Why this blog?

Two reasons to start this blog:

1) I teach Human Anatomy & Physiology to many kinds of pre-health students including nursing, athletic training, sports medicine, exercise physiology, the various therapies (occupational, physical), psychology, and a few pre-meds. We spend a year talking about how the different organ systems function in health (mostly) and disease (a little, since pathophysiology is an upper level class), generally at the molecular and cellular level. The students learn about enzyme function, and protein channels, and protein transporters, and cell signaling, and all that good stuff. I usually spend a full lecture on "how we know what we know and why we believe what we believe" which is a lecture on evidence-based medicine (in the broad sense) and especially how science (in the broad sense) is the only game in town that allows us to overcome the many cognitive biases that get in the way of gaining reliable knowledge. A few students like the lecture but many don't because I really challenge many of their beliefs.

2) I run and ski and there's lots of bad information out there on endurance physiology and on how to avoid injury in these sports and how to treat injuries.

So this blog gives me space to draw attention to these areas. Since I don't have time to write a bunch of essays, mostly they will be links but sometimes I might write something longer.