The important documentary film called “A Typical Heart“is a triumph.
It’s about the deadly disparity in diagnosis, treatment and outcomes among male and female heart patients. It packs an incredible load of unforgettable facts and quotable quotes into just 22 short minutes. .Continue reading “This documentary film pulls no punches!”→
If you’ve had as many 12-lead ECG tests as I’ve had done over the years since my heart attack, you too may marvel at how swiftly the nurse or paramedic or Stress Test Clinic tech can slap those sticky electrode patches onto your chest, arms and legs. Having observed many people slapping patches on me, I often wonder: how do they know if they’re attaching those electrocardiogram patches onto the right anatomical places? .
Internal Medicine specialist Dr. Ann Hester’s new book is called Patient Empowerment 101– but its subtitle is “More than a Book – It’s an Adventure!” The adventure of Chapter 1 includes this:
Well, we’re into the New Year now. For some of us, that’s almost enough time to notice small cracks beginning to appear in the boldly announced resolutions made in the midst of all those post-Christmas excess guilt pangs. When I was one of the volunteer run leaders at our local Y Marathon Clinic during the last century, we’d often hear such resolutions from the first-timers starting our training workouts at this time of year – something like “This is the year I’m finally going to quit smoking, lose 20 pounds and run a marathon!”
Anne at the 2017 Monterey Bay Half Marathon, Thomas Blog photo*
A number of my readers contacted me recently to make sure I’d seen Gretchen Reynolds’ new Washington Post article (THANK YOU, dear heart sisters, for thinking of me!) For those who missed it, I want to revisit some key messages from a tragic story about Gretchen’s friend, Anne – her hiking/mountain biking/distance running (also non-drinking and non-smoking) buddy. Gretchen described 61-year old Anne as “kind and capable, modest and fit”. She died suddenly last month. Anne’s cause of death, as Gretchen wrote in her regular column in the Post, was “a bolt-of-lightning heart attack” : . Continue reading “Too fit and healthy to worry about heart disease?”→