Welcome to the Understanding Health Weekly Blog!
This blog is actually being written as an avenue to vent my personal frustrations about the way that health is portrayed to the public, and perhaps most specifically through the avenue of commercial media. I do not have all the answers to health, but as a medical student I continue to learn more about the clinical aspects of health and I am being exposed to more and more people in the news that give their opinion about health and sell it as gospel. My goal for this blog is to expose some of the fallacies that are being represented in the media and myths held by the public regarding health and to provide evidence based medicine or clinical studies to support what I write for all interested in reading.
I first want to express to you that I am not selling medical advice, I am not trying to gain from doing the blog, I am simply trying to disspell the misconception of health and medicine. I am not a physician (yet) and I am not giving specific clinical advice for any particular condition or for any person. If you read something on here that you think might apply to you, I suggest contacting a medical professional about your condition and coordinate care with that person, whether it be your physician, a mid-level provider, a naturopathic doctor, etc. Also, some of the information you read here will be anectdotal or my opinion of a current news topic or public policy. I will do my best to indicate these instances whenever possible, but if I forget to anotate the issue as such, please do not accept what I wrote as gospel truth on health.
I am only looking to publish this blog once a week, hence the name. With a busy schedule studying and spending time with my family I will not have the ability to provide daily information to you. This being said, it gives you, the reader, if I ever gain any, the opportunity to provide input for topics you would like to see written about. I will be looking at current events for clues for what may be important to the masses, but I a good deal of the time I will be providing information on topics that I have interest in when there is little else that interests me in the news.
A little about the author:
I am a second year medical student and I live very close to the geographical center of the contiguous United States. Prior to medical school I was a healthcare administrator at multiple levels within the hospital environment, culminating with my positions as the administrator of a home health agency and a critical access hospital. I have a wife of 12 years and twin boys who are 8 years old. While I am a medical student, my family and I value using natural remedies whenever possible and to help keep our health in check we are very active physically, exercising multiple times per week, and we maintain a plant based diet (my wife and kids are vegan and I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian, mainly this is out of convenience, I believe vegan to be the best dietary option when it is well balanced).
I hope that this blog is helpful to others enabling them to moderate fact and fiction about health.
