Hot MedFax

Did you know your tweets could get sick, too? Apparently, it turns out that they change when we ourselves are sick.  According to newswise.com, opinion and emotion in tweets change when you're sick. "Opinions and emotions are present in every tweet, regardless of whether the user is talking about their health," says Svitlana Volkova, a data scientist at Richland, Washington's  Department of Energy's  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory  ( PNNL) and lead author of a recent study. "Like a digital heartbeat, we're finding how changes in this behavior relate to health trends in a community." It takes health workers weeks to discover influenza trends the traditional way: by monitoring how many sick people visit clinics. By discovering trends in real time, social media could be the game-changing solution public health workers have been looking for. But can tweets replace a health exam for detecting a rise in the flu or other health threats? Vo...

This may surprise you.  I know it did me. But singing the company song in a circle or going to camp with your colleagues, like they used to do at IBM,  may just not be good for you. They did it to instill spirit in workers, but now a new study says inspirational managers may actually harm employees. "Managers who inspire their staff to perform above and beyond the call of duty may actually harm their employees’ health over time, according to researchers from the University of East Anglia," newswise.com reports. The findings suggest that constant pressure from these "transformational leaders" may increase sickness absence levels among employees. They also indicate that some vulnerable employees in groups with transformational leaders may, in the long term, have increased sickness absence rates if they ignore their ill-health and frequently show up for work while ill, known as "presenteeism." Transformational leaders are defined as those wh...