Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Wisdom Wednesday: Bill’s Blog – A Review of 2016


Every New Year I like to review all the blogs I posted during the previous year. I look for trends, both good and bad, in an effort to improve my site.

My perception, prior to the review, is that I too often write about the negative aspects of health care – overprescribing drugs, needless surgery, Big Pharm, etc. I also feel I do the same with environmental concerns.

However, a review of my blogs paints a different story.

Fully a third of my blogs last year were on nutrition. They were pretty evenly split between diet and nutritional supplementation. My series on the eight most common diets last spring was, in my mind, the most informative. I hope that it provided some guidance in selecting and improving your diet. You can view any of these blogs in the archive under March, April and May.

About 13% of my blogs did chastise the U.S. health care system. That’s less than I imagined but it was still the second most popular topic. I guess we do tend to remember the negative more than the positive. Although I won’t leave the system alone, I will try to recommend action steps you can take to reduce your personal risks when dealing with our health care system. You must be your own health care advocate.

In third place this year were blogs about various drugs. They accounted for 10% of my blogs with posts about statin drugs leading the pack. There were also several posts about drugs and our aging population. My blog “How Older People Can Head Off Dangerous Drug Interactions”
posted on October 7, 2016 is worth review.

Number four was posts about the environment. Although most of them did spotlight negative impacts on our environment, a recent post on November 28th, “Mercury Levels Dropping in North Atlantic Tuna” highlights the positive changes that have resulted from efforts to reduce the burning of coal for fuel.



In fifth place were the blogs I wrote about laboratory testing. The series on the routine yearly testing I recommend began in November and run every Wednesday through the first of the year. There are a couple of new laboratory tests that I will cover early next year. The first is a blood spot from a pin prick that measures the omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acid levels. The test results are then cross correlated with an online cognitive test to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, slow cellular aging and improved attention and memory. The second is the brain natriuretic peptide test (BPN). It measures proteins produced by the heart that increase with heart failure.

The Bottom Line:
I started writing this blog in the fall of 2013. After three full years and 450 posts I still enjoy the process. My initial goal was to provide a forum for alternative education on health of the human body. I didn’t anticipate that I would be the one receiving the best education. However, in college, especially graduate school, I always found that the best way to learn was to teach others. My daily research has kept me abreast of the ever evolving world of medical research. I find myself much more informed that most other physicians. I want to publicly thank Jarrod Arthur for suggesting I write this blog and for posting every single article to date.

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