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The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty: The Dove Self-Esteem Fund and The Reality Diaries
Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is a fresh concept coming from a beauty product company. Now, as part of that campaign, Dove has spearheaded the The Dove Self-Esteem Fund to foster and raise the self-esteem of girls and young women. The fund supports specific charitable organizations in a variety of countries, and in conjunction, Dove […]

Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is a fresh concept coming from a beauty product company. Now, as part of that campaign, Dove has spearheaded the The Dove Self-Esteem Fund to foster and raise the self-esteem of girls and young women. The fund supports specific charitable organizations in a variety of countries, and in conjunction, Dove has produced some very intriguing programs to compliment it.

For example, to promote self-esteem building, Dove is also sponsoring The Reality Diaries, a 6 week program revolving around the lives of four girls who through the use of blogs and videos, share their personal self-esteem stories online. Each girl presents a different self-esteem issue and the Diaries reflect the media influences on self-esteem.

Presenting some interesting and educational insight, The Reality Diaries is a great resource for girls, young women, their parents, and older women alike.

2007: Year of the Bedbug
Among many other things, 2007 was apparently the year of the bedbug. The Health Blog was alerted to this fact by the folks at Logical Images, a Rochester, NY company that sells VisualDx, a computer program docs can use as a sort of visual field guide to help them make tricky diagnoses. Some serious diseases showed […]

Among many other things, 2007 was apparently the year of the bedbug.

The Health Blog was alerted to this fact by the folks at Logical Images, a Rochester, NY company that sells VisualDx, a computer program docs can use as a sort of visual field guide to help them make tricky diagnoses.

Some serious diseases showed up on the company’s list of most frequently viewed images this year. (Necrotizing fasciitis, anyone?) But beating them all was the humble bedbug bite (pictured, right), according to the company.

It wasn’t a rash of rashes that drove the views as much as a wave of newspaper and TV stories about bedbugs showing up at fancy hotels, according to Art Papier, a co-founder of the company. “Bedbugs really took off because of the media exposure,” Papier, also a University of Rochester dermatologist, told the Health Blog.

There is something to the trend beyond pure media hype. As the WSJ pointed out a while back, the common bedbug “has been making a small but alarming comeback, in part because some of the pesticides that had kept them at bay have been phased out.”

The bites don’t typically cause much more than a little itching, but people do have a tendency to file lawsuits if they think they were bitten while staying at an expensive hotel.

We asked Papier what malady might grab the bedbug’s crown next year, but he wouldn’t venture a guess. “The history of these newsworthy epidemics is you don’t know whats going to be next,” he said. “All of these things are simmering on back burners and you don’t know whats going to pop up.”

All of the Hospital, None of the Paper
By now, we were all supposed to be working in the paperless office. One glance at the Health Blog’s desk shows it ain’t so. But the push is nonetheless on for the paperless hospital. And Ohio Health, a 16-hospital system based in Columbus, says it will hit the mark — just about — when it opens […]

By now, we were all supposed to be working in the paperless office. One glance at the Health Blog’s desk shows it ain’t so.

Ohio Health, a 16-hospital system based in Columbus, says it will hit the mark — just about — when it opens a new hospital in Dublin, Ohio, on Jan. 8. (See a video tour.)

The nonprofit chain’s 94-bed Dublin Methodist Hospital isn’t the first to make the claim — among others, Estrella Medical Center in Phoenix was designed with the paperless future in mind, and Penninsula Medical Center in Salisbury, Md., has called itself 85% paperless. But it does give a glimpse of what the future is likely to bring.

The only time Dublin Methodist patients will see paper during a visit is when signing consent forms — an electronic replacement is in the works — and those papers will be scanned and tossed immediately, hospital President Cheryl Herbert tells Health Blog. “We don’t have any place to store paper,” she says. (The hospital will provide printed discharge instructions and payment receipts as well.)

Patients will be greeted in the lobby by staff with wireless tablets (there is no admissions desk) and doctors will make rounds with similar tablets. Soon, the hospital hopes to offer patient-education — e.g., what not to do after a hip replacement — on bedside computers.

Q&A: Resident Work Hours, M.D. Lifestyles and Primary Care
Over the holidays, the Health Blog read Intern, a new memoir of a doctor’s internship year. The internship — the first year of training after medical school — is notoriously grueling, and Intern’s author, Sandeep Jauhar (pictured), struggled not only with the typical crushing hours and rough treatment from more senior docs, but also with […]

Over the holidays, the Health Blog read Intern, a new memoir of a doctor’s internship year. The internship — the first year of training after medical school — is notoriously grueling, and Intern’s author, Sandeep Jauhar (pictured), struggled not only with the typical crushing hours and rough treatment from more senior docs, but also with his own ambivalence toward the profession.

Perhaps a result, Jauhar’s memoir is rich with the kind of tales that can make a would-be patient’s hair stand on end — confusion, mistakes, tests performed simply so an intern can say he’s done them. Yet Jauhar persisted, and now runs the heart-failure program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, where his work includes supervising interns and residents.

We spoke with him earlier this week. Here are the highlights:

What do you think of the current system that puts caps on the number of hours interns and residents can work?

The current system is flawed. It encourages interns and residents to think in terms of shifts. There are huge problems with patient hand-offs, where the intern who is going to go home for the day transfers patient care to other interns and residents. Typically that hand-off is sloppy, as I document in the book. Is it better to be taken care of by a sleepy resident who knows you well or a rested resident who doesn’t? That question doesn’t seem to have a clear answer.

So how would you improve the system?

The ideal is a system where you have medical information in computers that are readily accessible and you have an improved sign out.

The problem when you’re an intern is you just want to get the hell out of the hospital. You’ve been on for 27 hours and the last thing you want to do is hang out some more. You might [sign out] 12 patients in 10 minutes or less. It’s not adequate.

I was on night float once and a nurse called me and said this patient is having hiccups. He’s been hiccupping for 24 hours. So I said give him this drug to cure hiccups. Then as I was about to leave the ward, I casually checked the chart and I noticed scribbled in a progress note the fact that this patient was allergic to the medicine I had just prescribed. This wasn’t communicated to me on sign out. I just found it fortuitously.

Are doctors becoming less willing to work long hours and deal with inconvenient emergencies?

Very much so. Men and women don’t want to sacrifice their family lives for their professional lives like our predecessors did. So some of the most popular specialties are the ones that don’t have too many emergencies: dermatology, radiology, anesthesiology.

What medicine needs more than anyone else are primary-care physicians — people who are willing to slog it out, be on the front line, not get paid a lot relatively speaking but advocate for the patient. People don’t want to do that any more.

But you yourself decided to go into cardiology rather than become a primary-care doc.

I also had a problem with the work life of the general internist. You send someone for a nuclear stress test and the cardiologist [who does the test] might be paid something like $1,100 You’ve done the hard work in deciding when the patient needs a stress test and interviewed the patient and examined them and spent maybe an hour and you’re paid a small, small fraction of that amount.

You have to see 25 or 30 patients a day. You can’t provide good care when you’re seeing a patient every seven minutes.

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