As an addendum to my last post related to the health hazards of excess sitting, a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine added more evidence that excessive sitting is a risk factor for mortality. Using survey data from 54 countries, the researchers analyzed the association between time spent sitting more than three hours a day and mortality. They found thatContinue reading “Sitting is killing us, again”
Category Archives: public health
Sitting is the new smoking
Alternatives to the traditional desk chair have become popular as increasing evidence shows that prolonged sitting increases heart failure risk and disability risk and shortens life expectancy. A review found that sitting time was independently associated with poor health outcomes regardless of physical activity. Alternatives to sitting have become a new industry: A new Cochrane review of 20 studies of sitting-alternatives showedContinue reading “Sitting is the new smoking”
Talking with children about political bullies
Columns on “talking to your children about XXX” appear after mass shootings, natural disasters and other disturbing news events. This election cycle’s extreme levels of bullying have inspired columns on talking with your children about Trump. These include The Parent-Child Discussion That So Many Dread: Donald Trump (New York Times) Telling our kids not toContinue reading “Talking with children about political bullies”
Coffee: to drink or not to drink
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, 90% of people worldwide, and 80% in the US, consume caffeine in some form every day. The average adult has an intake of about 200 milligrams, or roughly one cup of coffee per day. As one of those few non-coffee-drinking adults–probably rarer still among emergency medicine providers–I was intrigued by today’s New YorkContinue reading “Coffee: to drink or not to drink”
Readmissions revisited
I am reposting a post by Garret Johnson and Zoe Lyon, both research assistants for Dr. Ashish Jha at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (who also has a great post on risk-adjustment for readmissions. The post eloquently explores an issue I’ve visited in a recent post: the importance of understanding the diverseContinue reading “Readmissions revisited”
Guns, Drugs and Cars
This week’s JAMA released a comparison of major causes of injury death and how they contribute to the gap in life expectancy between the US and other high-income countries. Here are their findings: Men in the comparison countries had a life expectancy advantage of 2.2 years over US men (78.6 years vs 76.4 years), asContinue reading “Guns, Drugs and Cars”
How Performance Metrics Fail Healthcare
A recent New York Times article calls attention to the unintended consequences of healthcare performance metrics. (Disclaimer: I am am favorably disposed to cite any piece that quotes Avedis Donabedian, one of the fore-parents of health quality research methods.) With widespread use of the electronic health record, gathering data for performance metrics increasingly overshadows clinical care. AContinue reading “How Performance Metrics Fail Healthcare”
Your Team Made the Super Bowl? Better Get a Flu Shot
As an emergency medicine physician, popular spectator events such as the Super Bowl usually mean little more than a temporary slowing in the rate of patient arrivals, especially among males, a phenomenon described in several countries in addition to the U.S. A recent Upshot post shows that the impact of widely popular spectator events extendsContinue reading “Your Team Made the Super Bowl? Better Get a Flu Shot”
Rising death rates in young white adults due to overdoses
A New York Times analysis of CDC data released this week showed that, in contrast to falling death rates among black and Hispanic adults, drug overdoses are driving up the death rate of young white adults in the United States to levels not seen since the end of the AIDS epidemic more than two decades agoContinue reading “Rising death rates in young white adults due to overdoses”
Marion R. Sills, MD, MPH 