Insights

<p>Last week, my oldest daughter graduated from high school and began her journey as a young adult. As a proud parent and the commencement speaker, I shared some life lessons with the class of 2010. Here is some of what I said:</p> <p>Mr. Ronnie Quinn is about my age but twice my size and looks like Michael Oher, the professional football player from the movie "The Blind Side."</p> <p>Despite high fever and his blood teeming with bacteria, he was sitting up in his hospital bed with the sheets pulled up to his thighs. Looking me in the eye, he greeted me with a smile.</p>

<p>(cross-posted and edited from the<a href="http://www.diabetesmine.com/2010/05/introducing-“tuanalyze”-why-mapping-diabetes-data-matters.html" target="_blank"> original version posted in DiabetesMine</a>)</p>

<p>The <a href="http://hawaii.gov/dcca/pvl">Hawaii Professional and Vocational Licensing division</a> could not possibly make it harder to find information about a doctor’s misdeeds.</p>

<p><!--StartFragment--></p><p>Last May was a big month for the Asian community. It was Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, but was also the National Hepatitis B Awareness Month.</p> <p>The prevalence of hepatitis B among Asians Americans is stunningly high—15% compared to 0.5% for average Americans. So there were many educational workshops and screenings offered by various organizations and institutions in the community through the month.</p>

<p>For the past year and a half, Julie Sullivan at the <em>Oregonian</em>, one of the country’s most consistent and skilled investigative reporters, has been writing about troops that were exposed to the cancer-causing chemical hexavalent chromium in Iraq.

<p>Most health sites focus on personal health -- what individuals can do to improve their own or their families’ health. But at a local level, health is a community issue. For example, we’re all supposed to get regular checkups. If everyone in a community does not have access to good health care, however, then the advice is useless. Our kids are supposed to eat healthy food, but if school lunch programs provide mac-and-cheese, French fries and few vegetables, then the community is failing those kids.

<p>Everyone could benefit from taking cholesterol-lowering statins. Who wants gunk clogging up their arteries, right? And even if your cholesterol is already low, you may gain some wonderful side benefit.</p> <p>That is the overwhelming message driven home by a combination of marketing campaigns and overly enthusiastic health reporting.</p>

<p>Interested in mashing up health data to report on your community? A new federal <a href="http://www.hhs.gov/open/datasets/communityhealthdata.html">community health data initiative</a> launched today may help.</p> <p>Here’s more from the U.S. Health and Human Services Agency:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The Community Health Data Initiative is a major new public-private effort that aims to help Americans understand health and health care performance in their communities – and to help spark and facilitate action to improve performance…</em></p>

<p>Kevin Jermaine Edmonds, a young ob/gyn with a brand new practice, presumably would have better luck than most trying to impress a woman he has met at a bar.</p><p>But why bother leaving the office at all when your calendar is full of women undressing and telling you the most intimate details of their lives?</p><p>Doctor-patient relationships are barred by state law and by long established medical ethics. In part, these relationships are discouraged because they can cloud a physician’s judgment and potentially lead to patient harm.</p>

<p>Whether you’re facing hourly, daily or monthly deadlines, it’s nice to get some inspiration from some excellent health journalists and the people who edit them.</p> <p>For that inspiration, I turned off my laptop and opened an actual book: <a href="http://www.cqpress.com/product/NYT-Health.html">The New York Times Reader: Health and Medicine</a> (CQ Press, 2010). This recently-published paperback, an annotated anthology of work by the New York Times’ health and medical writers, is aimed at journalism students, but professionals at all levels can learn from it too.</p>