Best Health

12 Medical Myths Most Doctors Believe

Joseph Mercola says there are twelve medical myths even most doctors believe, from cardio being one of the best types of exercise to low-fat diets being healthy.

… With all the medical misinformation we’re currently exposed to on a daily basis, it’s disappointing to see CNN waste time and space on yet another entertainment-style fluff piece, discussing “health myths” that have no real bearing on your health whatsoever.

Because, believe me, there is no shortage of real health myths that can, and do, have a massive impact on tens of thousands if not millions of people.

Here is my list of the top 12 health myths, none of which CNN bothered to mention:

1: Cardio is One of the Best Types of Exercise

In recent years, researchers have begun to realize that conventional cardio, such as jogging, is not all it’s been cracked up to be, and that you can actually improve your health and increase fat burning by making slight modifications to your cardio routine.

The problem is that traditional cardio only works on the slow twitch muscle fibers in your red muscle, completely ignoring your white muscle super-fast twitch fibers. Read more

An article from me about Second Life

Webber, S. (2010) “Investigating modes of student inquiry in Second Life as part of a blended approach.” International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments, 1 (3), 55-70.
“This article discusses activities carried out in Second Life (SL), the virtual world, as part of a compulsory class (“Information Literacy”) in the first year of an undergraduate programme. The paper aims to identify the contribution of SL to the students’ learning environment and to an Inquiry Based Learning (IBL) approach to programme design. The reasons for taking an IBL approach are explained in relation to institutional and disciplinary goals. The paper reflects on the contribution of the three key learning environments (the classroom, WebCT and SL) to students’ learning. SL is evaluated in relation to a conceptual framework of IBL. It is concluded that SL has made a contribution to students’ achievement of learning outcomes from the class, and has facilitated the development of students’ inquiry skills. In conclusion, further avenues for developing research and teaching are identified.”
The articles in this issue also include one from Diane Nahl on information behaviour in Second Life: “Affective load and engagement in second Life: experiencing urgent, persistent, and long term information needs” (pages 1-16)

5 Steps to Prevent Diabetes Naturally

(Article first published as Five Steps to Prevent Diabetes Naturally on Technorati.)
Type 2 diabetes continues to reach epidemic levels in America, doubling the risk of stroke and sudden death from a heart attack. This insidious disease attacks the body’s vascular system, causing metabolic imbalances which reduce quality of life and increase mortality from all causes.

New cases of diabetes are skyrocketing with diagnosis in children becoming all too common, predisposing them to a lifetime of suffering and a shortened lifespan. For the vast majority of people, Type 2 diabetes is a problem caused by poor food choices, and is best prevented and treated through a natural multi-step approach to diet and lifestyle.

Step 1. Monitor Post Meal Blood Sugar Levels

Type 2 diabetes is a disease characterized by excessive sugar circulating in the blood. The cells become resistant to the effects of insulin, and sugar uptake becomes inefficient leading to high blood sugar levels especially after eating. Research indicates that it is the surge of blood sugar after each meal which leads to metabolic dysfunction and ultimately to full blown diabetes. Further, the risk of devastating complications associated with diabetes increases as post meal blood sugar levels rise. Keep blood sugar readings 1 hour after eating below 140 mg/dl and 2 hour readings below 120 mg/dl to reduce disease risk.

Step 2. Eat Healthy – Eliminate Refined Carbs

Poor diet is the primary cause of Type 2 diabetes. Specifically, it’s the excessive amount of refined carbohydrates most people eat throughout the day. All types of breads, pasta and wheat-based starches begin to break down into sugar in the mouth and cause blood sugar levels to spike dangerously. The sugars in most vegetables are closely bound to fiber, and release very slowly, making leafy greens a natural anti-diabetic food. Other good choices include lean cuts of meat (avoid charring or overcooking), nuts and seeds. Be sure to include a raw fat source with each meal, as this will slow the breakdown of sugars and ensure the fat-soluble nutrients in your food are properly absorbed.

