This Week in Health Care News

This Week in Health Care News

This week, Recess Rocks, a nationwide childhood obesity prevention campaign of CHC announced the winners of its video contest, which asked students about their ideas of dealing with childhood obesity.  The press release is available on the Recess Rocks website.  The Middletown Press wrote about the Macdonough School Video Production Club prize winning entry and a New York newspaper wrote about a Potsdam fourth-grader who won 2nd place.  Out in Nebraska, a physical education teacher wrote about O’Neill Elementary School…

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Dentists Wearing Red

Dentists Wearing Red

February is American Heart Month.  The White House Proclamation starts off Heart disease is a staggering health problem and a leading cause of death for American women and men.  Thankfully, there are steps each of us can take to prevent this chronic disease.  In a time when one in three adults in the United States is living with some form of cardiovascular disease, American Heart Month provides an important reminder that it is never too early to take action to…

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Welcome Home

Welcome Home

I was born in Maine and grew up in Massachusetts, and I love the snow.  Well, most years I love the snow.  This year, however, with record snowfalls in Connecticut, it is starting to wear me down a bit.  As I sit in my office and worry about how I’ll get home, or get into the office during the next snow storm, I stop to remember a few things.  First, I’m fortunate to have a good job.  I work with…

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The Health Care Game

The Health Care Game

I am a big fan of games.  They are an important part of how we learn, whether it be coordination in hopscotch or socialization in tag, they are important in our education.  With computers, our relationship to games is changing.  To take advantage of this, I told my children when they were young, that they could play any computer game that they could write.  It provided additional educational experiences. Now, ‘gamefication’ is a hot topic as people explore how to…

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This Week in Health Care News

This Week in Health Care News

Inside of CHC, we regularly share links to articles about health care issues, and it seems useful to try to create a summary of the weekly news.  In the world of marketing, two stories caught people’s attention.  Wal-Mart’s decision to promote health foods got a lot of attention, as seen in this article in the New York Times: Wal-Mart Shifts Strategy to Promote Healthy Foods.  Reuters reported that Cigarette ads may lure teens to smoke.  The Reuters report doesn’t seem…

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Using the Monomyth as a Therapeutic Tool

Using the Monomyth as a Therapeutic Tool

Recently, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation published a report, Culturally Appropriate Storytelling to Improve Blood Pressure.  Their research found: African-Americans with uncontrolled high blood pressure benefited from an intervention using DVDs of real patients’ stories of how they dealt with their chronic disease. It has generated a lot of interesting discussions.  Should this research be replicated in different ways?  Would it work with other communities?  Other health conditions?  Other ways of distributing the stories?    Could stories of successfully controlling high…

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