The way we respond to obesity and related chronic disease in the U.S. is like waiting to send every adult to night school to learn English -- painfully, poorly, expensively, and late -- rather than having them grow up speaking fluently all along.

Physicians do a terrible job at assessing a patient's health literacy. We are educating a new generation of doctors and nurses to use plain language, but in the meantime there are some steps you can take so you don't fall into the same trap that I did.

To help people overcome their fear, I wrote a colonoscopy song. My idea is that if people can sing about something, they can talk about it. And if they can talk about it, they can do something about it.

Not enough attention seems focused on ensuring health care systems' preparedness to deal with cognitive health issues -- with Alzheimer's Disease as the most dramatic example.