Beginning today, The Huffington Post is launching a new section, HuffPost Health. It's a place for serious and interesting conversation and education around all aspects of personal health and well-being, including treatment, prevention and wellness.
As you know, there is no shortage of information on the Internet. For example, a Google search of "heart disease" yields over 25 million entries. You could literally spend the rest of your life reading through these.
What's needed is an intelligent forum for sharing a spectrum of evidence-based ideas and approaches to enable you to sort out what works, what doesn't, for whom and under what circumstances.
HuffPost Health will be a clear and balanced resource to provide a comprehensive view of the state of health and health news in a given day. It will provide a forum for intelligent discourse and divergent but respectful points of view. HuffPost Health will empower you with state of the art information you can use to make informed and intelligent decisions that affect your life in meaningful ways.
In this spirit, HuffPost Health's articles and videos will include the best of evidence-based allopathic Western medicine (including drugs and surgery), lifestyle and functional medicine (including nutrition, fitness, stress management, supplements, and love and support), mind/body medicine (including mental and emotional health), women's and men's health issues, and integrative medicine (including complementary and alternative medicine).
In addition to personal health information, HuffPost Health will address health policy issues. At a time when there is more controversy than ever about the roles of government and industry in health care, HuffPost Health will provide a place to have a lively dialogue from a wide variety of perspectives that may transcend the usual liberal/conservative dichotomies.
For example, many conservative CEO's are beginning to embrace universal health coverage as health care costs are taking such a disproportionate share of bottom-line profits. And when parents realize that the childhood obesity epidemic may cause this to be the first generation in which children live a shorter lifespan than their parents, it doesn't matter if you come from a red state or a blue state, as the state of your child's health transcends these divisions.
We encourage you to participate by writing articles, making videos, sharing comments, and letting us know what most interests you, as we're here to serve you and your health needs.
To your health,
Dean Ornish, M.D.
Medical Editor, The Huffington Post
Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute
Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
www.pmri.org