It's cold out! People have heart attacks when it's cold out! You can avoid the cold weather heart attack! But how?

Studies have shown that Christmas, New Year's Eve, and winter months in general have the highest rates of heart attacks of all the days and months of the year. Why? Even in warmer climates, people have more heart attacks during the winter. Why? More...

Anytime you plan on making a significant lifestyle change, it helps if you have a social support structure around you to help you make that change. It's very difficult to quit smoking when everyone in your house smokes. You can't lose weight if the rest of your family keeps eating unhealthy food. One way to incorprate weightloss and a social support structure is through social applications. Smartphones are great becasue they have great apps! And some of them can help you lose weight.

One of the best apps for this is Calorie Conter by MyFitnessPal.com. You can search for it on your phone and download it. It is completely free.

You enter your sex, age, height, and weight, Then you give it a goal weight. It calculates your daily caloric intake allowance. For example, it may say, you may eat 1500 calories per day, and in 5 weeks, you will weigh 160 (assuming that's your goal).

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I've been watching NFL football since the mid 80s. Elway, Marino, Montana, Kelly, Favre, Brady, Manning... I've seen them all.

I have never seen anything like Tim Tebow.

His current run is something I have never seen before. It's simply unbelievable. Looking back at these past seven weeks has been something truly amazing. John Fox, Denver's headcoach who has spent his entire life coaching, hasn't seen anything like this either.

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If you've been an Ohio State football fan for a long time you will understand my frustration with Jim Tressel's style of football. Jim Tressel was a small town, mediocre coach playing small ball football in the big ten and winning on superior talent alone. He was continuously out coached, under prepared, and out game planned in nearly every big game he was a part of and never delivered big wins.

Ohio State kept him around because he dominated the big ten and beat Michigan every year. It was frustrating to watch his brand of football. Three yards and a cloud of dust, punt, punt, punt, and was never creative or aggressive on offense. Not only did he lose nearly every big game, he almost lost so many games to inferior programs. Youngstown, Toledo, Troy State, Ohio University... the list goes on and on. How many games did you watch and want to gauge your eyes out?

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Gmail just got a makeover! The new and improved Gmail looks very clean, smooth, and is very appealing. The new look matches the new look for Documents, Calendar, and other Google features. Check out this screen shot and read more about it! If you don't have gmail yet, what are you waiting for?

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Although this isn't new information, a new article was published linking alcohol consumption to higher and higher incidence of breast cancer. We've know for years that alcohol is one of the few modifiable risk factors for breast cancer. Breast cancer kills 1 in every 36 women. Heart Disease kills 1 in every 3 women. What's new? Even very small amounts of alcohol increased risk of breast cancer.

The article in this weeks Journal of the American Medical Association is below: 

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A website from Stanford University Medical school teaching faculty in an attempt to revive the art of physical exam. Great site check it out!

http://stanford25.wordpress.com/

An excellent high yield cardiology board review lecture I give the fourth year medical students, residents, and interns in preparation for Step 2 and Step 3 board exams. Download the slides and the audio lecture that goes with them!

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This is a lecture I give to all the medical students at the end of their third year clinical rotations to help them prepare for Step 2 boards. I also give this lecture in small parts throughout the year to the various internal medicine residents that rotate with us. It's a great introduction and intermediate course in EKG interpretation. After a brief introduction, we go through about 60 ECGs together and discuss them.

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Apixaban prevents embolic stroke, improves mortality, and reduces bleeding when compared to warfarin. Now we have many options for preventing thromboembolic events in atrial fibrillation; warfarin, dabigatran (pradaxa), rivoroxaban, apixaban.

The growing list of oral anticoagulant drugs jockeying to replace warfarin as the go-to agent for stroke prevention in patients with atrial fibrillation added a new candidate, apixaban, that appeared to immediately take the lead on the strength of strikingly impressive results in an 18,000-patient trial.

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Eplerenone has been found to be superior than spironolactone for all stages of heart failure, including a mortality benefit, less reshospitalization, as well as not raising HgbA1c levels.

The aldosterone antagonist eplerenone cut cardiovascular events and the need for hospitalization significantly across all risk levels in patients with mild heart failure, according to a subanalysis of the EMPHASIS-HF trial.

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I remember it like yesterday. I can't believe it's been ten years already. It's definitely changed our lives significantly.

I was at the Medical College of Ohio hospital doing research with a Dr. Juan Sanabria on liver transplants. I was applying to medical schools, and transplanting rat livers was going to be my research. We were walking around the hospital. He was showing me around the various parts of the hospital. Then we saw it on TV. We walked by a few rooms, and I could see the smoke bellowing from the towers and some replays of the planes crashing into them. I knew something was awfully wrong.

A very thorough evaluation of diabetes and guidelines on how diabetes should be managed during Ramdan. This group of physicians wrote an excellent group of guidelines on the management of diabetic patients in Ramdan. They just updated their guidelines this year. This is a must read for every physician with diabetic patients who want to fast in Ramadan.

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One of the many interesting articles on religious fasting and it's effects on human health. This is a more recent 2010 article on the effects of fasting on health. The article reviews the findings of multiple studies on religious fasting. It finds that Ramadan fasting gives mixed results, while other types of fasting offer improvement in health benefits. This tells me that Muslims are fasting incorrectly; gorging, binging, eating more total calories, eating fattier and more sugary foods.

Here are a few excerpts. You can download the full article from the link below.

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