What’s In a Name?

Each year I assemble a small group of colleagues to study the schedule of seminars that have been confirmed for the Johns Hopkins Medicine annual women’s health conference, A Woman’s Journey. Our agenda is to craft titles for each lecture. These are critical subjects about improving your health and sometimes devastating diseases. Naming a seminar is serious business. Never the less, the meeting sometimes becomes raucous. It’s challenging. We need to be creative, yet maintain the integrity of the subject matter. The bottom line is to appeal to your curiosity and interests.

So, as you plan your fall, I hope you will check out hopkinsmedicine.org/awomansjourney. Read the titles of A Woman’s Journey’s 32 seminars that will be taught by Johns Hopkins physicians. Laugh at some of the titles; be motivated by others. But, when you finish reading the seminar names, be sure to go to our website, register for A Woman’s Journey, and learn what’s really in a name.
Leslie

Numbers

I always liked math—algebra withstanding. But with each year I come to better appreciate the importance of numbers. Although April 15 has just passed, remember that numbers have a pervasive impact on our health as well as our taxes. Whether we want to admit it or not, our increasing age impacts our health and our daily lives. More important, however, is our “medical age.”

Most of us know our shoe size or dress size, but do you know your HLD and LDL cholesterol, your glucose level or blood pressure? How many grams of fiber are you eating a day? What is your thyroid level? Yesterday I learned from a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist that, on average, with each advancing decade the vitreous gel that fills your eye pulls away from your retina by 10 percent. I wondered what other changes are occurring in my body that can be captured by data.

We may not be doctors, but we need to become familiar with these numbers and know how they can impact our health.