HealthyConcerns.com

Interview with Kevin MD

KevinMD is a long-time and extremely dedicated medblogger. He is one of the more reliable resources for quick links to news and current events in the medical space. I read him (and link to him) regularly.

The Pulse, a healthcare marketing blog, does a nice interview with Kevin here.

Of course Kevin points out what it takes to be a successful medbloggers:

D.J.: Why do you think that you have been so successful in attracting followers?
KevinMD: It’s persistence. When you start a blog you have to stick to a schedule and I post normally three times a day. When you have a readership that looks forward to that schedule, then it can certainly grow.  I have posted almost everyday. There are very few days that I don’t post unless I’m on vacation and what not.  So I think that posting regularly is very important.  I also have different mediums that people can access my blog through. I have the blog itself.  I have a link to my post served up on twitter, so that it exposes the blog to a different audience. People who don’t want to go to blog itself can read my posts through a RSS reader or they can subscribe by e-mail newsletter. Having a variety of means that people can access your writing is important, and the fact that they all go back to the blog - it kind of helps identify your brand within the Internet and that helps increase readership.

Wowsa. I guess we can see why I'm no Kevin MD. Posting 3x per day? Sigh. I'm lucky when I do 3x/month, and you all would probably fall over dead if I blogged 3x/week!

It's nice interview all the way around. he makes the point that there is no barrier to entry to blogging that anything to do with anything other than your time. It's easy, it's cheap, it's accessible. But it does take time. 

He closes with a plug for appreciating primary care more in the country, and I can buy that too.

Check it out.

The second-guessing continues on Richardson case

Terrible news this past week when actress Natasha Richardson died, subsequent to what seemed to be a minor fall while learning to ski.

Such cases always spur second-guessing, and as this post at Kevin MD illustrates, this case is no different. Some people are turning this into a political football, wondering if somehow the Canadian style of national health care system is what did Ms. Richardson in. When I read the actual timeline, it seems clear that this was a case of the accumulation of a bunch of questionable human decisions every step of the way. Throw in the lack of helicopter availability in the area where they were vacationing, and in a case where time is of the essence, they lost it over and over.

The single most questioned decision has got to be: Who turned away the ambulance that arrived 17 minutes after her fall, and why did those EMTs agree to leave without even seeing the patient? The two hours lost right from the beginning is likely be all the delay required to make her situation unsalvageable.

And yet, how many of us would do the same if we felt fine, could walk, talk, etc? Well, maybe not anymore. But just in the comments and links in this BlogHer post, plenty of women share their stories of being bonked on the head and not immediately jumping to get checked out. 

We can only hope that this tragic death convinces people that a head injury is nothing to ignore or "wait and see" about...hit on head? Get thee to an emergency room...stat!

Wow, Americans have a slow-death wish

Hat tip to Daily Green for pointing me to Food Politics, if for no other reason than learning about how the most famous cookbook in America (The Joy of Cooking, natch) has adjusted its portion sizes over the year.

One example cited:

That recipe calls for about 4 pounds of ingredients to make only 18 cookies, each of which runs 500 calories — one quarter of the amount needed by most people for an entire day. I’d call one of those cookies lunch or share it with three friends. By the way, a similar recipe in the 1975 “Joy of Cooking” made 45 cookies with just half the ingredients. These would be just under 100 calories each.

Wow, right?

I, too, would like to know how the editors justified this ballooning of portion sizes over the years. Certainly, as people with free will, we could always choose to serve more than the recipe calls a portion if we protested against their original small portion size, but when recipes (and restaurants) put portions of immense size in front of us, it does sort of re-set our expectations of how much we should eat.

Seems like this is just another way that our culture is killing us slowly and insidiously.

Am I being over-dramatic?

The age-old question: When do you pull the trigger and make a Dr. appt.?

One of the most trafficked posts I ever wrote here was about green phlegm. That's right. I was coughing up some, and I was wondering if that was an automatic "Go straight to Dr., do not Pass Go, and be prepared to cough up $$" symptom.

As it turns out, there was not complete agreement on the matter.

And Google searches for "green phlegm" still bring me traffic every single week.

I am in a similar situation now. Three weeks ago I started feeling a bit under the weather, and I was cursing my body out, because on February 16th I left for a trip to South Africa, my first real vacation in about 6 years. (Yes, I took many cool pictures, and you can find the links to those photo pages here on my personal blog.)

Well, a 40-hour door-to-door trip, which included about 24 hours sitting on three different planes with all of humanity, did nothing to quell my ailment. In fact, by the time we arrived in our game lodge room, I was a goner. I got in bed at about 2PM that afternoon and didn't emerge until morning.

At some point it was hard to tell where my allergies might have played a role...we were driving out in the bushlands amongst dense vegetation for about 5-6 hours a day. But the bottom line was that I had a wicked cough, an ear that never unclogged from landing, sinus congestion and pressure and sneezing. And a general fatigued, feverish feeling.

You can get cough syrup with codeine without a prescription in Africa, so my friend (who was also sick) and I  did get through the trip without missing too much. But we were not at our best, and our energy was definitely depleted.

I've been back over one week now, and while I'm mostly better, I can't say I'm 100%. The cough is there, and perhaps more annoyingly, it's that tightness in the chest that is still there. You know the kind...when you have to plan your deep breaths carefully because otherwise they automatically lead to a cough. It's a dry cough, not producing much phlegm at all, but it's persistent.

And yes, I'm asking that question: After three weeks of being sick, how long do I give myself to get over this before going to the Dr.? Does this last remaining symptom get to stick around for another week? What would the doctor do about it anyway?

What would you do? And be honest...because I am well familiar with the "do as I say and go to the doctor, and not as a I do (which is never to go to the doctor) approach!!