Step 3. Lose Weight

Regardless of your starting point, losing as little as 7% of your total body weight can have a dramatic effect on the metabolic factors which drive diabetes. Aiming for a sustainable weight is more important than targeting an unrealistically low weight. Losing weight stimulates a cascade of metabolic functions which exert positive control over blood sugar, insulin resistance and blood lipids. Following a healthy diet will cause natural weight loss with little effort.

Step 4. Begin an Exercise Regimen

Studies show that walking the equivalent of 30 minutes a day reduces the risk of diabetes by half. Exercise allows the cells to naturally accept sugar from the blood as it helps to reverse the effects of insulin resistance. Blood sugar levels are kept at lower levels and are much less likely to lead to diabetes or cause damage to the eyes, kidneys and extremities.

Step 5. Targeted Natural Supplementation

There are a handful of natural supplements which are used by the body to assist blood sugar metabolism. Minerals such as zinc, magnesium and chromium are critical to the proper breakdown of carbohydrates and fat, assisting the body to properly respond to the effects of insulin. Vinegar and cinnamon have been shown to assist the breakdown of carbohydrates to sugar, resulting in improved post meal blood sugar response.

For most people, Type 2 diabetes is a direct result of poor food choices. Many resort to prescription medications which are minimally effective in reducing blood sugar and many have been shown to increase heart disease risk. A growing number of people have been able to prevent and treat diabetes through a natural approach to diet, exercise and lifestyle, leading to dramatically improved health and extended lifespan.

Citizen Journalism: Why I Blog on Healthcare Informatics

I am teaching my current students about alternate media, a.k.a. citizen journalism, also known as “blogging”, in a course on organizational and social aspects of healthcare informatics.

I am using a (de-identified) personal experience as an example of why alternate media is valuable in getting “inconvenient” memes into circulation.

In addition to recent articles such as “The Problems with Peer Review” (in the British Medical Journal by Mark Henderson, Science Editor, the Times, London. BMJ 2010;340:c1409), “Ghostwriting at Elite Academic Medical Centers in the United States” (LaCasse & Leo, PLoS Medicine, February 2010, Volume 7, Issue 2) and others about ghostwriting and other ills affecting the conventional biomedical literature, I provided my students the personal example below.

I thought the example might be interesting to blog readers as well.

Here is the example I used with my students:

Regarding a paper I wrote a few years ago and that I ultimately simply posted on Scribd, “Remediating an Unintended Consequence of Healthcare IT: A Dearth of Data on Unintended Consequences of Healthcare IT” (link), an anonymous peer reviewer had this to say when I submitted it to “journal XYZ”:

Comments to the Author

This paper addresses a potentially important issue but adds little that is new or that goes beyond what a reader might find in a major city newspaper. Proposing a classification of sources of UC and analysis of reasons for undereporting of each type in the resulting classification could be a useful addition to the field.

This was certainly an ironic if not bizarre comment. A paper on a scarcity of data on unintended consequences of health IT due to a “closed culture” in the HIT industry does not add anything new “beyond what one might find in a major city newspaper?”

Unfortunately, the anonymous peer review process does not allow me to ask what newspaper this reviewer reads, but it was clear to me this reviewer was 1) attempting to prevent the paper’s publication and 2) “moving the goalposts” to delay it or have the focus on scarcity removed by seeking for me to “propose a classification of sources of UC” (tangential or even irrelevant to the paper’s topic).

I felt it likely the review of a revised paper by this reviewer would have led to negative comments on any proposed classification schema.

Worse, was this, in a dialog via several emails I’ve condensed for readability. It is very likely it came from the same reviewer above:

EDITOR OF JOURNAL XYZ: I suggest Scot that you modify this into an editorial. One reviewer recognized the writing and asked me if this may have been pre-published on a blog. Any possibility for that?

In other words, I was being accused by the anonymous reviewer of possibly violating the ethics of journal publication and the contract I signed to not pre-publish (the journal has exclusive rights).

My response:

SS: No, this work was entirely original, written from a clean slate, and was not pre-published on a blog. I would think the reviewers would know me better than that in terms of integrity.

