Wellness Blogging to Inspire Healthy Behavior

The competition for your participants' time and attention has never been greater. You've done the table tents, the lunch 'n learns, and maybe even an online wellness campaign. Are you ready to take your message to the masses in a way that can capture even more eyeballs?

Start a blog -- and join the millions of people and businesses who have entered the blogosphere. What began as a way to maintain an online personal journal has become a wildly popular way for the like-minded to gather, families to connect, and businesses to reach a wider audience. According to the Pew Internet Study, data from July 2008 showed that 33% of US adults read blogs regularly, while 11% read blogs daily.

What could a health promotion blog do for your population? As long as your content is crisp, fresh, and engaging -- and updated regularly -- readers will come back for more. Your wellness campaigns will stay in front of them, and you can drive home behavior change messages disguised as entertaining blog posts. Here's how:

    Know your audience. Design your blog with the user in mind. What topics would be most interesting and compelling for your target population based on your workplace culture and demographics? What are your top healthcare cost drivers, and how can you approach blog posts that address related behaviors?

Diabetic Glucose Monitor News, Will We Be Testing Without Blood?

Diabetic glucose monitor research is moving quickly. There is hope that soon we will have ways to test our blood sugar without using test strips and drops of blood. Every diabetes doctor knows that testing more often will improve the health of a type 1 or type 2 diabetic.

The problem with testing has always been the pain and inconvenience. Convincing teenagers on the go and older folks on tight budgets to do more frequent blood tests isn't easy.

From the first home testing glucose monitor to the ones we use today, drawing a drop of blood has been the only foolproof way to know your blood sugar. A type 2 diabetic who is not on insulin may test once a day while a type 2 on insulin ought to test at least four times every day.

The First Continuous Glucose Monitor

Brittle type 1 diabetics need to test as often as every 15 minutes to watch for hypoglycemia. It's the only way to ensure they don't enter a diabetic coma. Many parents set their alarms to wake up several times a night and check on their diabetic children, who would not wake up from a dangerously low blood sugar on their own.

The answer is a continuous monitor worn day and night. And there are some on the market right now. They use a special sensor needle inserted under the skin that is connected by wire or wirelessly to a receiver. Some receivers are as small as a cell phone, and some sit on a bedside table at night.

Good News for Hormone Replacement Therapy

News flash! You can safely get rid of your hot flashes! Estrogen is not so bad after all. A study in JAMA Journal of the American Medical Association April 2011 found that estrogen alone had a reduced risk of breast cancer and their risk of stroke declined after stopping the medication.

There is so much confusion regarding hormone replacement therapy. When evaluating the studies, you should consider a few things. The type of hormone (synthetic versus bioidentical), the route of administration (oral, transdermal or through the skin or other), the age when started and other therapies. These are just a few considerations.

This study cited in the media was done on women with hysterectomies using oral synthetic estrogen alone without any synthetic progestin. They began using the hormone in there 50's. There were 3 important findings:

• The first one is when you stop taking oral synthetic hormone therapy the increased risk of stroke and blood clots in the legs and lungs go down and so does the benefits on decreased hip fracture. Note: only oral estrogen produces blood clots and increases risk of stroke. Bioidentical estrogen given through the skin does not increase stroke or cardiovascular disease risk.

• The second major finding was a decreased risk of breast cancer. When we followed for another four years, that decreased risk of breast cancer persisted, so that, over the entire follow-up period, we saw a 23 percent decreased risk of breast cancer. Note: it was the oral, synthetic progestin that was implicated in increasing the risk of breast cancer.