Vigorous Play Keeps the Pounds Off

Are fat people fat because they don't exercise enough? Or do they not exercise enough because they are fat? These questions are actually tougher to answer than you might suppose, as a study from the U.K. in the open-access journal PLoS: Medicine makes clear.Investigators found that moderate to vigorous physical activity in a group of 5,500 12-year olds was associated with a lower risk of obesity.

How Doctors Think

And now for a bit of shameless self-promotion. My review of "How Doctors Think," a new book by Dr. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School, is in the current issue of TIME Magazine (the one with a photo-shopped image of Ronald Reagan crying).I don't recommend many books but this one is definitely worth your time. It looks at the kinds of mental traps or cognitive errors that can lead a

This Blog is Banned in China!

The ban may not extend to all of China and there are ways to get around it, but what a surprise this morning when I typed the url "www.thehealthmediawatch.com" into the search box on greatfirewallofchina.org, a new website that allows you to check if sites are censored in China.The message I got back was "Your URL is Blocked!"Was it something I said? Or just the fact that I want my readers to be

Black Men, Tuskegee and Prostate Cancer

Difficulties getting health care, not lack of information or education, explain why black men fall behind on treatment for prostate cancer, according to a new study in the research journal Cancer. Distrust of medical personnel, while significant, was also not a factor.Whenever journalists try to explain why black people often distrust doctors in the U.S., someone is bound to bring up the

Seeing is Not Necessarily Believing

People trust television over what they read in print. Is that because they have the illusion of witnessing the event firsthand--as opposed to relying on someone else's description? And yet we know images can be manipulated just as much as words--and I'm not talking about faking here. Camera angles, music, production values and the like influence our perceptions as much as the adjectives, verbs

Why Do You Trust The Web?

A British study suggests that web users looking for medical information avoid many high-quality sites in favor of those with a more personal look and feel. But doing that could prove harmful to your health. Drug companies often have the most accurate information about their products and stodgy government sites are typically worth their weight in gold.Readers of this blog may get the impression

Why Chocolate is Not a Health Food--Sigh

I've always loved chocolate--especially dark chocolate. But the recent flurry of stories that chocolate could be some kind of wonder food leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This falls into a category of stories that journalists love to report and consumers love to read: Hey, what you think is bad for you is actually good. (And let's not forget another closely related category: what you think is good