The editor shot back:

EDITOR: My response as well. Good – looking forward to the edits. Happy snow day

I reminded the editor:

SS: Not to mention the extensive footnotes showing where I sourced my material. In an age of search engines, I have to ask the following:

- was the person who raised this concern so technologically limited they were unable to search themselves to answer their own question?- did this person have such a lack of trust they felt compelled to make such a statement?- did this person raise this due to bias against the fundamental thesis of the paper?

I think it’s fair to say there is very, very strong pushback against articles such as this being published. I have to consider whether it’s worth my while to continue, or to withdraw the paper.

At which point I received the following revealing comment from the editor:

EDITOR: I think, Scot, that you have a talent for sniffing out problems, dangers, risk, failures and by addressing them in your head on ways, you are likely to make enemies. You are doing a valuable job, but you have to realize that people are threatened by you. That’s why the respond in this manner. Not that it is excusable, but it is understandable.

I decided it was not worth revising the paper due to that reviewer’s comments and the editor’s observations, and therefore disseminated the paper via the Healthcare Renewal blog and Scribd.

(I note that “making enemies” by directly confronting possible risks of a new technology in healthcare suggests skewed priorities among those so affected.)

While I believe the current Wikileaks web exposures have gone insanely too far, as those incidents involved exposure of sensitive material held illegally that could people to be harmed, damage international relations, and cause other unforeseen ill effects, the web has proven valuable for dissemination of one’s ideas that have not been able to escape the gravity of the sometimes “peer review Black Hole.”

– SS

The National Program for Healthcare IT in the U.S., and the Elephant in the Living Room

… We’re still learning, in healthcare, about that user interface. We’re still learning about how to put the applications together in a clinical workflow that’s going to be valuable to the patients and to the people who are providing care. Let’s be patient. Let’s give them a chance to figure out the right way to do this. Let’s give the application providers an opportunity to make this better;

“Electronic medical record (EMR)!adoption rates have been slower than expected in the United States, especially in comparison to other industry sectors and other developed countries. A key reason, aside from initial costs and lost productivity during EMR implementation, is lack of efficiency and usability of EMRs currently available“;

“Current Approaches to U.S. Health Care Information Technology are Insufficient” and that the technology “does not support clinicians’ cognitive needs.” The study was chaired by Medical Informatics pioneers Octo Barnett (Harvard/MGH) and William Stead (Vanderbilt);

The above issues are the elephant in the living room. Or, shall I say, in the Boardrooms and meeting rooms where health IT is planned and discussed?

Health IT is great stuff, guys; it might actually work well one day!Let’s roll it out nationally and penalize those Luddite doctorswho refuse to “use it meaningfully” because it’s not very usable.Oh, just ignore that strange creature over there in the corner ...

Vitamin Deficiency Asthma “Link”

Asthma seems more common than ever before, and vitamin deficiency could be partly to blame.

A low intake of vitamins A and C could raise the risk of asthma, a team which reviewed 40 studies carried out over the past 30 years has said.

A Nottingham University-led team found people with a low intake of vitamin C had a 12% increased risk of asthma, the Thorax journal reported.

For vitamin A the raised risk was less clear cut, the team said, but there was still a significant association. Read more

Multi-Vitamins Slash Heart Attack Risk by 41%

(Article first published as Multi-Vitamin Use Shown to Dramatically Lower Heart Attack Risk on Technorati.)

Your mother was right when she told you to eat your vegetables and take your vitamins. It just sounds like good advice, yet millions of people fail to eat the minimum servings of fresh vegetables and fruit and don’t supplement their poor diet with the essential vitamins and minerals needed to prevent chronic illness.

The results of a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition provide evidence that taking a multi vitamin can have a critical impact on heart disease risk. Women who took a high potency multi vitamin over a 5 year period were found to lower their risk of a heart attack by 41% compared to women who didn’t supplement. These results demonstrate the importance of proper nutrition to our health.

The results of this study highlight the importance of vitamins and minerals to our health. A potent multi vitamin is a good way to ensure you get the minimum requirements for the vitamins and minerals that are commonly available in a single tablet. Nature provides a bounty of additional nutrients in whole foods that simply aren’t available in a pill. Many of the nutrients that exist in natural foods have yet to be discovered and undoubtedly have a major impact on our health when eaten as part of a whole food diet.

COLIS 2010: Wikipedia studies

I’m giving brief reports from the COLIS 2010 conference in London, UK. I will cover a study of Wikipedia editors and then (more briefly) a study on using Wikipedia editing as a task in schools. Helena Francke (Boras University) and Olof Sundin (Lund University) presented on Credibility in Wikipedia from the perspective of editors. They looked at questions about how credibility was discussed, what types of criteria partcipants consider (as Wikipedia editors) and how the editors themselves use Wikpedia. It was a qualitative study, interviewing 11 people who were experienced editors of Swedish Wikipedia. Since “Wikipedians” share a set of tools, language etc. and have common goals, they could be said to form a network of practice.
In terms of assessing entries, the author was very important, tending to assume that experienced known authors would be more trustworthy than new or unknown authors. The Editors also looked at the history and talk pages to guauge the discussion, to see whether some element was being disputed or changed a lot, or identify controversial issues.Subject knowledge is used to judge which topics are more likely to be subject to bias or inaccuracy. The Editors might compare with other versions of Wikipedia (e.g. English or German) “if there are enoiugh versions that include the same facts, I think you can probably trust them”. Unsurprisingly, given the Wikipedia guidelines, citing sources was important too.
In terms of using Wikipedia themselves, the editors used them in ways that are similar to previous studies. For example they used it to get an overview (so absolute accuracy was not necessary), they tend not to use it when they need to be certain abut something and they compare sources to verify information.
However, the editors also use their “inside knowledge” and so again consider the credibility of the author (since they will know the authors from their editing activities) and use all the pages and features of Wikipedia to make their assessments as readers.
One conclusion that could come out of that (I think) is that being Wikipedia editors could make people make more critical and confident Wikipedia users. There are already examples of lecturers and teachers using this approach to educate their students (e.g. as described in http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/
2009/01/wikipedia-original-research.html)
There was also a paper in the information literacy research seminar from Eoro Sormunen, Leeni Lehtio and Heidi Hongisto on Collective authoring of wikipedia articles as a learning task in embedded information literacy instruction (at a school in Finland) . I won’t say too much as the paper can be seen at in this location. The authors observed activities in the classroom, where students were set the task of collaborating on the production of Wikipedia articles. They were interested in the information literacy and inquiry based learning aspects. Analysis showed that issues to do with information seeking and use, and discussion about the work process, were the most problems or explained or discussed by the students.
There is also a paper on a first study:
Hongisto, H. & Sormunen, E. (2010) “The challenges of the first research paper – observing students and the teacher in the secondary school classroom.” In: Lloyd & Talja (Eds.) Practising Information Literacy: Bringing Theories of Learning, Practice and Information Literacy Together. Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies, pp. 95-120
https://www12.uta.fi/blogs/know-id/
files/2010/05/Hongisto_Sormunen_PIL2010.pdf
Photos by Sheila Webber: University College London (the conference venue), June 2010

UNESCO commissions survey on media and information literacy among teachers

A press release, dated 3rd March, on the UNESCO site states that they have “commissioned a survey on media and information literacy levels of teachers in Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland. The outcomes of the research will serve as an indication of the need for media and information literacy (MIL) training for teachers and will inform the adaptation of the Model MIL Curriculum for Teachers.” The Media and Information Literacy brochure is here and the press release is here:
http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31267&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Student election placards, March 2011. This reminded me of the information management and information literacy guru, Forest Woody Horton.

Jings

A couple of examples of using Jing to produce short online tutorials from Spencer Jardine: http://spencerjardine.blogspot.com/
2010/01/jing-awesome-way-to-
promote-information.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Mosaic on the Moscow underground, December 2009.