Those searching for the next health improvement ‘silver bullet’ are advised by Dan Buettner of the Blue Zones Project℠ to consider “silver buckshot:” creating healthy communities by integrating policy, built environment, social networks, structural context and people’s sense of purpose. Buettner calls ‘bullets’ like individual responsibility and the diet/exercise combination insufficient on their own, pointing [...]

If a family that’s been tightening its belt comes upon a little extra cash, would it typically use it to pay off the mortgage or take care of the kids? That question crossed our minds when the FY ‘13 Executive Budget proposed allocating some of Arizona’s current budget surplus funds toward buying back Capitol buildings [...]

A decision-making swamp resides at the confluence of suicide attempts and practical bedside ethics. Once a patient is stabilized, a tapestry of factors tend to appear: chronic illness, poor quality of life, depression, terminal prognosis and more. How do professionals respect the autonomy of a patient who has already attempted to take his/her life? What [...]

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see. – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now that the ritual of making personal New Year’s resolutions is out of the way, we can get back to the business of setting goals for community impact. Nonprofits interested in engaging with peers and exploring collaborative technical assistance can get their goal-setting fix – and some lunch at the same time – by attending [...]

Given the fact that we are consuming sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) – the single greatest source of added sugar in the American diet – at an average rate of “70,000 ‘empty calories’ per person” per year, we probably should all be obese diabetics by now. Thankfully we aren’t quite yet. A new Health Affairs study [...]

The next time you recall a vivid memory, try to remember this as well: our brains are making it up. It turns out that in their zeal to be efficient users of memory, our brains compress an experience by reducing it “to a few critical threads, such as a summary phrase,” according to Dan Gilbert’s [...]

The effects of the Great Recession and associated budget cuts are playing out in emergency rooms across the country, according to a Reuters report that spanned from Seattle to Boston with stops in Chicago and smaller areas like Grand Rapids, Winston-Salem in between. It reveals what poor cost-shifting decisions look like in real time, and [...]

What’s in a word so often depends on its context, so imagine how much fun you can have introducing a contentious word into the roiling world of health care. The longer the word is the better, because it turns out that words with few letters have the most definitions. The winner in this regard is [...]

Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo keep shrinking, leaving leaders no choice but to re-imagine them. It turns out that adaptation to The Incredible Shrinking City includes making it healthier for people: designing with nature, establishing local food sources (urban farming, community gardening), and re-aggregating communities on a livable scale. U.S. cities aren’t likely to ever be [...]