Blooming Wellness
Dr. Eek's Health & Wellness Blog
We live in a world where every week a new headline promises that a drug cuts your risk in half or slashes disease by a huge percentage. Sounds impressive. But those numbers often leave out context that actually matters for your real world health decisions. In public health we talk about absolute risk reduction and …
By: Dr. Eeks (ErinKate Stair, MD, MPH) Trust in medical and public health leaders has been eroding for decades. People often miss a slow slide until something dramatic makes them look up. Then they mistake it for something new. For medicine and public health, that “big thing” was the COVID pandemic. Way Back When: Historical …
Public health saves lives. But it only works if people can hear it, trust it, and carry it as their own. Connection isn’t decoration. It’s the job. —Eeks So much public health online sounds like choir practice. The echo claps back, the room gives itself a standing ovation, and nothing moves. Preaching to the choir …
What is an anecdote? What’s the plural of anecdote? A popular doctor on X (Twitter) posted that the plural of anecdote is misinformation. I guess the doctor thought it was clever…it got many likes and reposted several times, but in my head, it didn’t make sense. What annoyed me was its blatant inaccuracy. The plural …
This is an updated version. By Dr. Eeks But first, a quick joke I wrote: Welcome to the Church of Letters! Credentialism is the habit of treating degrees and licenses like receipts for intelligence, competence, and general worthiness to speak. The more credentials you have, the more valid your opinions apparently become. This works …
This is Causation in Epidemiology made fun. Read below and learn what really killed my pal Skip. ;) Below you’ll see a short video posted from my Youtube channel. It will make sense when you watch it (I think). I like to use props, often things in my kitchen, to explain public health concepts. I …
Case fatality vs Mortality Rate: They are often confused in media reports covering outbreaks, even by doctors who have turned into in public health spokespeople, yet they are not the same thing- and that matters. To explain the difference and why it matters, I used Bird Flu, since it’s 1) in the news and 2) …
Hello all. I’m sharing this because it’s health communication at its finest! ;) Also, living in a building with the slowest, smallest elevator in the world…in which there is little to no ventilation, Lord does this resonate. Anyhow, don’t be afraid to be funny in your health comms! Public health shouldn’t be so stiff and …
The War on Misinformation and the Elephants on the Battlfield: View are totally my own. In the health comms section of my blog, you’ll notice that I write a lot about the war on misinformation and have been doing so since the beginning of the pandemic. Fueled by the Election of 2016 and COVID-19, there’s …
Misinformation or Truth: My Cheat Sheet. As mentioned in several previous posts, I think trying to control all of the information a person is/isn’t exposed to is an expensive and losing battle. Between real life and the digital landscape, the opportunities for exposure are endless. No matter what you do, people will one day find …
What is the public health equilibrium? It’s a term I coined to describe the balancing act that is public health, which I’ll describe in this blog. This is my perception, vision, thinking and not anyone I work for or consult for. This blog was inspired by one of my recent tweets: I don’t think the …
Running with Headlines & Headline Science Troubles: For today’s musings in scicomms…What’s in a headline? And what do we do with headlines? To explain, let me share a Running with Headlines experience that happened: I recently had Dr. Shuji Ogino (Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School) on my Causes or Cures podcast to …
