From The Washington Post; all of these are gift links:

This doctor was tired of patients not exercising. So he joined them for walks, by Dr. Leana Wen

The idea has since grown into a program with more than 570 locations.

How to make exercise nonnegotiable in 2025

Specific tactics can help make a resolution more likely to stick.

His path to reaching 106? ‘I did everything I shouldn’t do’

Herbert Stern, the oldest living graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, continues to drive, shop and cook.

The case of RaDonda Vaught highlights a double standard for nurses and physicians, from StatNews

(Indeed, I found both of these cases rather surprising, especially in comparison to each other...)

Canadian doctors are prescribing free passes to national parks to treat patients

She Invented Adulting. Her Life Fell Apart. She Wants You to Know That’s Okay., from VanityFair

Best-selling author Kelly Williams Brown reflects on coining that now dreaded phrase, her 700 worst days, and the millennial mythos of having it all together.

Why is it so hard to control our appetites? A doctor’s struggles with giving up sugar, by Raj Telhan, from The Guardian

We’ve become convinced that if we can eat more healthily, we will be morally better people. But where does this idea come from?

Eating Avocado Linked to Lower Cardiovascular Risk, from Medscape


And to finish off, also from Medscape:

This Week in Cardiology, aka, Dr. M. tells it like it is:


"...Espresso and TC

• Espresso Coffee Associated With Increased Total Cholesterol

The journal Open Heart published a nutritional epidemiology observational study on different types of coffee and their association with total cholesterol. I have several observations.

• We have enough coffee, blueberry, chocolate, raspberry, etc studies. I’ve written about this before.
• This world has a lot of health problems we need solved. These sorts of studies do not move the needle.
• Because of huge amounts of confounding plus recall bias of food questionnaires, studies like this that look at one macronutrient with observational methods is simply not going to advance our knowledge base. It’s not worth the effort...."

Is Money Driving Those Who Spread COVID Disinformation?
— Milton Packer is amazed to learn what monetizing followers can do for writers

...Me: I have heard that the content on Substack is not moderated. Many people who have been kicked off Twitter or Facebook have moved to Substack. Robert Malone, MD, and Alex Berenson are a couple examples.

Colleague: Yes, and they are making millions of dollars a year by selling their thoughts to subscribers on Substack. Being a physician who spreads disinformation about COVID-19 is very profitable.

Yes. It is very profitable....

COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Past Trauma: Is There a Link?
— U.K. researchers found that adverse childhood experiences played a role

‘Catastrophic disruption’: What covid-19 school shutdowns have cost the world’s children

Covid-19 has meant shuttered classrooms for more than 1.6 billion kids. The consequences reach well beyond lost learning.

Ask Aradhana, a bright and energetic 9-year-old from India, about what she’s been learning lately, and the child hides behind her mother in embarrassment.

“She only remembers some things, most of it she’s forgotten,” her mother, Vibha Singh, told Grid, standing with her child in her one-room home in a slum in the Indian capital Delhi. The city’s schools have been shuttered for more than 600 days, in what amounts to one of the world’s longest covid-induced school closures...


Why Deaths of Despair Are Increasing in the US and Not Other Industrial Nations—Insights From Neuroscience and Anthropology

The US National Academy of Sciences reports rising mortality for US adults, most steeply for White adults with a secondary education or less. The rise is largely attributable to deaths of despair (suicide and poisoning by alcohol and drugs) with strong contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity....

...Deaths of despair combined with metabolic and cardiac deaths exceed by 4-fold the next important cause of death, cancer. Moreover, when primary liver cancers caused by alcoholism (50%) and lung cancers caused by smoking (90%) are included, the total number of deaths exceeds the remaining cancers by nearly 5-fold. This annual mortality rate far exceeds that caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, it shows no signs of abating...

Full text:  jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2788767

Jeremiah Stamler, Pioneer of Preventive Cardiology, Dies at 102

On the occasion of his 100th birthday, The Washington Post wrote of the trailblazing cardiologist and scientist Jeremiah Stamler, MD: "You may not know him, but he may have saved your life."

