March 22, 2020 — Author: Jelena Kecmanovic Adjunct Professor of Psychology Georgetown University As the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues its global spread and the number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases continues to increase, anxiety related to the outbreak is on the rise too. As a psychologist, I am seeing this in my practice already. Although feeling anxiety in response to a […]
March 21, 2020 — Obesity is a complex, chronic disease. However, it’s one that’s easy to ignore, because it burns slowly into a person’s health status. The problem isn’t immediate. It usually lies in the distant future – with long-term risks. That’s true enough, until those long-term risks come into short-term focus. Right now, this is precisely what is […]
March 20, 2020 — All around the world, we have a new commitment to suspense. Education is suspended. So, too are daycare and preschools. Office work? In large measure, that simply doesn’t exist right now. In fact, it seems like the pattern of our lives has become suspended animation. The Pause Button For a small minority, this might be […]
March 19, 2020 — We have a grand natural experiment underway – a huge lifestyle intervention. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people are living a more confined lifestyle. We have no more third place, no commute to work, only the home place. So physical activity and nutrition patterns will change. Likewise, social dynamics will change, too. But we have […]
March 18, 2020 — A public health emergency can have an unfortunate side effect. With the coronavirus pandemic, pseudoscience, quackery, and fraud are emerging, too. Diets and supplements to “boost” your immune system are a common form of this fraud. Honestly, sometimes this sort of misinformation flies under the radar of normally discerning people. But we praise Dietitians of […]
March 17, 2020 — A pandemic such as COVID-19 has a way of raising difficult issues to confront. Questions about who’s at risk also raise issues about stigma and bias. On top of that, when the pandemic overruns our capacity for healthcare, triage becomes a reality. In Italy, physicians on the frontlines of this pandemic are facing difficult decisions […]
March 16, 2020 — Two things are now very apparent about the coronavirus epidemic. First, it affects all of us. But second, the health affects are wildly different for different people. For many people, the symptoms are mild, sometimes even negligible. However, it can also be deadly – especially for people older than 60 or people who have other […]
March 15, 2020 — Ready or not, it’s time to get comfortable with the idea of telemedicine for obesity care. Because the unfolding coronavirus pandemic is making it a fact of life. Wired describes it as a safety valve for a strained healthcare system. In addition, less personal contact is a tool for slowing the spread of this virus. […]
March 14, 2020 — Must everything be tribal and ideological? We think not. Yet avoiding this tendency is certainly hard for humans such as ourselves. Facing the health threat of COVID-19, we see a prime example of the importance of distinguishing science from ideology. It’s handwashing. The Most Effective Way to Prevent Transmission This is a matter scientific fact. […]
March 13, 2020 — Through the last four decades of relentlessly rising obesity, we’ve had two clinical strategies in play. The first approach – arguably dominant – has been to overlook obesity and merely treat the complications as they appear. The other is intensive behavioral treatment. But clearly, neither of these have been adequate. The burden of chronic diseases […]
