Have you ever been to a Genius Bar at an Apple store?
The last time I was there — checking out a pesky problem on my iPhone — I couldn’t help but wonder: why can’t we have something like that to deal with our common health issues?
Genius Bars are located in Apple Stores in easy-to-access shopping areas, like malls. The Genius Bars are …
We need an Apple Genius Bar for patients
If you or someone you love is considering surgery or an intensive treatment, it really pays to be sure you understand the pros and cons.
While that seems like common sense, millions of people say “yes” without learning all the facts.
Some simply rely on the trust they have in their physician. Others assume the known benefits and risks are too complicated to fully understand. And some people just want to get …
Give patients the pros and cons of treatment options
You may have heard that veteran NBC News correspondent Tom Brokaw was hospitalized recently after he reported feeling lightheaded after making an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
He’s fine. Brokaw tweeted, “All is well. Early a.m. I mistakenly took a half dose of Ambien and made less sense than usual.”
And that’s what you’ve got to be careful not to do.
Any time you get up in the wee hours of …
Taking medications in the middle of the night can be risky
We’re a disgruntled bunch these days. We think there must be a better way to experience health care.
Doctors say they’re pressed for time, don’t make enough money, have to hassle with insurance companies and typically feel generally burned out about medicine.
Patients feel they wait too long in the waiting room, don’t get much time in the examining room to ask questions or share concerns, want to be more involved in …
How can we improve the patient experience?
There’s a push-pull happening right now in the evolution of health care and it’s all about you. The question under debate is simple: can you handle being the first to know your own test results?
Are you smart enough to read the results? And are you emotionally capable of handling the situation?
Do you need someone next to you when an over-the-counter test tells you whether or not you have a disease? Can …
Can you handle being the first to know your own test results?
Facebook recently announced on Good Morning America that users in the U.S. and the U.K. can enroll as organ donors through links to official registries, making it easier for people who want to donate their organs to sign up. They’re working with Donate Life America, a nonprofit alliance of national organizations and state teams across the United States committed to increasing organ, eye and tissue donation.
But deciding to become an …
Becoming an organ donor requires more thought than a Facebook click
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
-William Shakespeare, Richard II
A friend recently asked me a simple question: Why do we have to wait so long for doctors and not for other professionals, like lawyers, accountants, or dentists? And what can we do about it?
A study by Press Ganey showed that the average time patients spend waiting to see their health provider is 24 minutes. The research was done …
Long waits at the doctor’s office disrespect patients
Yet another study is out highlighting that kids are getting fatter and they’re hardly moving any more. They get driven to school. They drink soft drinks. They don’t get much milk. They snack a lot. They text and watch video games. The number of obese kids has doubled since the 1970’s, with one in six now officially obese.
But if you really want your kids to be healthy, you have to …
How to create a health culture at home for your kids
If your computer has ever slowed way down you may have been advised to “defrag,” which puts all parts of a file together in the same place on the drive, enabling it to run faster and more efficiently. In much the same way, your health care needs to be defragged. For most people, health care is extremely fragmented, creating errors, delaying diagnoses and treatment and increasing costs.
Even for the very …
Your care is fragmented, here’s how to fix it
Against the backdrop of life as it is really lived, the decision to breast-feed or bottle-feed is minuscule.
Whether or not you decide to breast-feed your baby — and for how long — is, in the scheme of things, just one decision out of a million. And ultimately, you should do what works best for you and your family.
Full disclosure here: I never wanted to breast feed. I don’t know why. …
Breast feeding and the mismatch between idealism and realism
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