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Mission Statement

With baby boomers aging, many risk factors for diseases on the rise, and laymen’s obsession with finding their own medical advice growing every day, the field of preventive medicine - and the media coverage of it - is hotter than ever. This blog will cover new studies, trends and other news in preventive medicine, while at the same time scrutinizing medical research and encouraging readers not to take everything they find online at face value.

Key Web sites

In addition to being a fairly wide topic, preventive medicine also is extensively studied at research institutions, covered in the media and discussed on blogs and discussion boards.

• Journals: I’ll definitely be checking regularly the Web sites for peer-reviewed medical journals such as Preventive Medicine, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and even less-specific medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.
• Media Sources: This category is seemingly endless. It ranges from magazines such as, er, Prevention, to newspapers with fantastic Health sections such as the New York Times. I’m sure I’ll also see a ton of stuff in other magazines that I’ll look up and link to on their Web sites.
• Blogs: Here’s where I’m a bit unsure. I know there are really major blogs such as the New York Times’ Well blog, but I’m not sure where or how to find smaller-scale blogs that cover preventive medicine. I did find this blog, but it hasn’t been updated in a while, and I can’t quite tell how reliable it is. Perhaps as we learn more about the blogosphere, I’ll find ways to discover other blogs about preventive medicine.

Hot Topics

Preventive medicine is a fairly broad topic for a blog, since it encompasses any kind of medical practice involving preventing disease (as opposed to curing disease). It’s hard to anticipate exactly what will come up day to day, but I think I can safely say that many developments in this field will fall into one of the following categories:

• Diet: Many medical studies covered in the mainstream media involve dietary changes that may or may not reduce the risk of various diseases. For example, soy and foods and products containing it have been the focus of lots of studies over the last several years. It seems the verdict on soy’s effectiveness changes from week to week. This short article from Prevention magazine’s Web site covers a study that shows just how complicated the study of foods like soy can be.
• Exercise: Americans are obsessed with exercise - doing it, skipping it, buying clothes and gear for it, paying people to teach them how to do it, figuring out the easiest way to do it for the maximum results. Therefore, it’s all over the news, especially when such reliable sources as the New York Times reveal surprising new facts about exercise’s effectiveness - or lack thereof.
• Lifestyles: This category sort of lumps together a lot of the other types of studies that come out about preventive medicine. For example, here’s an interesting one from the most recent issue of the journal Preventive Medicine about adolescent R-rated movie viewing and smoking. (Obviously if I were doing an entire blog post about this study - or any other - I’d use my Northwestern library access to find the full text.)

Online Communities

My impression is that most preventive-medicine-related online communities focus around a specific health issue rather than PM in general (i.e. people at high risk of diabetes coming together to discuss ways to lower their risk, etc.) I did find a few things that might be interesting, but again, I might need some guidance in navigating the blogosphere to figure out where to look.

• Prevention magazine has a great Discussion Board section that covers all kinds of topics.
• Healthboards.com, which is partnered with WebMD, offers discussion boards on a huge range of health-related topics.
• This Facebook group is for medical students interested in PM.

I definitely anticipate adding to this list as I learn more about the field of PM.