Beginning today, The Huffington Post is launching a new section, HuffPost Health. It's a place for serious and interesting conversation and education around all aspects of personal health and well-being, including treatment, prevention and wellness.
As you know, there is no shortage of information on the Internet. For example, a Google search of "heart disease" yields over 25 million entries. You could literally spend the rest of your life reading through these.
What's needed is an intelligent forum for sharing a spectrum of evidence-based ideas and approaches to enable you to sort out what works, what doesn't, for whom and under what circumstances.
HuffPost Health will be a clear and balanced resource to provide a comprehensive view of the state of health and health news in a given day. It will provide a forum for intelligent discourse and divergent but respectful points of view. HuffPost Health will empower you with state of the art information you can use to make informed and intelligent decisions that affect your life in meaningful ways.
In this spirit, HuffPost Health's articles and videos will include the best of evidence-based allopathic Western medicine (including drugs and surgery), lifestyle and functional medicine (including nutrition, fitness, stress management, supplements, and love and support), mind/body medicine (including mental and emotional health), women's and men's health issues, and integrative medicine (including complementary and alternative medicine).
In addition to personal health information, HuffPost Health will address health policy issues. At a time when there is more controversy than ever about the roles of government and industry in health care, HuffPost Health will provide a place to have a lively dialogue from a wide variety of perspectives that may transcend the usual liberal/conservative dichotomies.
For example, many conservative CEO's are beginning to embrace universal health coverage as health care costs are taking such a disproportionate share of bottom-line profits. And when parents realize that the childhood obesity epidemic may cause this to be the first generation in which children live a shorter lifespan than their parents, it doesn't matter if you come from a red state or a blue state, as the state of your child's health transcends these divisions.
We encourage you to participate by writing articles, making videos, sharing comments, and letting us know what most interests you, as we're here to serve you and your health needs.
To your health,
Dean Ornish, M.D.
Medical Editor, The Huffington Post
Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute
Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
www.pmri.org
Follow Dr. Dean Ornish on Twitter: www.twitter.com/deanornishmd
It seems we need a major shift in how we view some of these topics. For example medical approaches are generally for masking the symptoms and not root-cause in nature. MDs are not trained in nutrition or prevention, thus they generally prescribe drugs as treatments for maladies. To me then, health care is/should be considered more in the nutritional spectrum, whereby nourishing intake is sought to fuel the body correctly so it can perform the wonderful miracles of which it is capable. Why do we spend SO much research, time, energy and money on trying to fix/mask issues instead of on how to eat correctly in the first place and avoid the diseases and medical approach as much as possible? It is much more effective, including in cost. I'd rather see the research going into how to prevent the diseases, since that is possible.
I've been nutritionally aware most of my life, searched broadly and with depth for "the" answer and relatively recently became aware of the Paleolithic Diet. It makes a LOT of sense, as it seems to tie it all together and elucidate how much of the other evidence fits right in line - inflammation, modern diseases of cancer, diabetes, arthritis, MS, other autoimmunes SOLVED. PLEASE look into this for publication here! SO important.
This is simply untrue.
If the medical approach were about masking symptoms, then the treatment for appendicitis would be drugs to reduce pain, fever, and nausea. Instead, the treatment is to excise the infected appendix, the underlying cause of the symptoms. If the medical approach were about masking symptoms, then the treatment for streptococcal pneumonia would be drugs to reduce pain and fever, and suppress cough. Instead, the treatment is to kill the bacteria that are causing the illness with an antibiotic.
The medical approach is very much about trying to figure out the underlying mechanism of a disease, and address that. Symptom control is added on top of that to make the patient more comfortable, or when we have no way to treat the underlying pathophysiological mechanism.
The reason we don't address everything just through diet is that the power of this is limited. Is it a good idea to have a healthy diet (fiber, veggies, vitamins, proteins, etc.)? Of course! But people still get sick, and need treatment. The Paleolithic Diet definitely has intuitive appeal... but remember that the way we ate back then was also "feast and famine". There simply wasn't much food available most of the time. Perhaps in a related vein, you might know that caloric restriction is definitely a way to live longer and healthier. If only we had the willpower...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/business/27drug.html
Let's not get into the "I don't like that post or response attitude". See too much of that in other parts of HP. Let us talk.
Orwellian doublespeak!
Perhaps we need to change our approach.
Maybe instead of seeing skinny-fat and weak, or fat-fat and diabetic as bad things, we need to discuss it in terms of the positive benefits of being skinny-fat, or fat-fat with diabetes as the result of a plant-based, carbohydrate-rich diet.
--
Davis Liu, MD
Author of Stay Healthy, Live Longer, Spend Wisely: Making Intelligent Choices in America's Healthcare System
(available in hardcover, Kindle, and iPad / iBooks)
Website: www.davisliumd.com
Blog: www.davisliumd.blogspot.com
Twitter: davisliumd
All parents, teens or otherwise, have a responsibility to understand what it means to create a child, to raise the child in a manner so as to give it unconditional love and guidance, teaching he or she about proper nutrition and fitness, ethics, and morality.
Knowledge for the best results already exists. Look at our Ancestors, look at the animal Kingdom.
You are responsible for your life and the children that you create.
Step away from the buffet table, the bar, the drugs, the casino, and stop blaming the World for your life.
If you think that praying or begging to the bearded floating cloud man in the sky will save you, than you are already doomed to failure.
I'm a medical professional myself and get frustrated when I see so much false info making it's way to the general population. I've created an educational website myself that follows along with Dr. Ornish's philosophy on how to achieve optimal health. For anyone interested you can find it below.
www.PursueAHealthyYou.com
Dustin Rudolph Pharm.D.
Allen Thomas
www.myindigestionremedies.org
sheldon101 www.vaccineswork.blogspot.com
~Gregory Goldmacher, MD, PhD
Other than that, I look forward to reading the posts. I never knew H.P. had a health section.
Dustin Rudolph Pharm.D.
www.PursueAHealthyYou.com
To me, it is amazing that anyone would be against "integrative health care" where the best of natural therapies and conventional medicine become a reality. I hope that the "medical fundamentalists" realize their scientism and medical religiosity in order to get safer health care for more people..
Here is a piece of information that bursts your already false logic. None of the people here are shutting anyone out of medical journals.
Your area of interest is Homeopathy. Despite years of this practice, there is no quality evidence that supports any therapeutic benefit to this practice. High quality randomized controlled trials of Homeopathic substances to placebo, or other Homeopathic substances have demonstrated no measurable difference between the actions of a Homeopathic substance to a placebo, or one Homeopathic substance to another.
Personally, I wish that Homeopathic substances actually worked. Given that these substances cost so little, widespread use of these substance could save billions of dollars, if only they actually worked. And, they don't work. Thus, any time a person spends seeking Homeopathic therapy, delays a person seeking evidence based medicine, resulting in increased mortality and morbidity.
Dana, you tend to view medicine as a religion. Conventional medicine is one religion. Your Homeopathic approach is a different yet equally valid religion. This is not how the courts view medicine. The courts look to evidence. As such, conventional medicine is defensible in court, Homeopathy is not.
This conclusion is fascinating -
"there isn't anything actually known to be physiologically inert. On top of that, there are no regulations about what goes into placebos, and what is in them is often determined by the makers of the drug being studied, who have a vested interest in the outcome. And there has been no expectation that placebos' composition be disclosed. At least then readers of the study might make up their own mind about whether the ingredients in the placebo might affect the interpretation of the study."