our health is a complicated challenge. But that’s what a new four-hour PBS series, “Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?” aims to do. The series premiered March 27 and ends April 17 and will soon be released on DVD. Producers Larry Edelman and Llew Smith say it was inspired by a medical mystery they discovered in their earlier documentary, “Race—The Power of an Illusion, “a series that investigated some common myths and misconceptions about race. They found, for example, that African-Americans have some of the highest rates of hypertension in world, which has been linked to heredity. But West Africans, who share many of the same genes as African-Americans, have some of the lowest blood-pressure rates.

read full article…

Dr. Adam Dimitrov doesn’t play favorites with patients. But he does have a few favorite patients — ones who make it easy for him to do his job well.

Bring details about treatment you’re getting from other health professionals to every appointment.

Take one of his patients who had a liver transplant. Dimitrov is her internist, and she arrives at every visit with a folder. Inside is a list of the medications she’s taking, copies of letters from her other doctors and results of her latest imaging studies and lab tests.

This way, Dimitrov isn’t searching through her chart for papers that might — or very well might not — be there.

“She makes sure that nothing falls through the cracks,” he said. This way, he can use their time together to take better care of her.

Now, wait a minute. Shouldn’t a doctor have everything — reports from other physicians, lab test results — right there? Why is it the patient’s responsibility to bring them in?

It’s true: In an ideal world, a doctor would have your health history, the medications you’re taking and lab results right in front of him. But we live in reality, and the reality is that these things are often lost in a mound of paperwork. So here are five things you can do to help your doctor help you:

read full article…