Insights

<p><a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/users/wjohnsonfiercehealthcarecom">Wen… Johnson</a> spent five years as a reporter at newspapers in Cape Cod and then on Capitol Hill before taking the leap to the B2B (business-to-business) media world.</p> <p>"It's something that I fell into accidentally," Johnson says. But she discovered that writing about one industry for a new audience of executives and others in healthcare was both "really interesting" and viable. "I could see that there was a career track here."</p>

<p>Pity Dr. Benjamin Levine, a rheumatologist licensed in New Jersey, who, by all accounts, has done nothing but a fine job since earning his medical license in 2005.</p> <p>Levine happens to have the same name as a family practice doctor with a long history of molesting patients and defrauding insurance companies. And, because the Medical Board of New Jersey does such a lousy job of providing the public information on the doctors it has disciplined, it gives people the mistaken impression that the Squeaky Clean Dr. Levine is actually the Former Inmate Dr. Levine.</p>

<p>In the intersection of online communities and health, Health 2.0 focused a session on behavior change. With so many of our chronic diseases due to lifestyle choices, online communities and tools hold the promise to help people make small, hard, and sustained incremental steps. The session reviewed some recent approaches, and the key to their success.</p>

<p>I’m <a href="../../../../../../../../fellowships/projects/title-test-barbara-feder-ostrov">not a fan</a> of disease awareness weeks, days or months.

<p><em>Mary Knudson, a journalist, author and </em><a href="http://advanced.jhu.edu/faculty/view/?id=424"><em>member of the John Hopkins University faculty</em></a><em>, recently discovered that U.S. News &amp; World Report subjected one of her guest blog posts to "keyword" advertising, one of the more ethically troubling practices of online content sites.</em></p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>Whooping Cough:</strong> In the wake of California’s worst pertussis epidemic in 60 years, a new state law <a href="http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-whooping-cough-20101007,0,2683454.s… kids aged 12-17 to get vaccinated</a> for the disease before they enter school in 2011, reports Rong-Gong Lin II of the Los Angeles Times.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>CPR:</strong> No need for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation during CPR? Just chest compressions? New research suggests <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487032985045755342305316166… approach might save more lives</a>, reports The Wall St. Journal’s Jennifer Corbett Dooren.</p>

<p>Reporters everywhere felt their serotonin levels drop when reading Mary Walton’s well-reported and wonderfully written <a href="http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4904">Investigative Shortfall</a>, published last month in <em>American Journalism Review</em>.</p> <p>The ranks of investigative reporters have thinned in recent years, but Walton documents the clear-cutting of I-teams in, as she puts it, “dead tree media.” This fact alone should bring tears to any journalist’s eyes:</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>Weight Loss:</strong> Can someone please explain why a weight-loss/sleep study with only 10 participants is <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&amp;cf=all&amp;topic=m&amp;ncl=dc… so much press</a>? Kudos to Foodconsumer.org’s Rachel Howell Stockton for highlighting <a href="http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/2/Obesity/sleep_quality_determines_… limitations of the study</a> while other media coverage hyperventilated.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>ER Care:</strong> The New York Times’ Lizette Alvarez spends a week in a Brooklyn emergency room and comes back with a beautifully-written <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/nyregion/03emergency.html">distillati… of what she saw</a>. &nbsp;</p>