Your mindset can impact your mortality in surprising ways. The jou al Health Psychology recently published a fascinating (and well-written) scientific study suggesting that how fit you think you are affects your risk of death more than how fit you actually are. Here’s how researchers conducted the

Follow me on Twitter @drClaire It’s a major milestone, starting school for the first time. Whether it’s preschool or kindergarten, that first school experience can be exciting — and scary. It can be a big adjustment for parents, too! Here are some tips to help ensure a smooth transition for everyone

For diet soda fans, recent news reports linking these popular drinks to higher risk of stroke may have been alarming. A closer look at the study behind the headlines suggests there’s no need to panic. But beverages naturally low in calories are probably a healthier option than artificially sweetened

Confession: I hardly go food shopping anymore. Too many choices and too many square feet in the grocery store make grabbing a few ingredients more like a dizzying test of attention and focus. Fortunately, my husband Jay is our hunter-gatherer. When he has a question about a particular item, he texts

Follow me on Twitter @RobShmerling Imagine you were asked to complete a series of math problems, ones just hard enough to require your attention and focus, but nothing you couldn’t handle. Now, imagine you were intermittently interrupted from these math problems and asked to remember a random list o

Because we all have to eat. When I saw the brochure for the Harvard Medical School Lifestyle Medicine conference, I was intrigued, and determined to attend. Why? Because how we live can either spur on or help prevent some of the biggest threats to health like diabetes, high blood pressure, high chol

Decades of research show that yoga can reduce the emotional and physical fatigue brought on by cancer treatment. Now researchers have shown for the first time that’s also true specifically for men being treated for prostate cancer. Men who took a yoga class twice a week during treatment reported les

I have always been accident-prone. It wasn’t unusual for me to suddenly lose my balance while walking down an even-paved path as though someone had slid a banana peel in front of me. I’d slam down hard on the ground, skinning knees and elbows. I once fell off a boardwalk on my bike into a swamp, my

There it goes again: a big blob or “floater” drifting across my right eye. It’s not dangerous and it doesn’t hurt, but it sure is annoying having cloudy vision for a few seconds until the blob moves on. I have quite a few floaters — so do a lot of middle-agers — and I’ve lea ed to live with them, s

Follow me on Twitter @RobShmerling Not long ago, I took ibuprofen after a dental procedure and was amazed at how well it worked. Millions of people have had similar experiences with ibuprofen and related medications (called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs) when used for a number of

Michael Rich, MD, MPH The Mediatrician® Even before the debut of the new Netflix original movie To the Bone, parents and professionals were worried, asking The Mediatrician® about what they need to know — and whether children and teens should watch. The movie, which depicts the story of a young woma

Ticks and the diseases they carry have long been recognized as health conce s, especially in the warmer months when ticks (and humans) are more active. Ticks wait on grass tips or shrubs to latch onto new hosts when they brush by. Most of the hosts are animals, but a few tick species do bite and fe

On a wet afte oon in early November of last year, I arrived 20 minutes early to an appointment with a new (to me) pain specialist. I had first scheduled the appointment in September. Since I had never visited this particular provider before, and because he was outside of the facility where I receiv

Follow me on Twitter @RobShmerling The evidence continues to mount — physical activity can help you live longer. Of course, that raises some fundamental questions: Are certain activities better than others? How much does the intensity of the activity matter? How much is enough? There are exercise gu

Over the July 4th weekend, my non-physician husband with a history of skin cancer tried to justify not wearing sunscreen in order to get some vitamin D. My husband, of course, has no idea how much vitamin D he needs or why, and I suspect he is not alone. Why do we need vitamin D? The easy answer is

Follow me on Twitter @RobShmerling It’s a central tenet of diabetes treatment: monitor the blood sugar closely, then adjust your diet, exercise, and medications to keep it in a good range. And that makes sense. Poorly controlled blood sugar is a major risk factor for diabetic complications, includin

Follow me on Twitter @drClaire Allergies to penicillin are the most commonly reported medication allergy. This can be a real problem; if you are allergic to penicillin, it’s not just penicillin you can’t take. You can’t take amoxicillin and other antibiotics that are extremely similar, and it’s iffy

Despite being a less common cause of low back pain, sciatica is still something I regularly see as a general inte ist. Primary care doctors can and should manage sciatica, because for most individuals the body can fix the problem. My job is to help manage the pain while the body does its job. When

Follow me on Twitter @RobShmerling We all know the drill by now: the healthiest diets are those with a good balance of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats with an emphasis on high fiber, whole grains, and modest portion sizes. Vegetables play a featured role in most healthy diets. For example,

It’s no secret that alcohol affects our brains, and most moderate drinkers like the way it makes them feel — happier, less stressed, more sociable. Science has verified alcohol’s feel-good effect; PET scans have shown that alcohol releases endorphins (the “pleasure hormones”) which bind to opiate re