Hot MedFax

Next time you're sick, don't call your doctor.  Consult your monitor. That's what's happening to medicine , writes Beth Carter at smartplanet.com, and it's completely transforming healthcare.  No longer do you need to see your doctor for a physical.  Now electronic monitors can track it, along with your fitness level, calories burned, heart rate and a brand-new application for detecting biomarkers in your blood can tell your doctor whether you need more potassium in your diet. Called InsideTracker, "By using insights drawn from blood work, the service helps individuals design his or her optimal diet and exercise program," Carter explains. As Carter notes, she recently learned that, while all her levels were fine, she was doing so much exercise she needed more potassium in her diet.  There's probably no way a doctor could tell you that without running a bunch of (expensive) tests, and who would even think to test that, anyway? So InsideTracker c

Great.  Now that the world knows, thanks to the Web, that I fill my prescriptions at Walgreen's, buy my running shoes at New Balance, and order my Christmas flank steak from QVC, it's going to help me lose weight on Facebook. That's right.  According to Health Works Collective, Johnson & Johnson  will use Facebook to "monitor obesity prevalence." Now no one I know would call me obese, so why am I getting this?  Most likely because I visit Weight Watchers' sites, but come on! Quoting a recent study from PLOS ONE, J&J graduate fellow Stephen Shie writes that public health workers can use Facebook to survey the pervasiveness of obesity. Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health "found that higher proportion of the population with activity-related interests on Facebook was associated with a significant lower predicted prevalence of obese and overweight people across the United States metro areas as well as across New York City neig