My New Favorite Website

Yourdiseaserisk.com is still a little slow - a recent WSJ article overwhelmed it with traffic - but I had great fun altering my lifestyle choices to see how they affected my risk for various catastrophic illnesses, such as stroke, heart disease, diabetes, etc. (It's like working for a life insurance company.) The site comes with good credentials, too: it was designed by the Harvard Center for Cancer Prevention. What have I learned so far? Nothing too surprising: not smoking and getting a basic amount of exercise drastically reduce your chances of getting just about every disease.

Tags

More like this

Last week, our Seed overlords published on the flagship an Agence France-Presse article about a survey in Britain whose results showed that large numbers of people believe that cancer is due to "fate" rather than risk factors that can be modified to decrease one's risk of developing the disease:…
I will never forget the very first patient history I ever took. Part of medical school training is they send you onto the wards to gather patient histories and physicals so you learn to gather information effectively as a clinician. My first patient history was on a woman about 35 years old on…
Tim Russert died suddenly today. I admired his journalism, his ability to press questions that has become so rare. He didn't seem to suffer from the "two-side-ism" that has become so common in today's journalism; he realized that some issues don't have two valid opposing views. But others will…
The New York Times has been periodically running a series about the "40 years' war" on cancer, with most articles by Gina Kolata. I've touched on this series before, liking some parts of it, while others not so much. In particular, I criticized an article one article that I thought to be so…