Hyperbole, it was not.

Over a career spanning more than 70 years, Stamler transformed medicine and the public's understanding of diet and lifestyle in cardiovascular health and helped introduce the concept of readily measured 'risk factors' such as cholesterol, hypertension, smoking, and diabetes.
...

Breaking the Cycle of Exhaustion

(A wise person once said, "Choose a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life." To that I say, "Yeah, right."

Celebrities live what appears to be the perfect life with what seems like limitless money at their disposal, and even they have days where life just smacks them in the face. Without a doubt, the average person sometimes thinks about flipping over their desk and running free out the nearest exit while sitting through a Zoom or Webex meeting. Yes, you can love your job. And yes, you can be exhausted from it.

It seems that as healthcare workers, we develop this complex of "being needed." So much so that we come in on our day off and work countless hours of overtime because the unit is understaffed. We then go through the crash-and-burn phase in which we are just so tired on our scheduled day, and we end up calling out. Which then continues the cycle of the unit being understaffed. Now more than ever, nurses are finding themselves in a dynamic love/hate relationship with their jobs. I can just imagine the literature that will be coming out years from now on the shift COVID has caused on healthcare. ...)

'How Can You Do This?' When the Patient's Family Dictates Care in Opposition to Medical Recommendations

Some Good News on Alcohol and 'Holiday Heart Syndrome'

(When thinking about alcohol consumption over the holiday period, the results of a new study published this week may give a little reassurance on the effects of the odd festive tipple.

The large cohort study found no association of total alcohol consumption with ventricular arrhythmia, and a U-shaped association for sudden cardiac death.

While it has been well established that alcohol use is linked to atrial fibrillation, a phenomenon known as "Holiday Heart Syndrome," the current results suggest this does not appear to extend to ventricular fibrillation....)

The Year in Medicine 2021: News That Made a Difference

(Many very interesting tidbits in this one)

Implantable Reveal LINQ cardiac rhythm monitor from Medtronic--paperclip size, implanting only takes a couple minutes, works for three years

Medstronic SEEQ portable cardiac monitoring system--stick it on and it's good for 30 days...no wires or electrodes

Heartbeats! There should be one day a year where school is taught only using baked goods.

From ASAP Science, who got it from [necessaryhealth.tumblr.com]

INCREDIBLE: A scientist in India has transmitted his thoughts via the Internet to the brains of scientists in France.

Read more: http://bit.ly/1tv64RE




These weird deep-sea animals, discovered off the coast of Tasmania in 1986, have just been classified - and they're like no animal alive today: http://bit.ly/Wf4MM6

( Surgical heart photo under the cut )

The essence of life...

The human heart, stripped of fat, muscle and connecting tissues.

An astonishing circulatory maze!

[Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia]

( image under the cut )
via AsapScience FB page

Guinness World Record for heart transplant patient

John McCafferty, 71, has surpassed the previous Guinness World Record of 30 years, 11 months and 10 days set by an American man who died in 2009.

Mr McCafferty was told he had five years to live when he underwent the life-saving operation at Harefield Hospital in Middlesex 31 years ago.

Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25507128 (Dec. 24, 2013)
~~
More about the surgeon who did his transplant: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3322515.stm
~~
And a Desert Island Discs interview with the surgeon: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093pg8
~~
And this:

Researchers call for a new approach to heart transplant allocation
In a study of more than 3,700 people waiting for a heart transplant, researchers found those with the most risk factors faced 10 times the risk of dying within 90 days of being placed on the waiting list, compared with the lowest-risk patients. In addition, the highest-risk patients face the greatest mortality rate after transplant, but they also reap the greatest survival benefit from the surgery. The findings, reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, suggest a rethinking of how organs are allocated may be in order, the authors say. MedPage Today (free registration) (1/31), BeckersHospitalReview.com (1/31)

And also this: