Taking Control of Your Healthcare

Very troubling news came was released last week. Despite numerous efforts to encourage people to wear sunscreens, only 1 in 4 children regularly use them. To make matters worse, researchers say more than half of the children in the study also reported having a sunburn in the previous summer. If you sunburn in childhood, you [...]

I bet you’re like me and didn’t know that, in 2004, the Surgeon General declared Thanksgiving “National Family Medical History Day.” The purpose of this new “holiday” was to encourage families to talk about and write down known, genetic health problems. Learning about your family’s health history is one sure way to help ensure a [...]

More than 1 in 5 seniors take five or more different prescription drugs every day. Given the limited knowledge of most Americans when it comes to medical matters in general, a study was conducted to examine how seniors schedule taking their medications. To assess their schedules, the researchers interviewed 464 patients ages 55 to 74 [...]

Last October, the results of the PLCO trial to determine the effectiveness of PSA screening were released. After a follow-up of 7 to 10 years, screening asymptomatic men for prostate cancer with PSA didn’t save more lives when compared with a group of men who were given routine medical care and tested for prostate cancer [...]

Preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S. We’re talking about 250,000 lives lost, trailing only heart disease and cancer. If you think these errors are confined to hospitalized patients, you’d be wrong. About half of them are the result of mistakes in the outpatient setting (read: doctors’ offices). By [...]