Insights

<p>Here’s where you have to pity <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;q=prednisone&amp;aq…. Conrad Murray</a>, regardless of whether you think he’s guilty.</p>

<p>It was a beautiful early spring day yesterday, so I visited the school farm stand at John Burroughs Elementary School.</p><p>At the farm stand, which is open every Wednesday afternoon, two women filled bags with fresh apples, oranges, and “snack packs” of locally harvested nuts and dried fruit. The women asked when the farm stand would start selling vegetables again.</p>

<p>Gabriela Martinez and Susana Cruz summed up the some of the reasons there is an obesity crisis among the Latino community in the San Joaquín Valley.</p><p>Martínez, an immigrant from Colima, México and the mother of three children, said she has made a serious effort to improve her family's healthy. She has stopped&nbsp;buying her children snacks at the liquor stores that populate her Fresno neighborhood, and she now places a greater emphasis on playing outside with her kids, though she wishes her neighborhood offered more safe areas to ride bikes and play outdoors.</p>

<p>Is geography destiny? At today’s <a href="../../../../../../../../blogs/different-kind-health-summit">Community Health and the Blogosphere</a> conference (Twitter hashtag <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23uscbloggercon">#uscbloggercon</a&gt;), participants wanted to know more about the ways in which where you live affects your health. If you’re interested in learning more for your reporting or blogging, here are some resources from ReportingonHealth and beyond.</p>

<p>Dan Pacheco, founder of <a href="http://www.printcasting.com/">Printcasting</a&gt;, says that the attendees of "Community Health and the Blogosphere "haven't just drunk the social media Kool-Aid, they are the Kool-Aid." And that's okay, because it's a much older phenomenon than you might expect.<br />

<p>"I don't ever want to admit that I'm a blogger," Mark Horvath told a group of bloggers and hyperlocal site editors in downtown Los Angeles. "But I guess I can't do that anymore."</p>

<p>Against the backdrop of today's televised health care summit in Washington, D.C., a Los Angeles gathering is discussing health in their communities from a decidedly different angle.<br /><br />"When people think of health, they frequently think of medicine," said Michelle Levander, director of The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, which convened the event. "But we encourage you think of health&nbsp; from a different standpoint, from the perspective of broader community well being."</p>

<p>A new <a href="http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_1801-1850/ab_1802_bill_… bill</a> allowing school employees to provide insulin injections to schoolchildren with diabetes is worth watching as it makes its way through the California legislature. AB1802 was introduced Feb. 10 by Assemblyman Isadore Hall (D—Compton). Advocates for children with diabetes <a href="http://www.diabetesincaschools.com/hall-introduces-ab1802.html">are rallying behind it</a>.</p>

<p>The doctors responsible for the safe delivery of millions of babies over the past two and a half centuries may have been serial killers.</p> <p>Some of the more cynical followers of Doctors Behaving Badly may not find this hard to believe, but it has caused quite a stir in Britain, where William Hunter and William Smellie created the science underlying modern day obstetrics. As Denis Campbell in the <em>London Observer</em> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/feb/07/british-obstetrics-founders-mu…;

<p><em>Originally posted on <a href="http://www.docgurley.com/2010/02/20/haiti-traveling/">Doc Gurley: Tales from an Insane Healthcare System</a>.</em></p>