While this may seem a novel approach, it seems pretty basic that people would want to be healthy not just for health’s sake but mostly so they can enjoy life better, fuller and longer. Isn’t that the point?

For the last year or two I have been considering this idea, that food is not only a contributor to good (or bad) health, but that proper nutrition is the difference between life and death. Reams of data clearly demonstrate that a plant-based diet with lots of vegetables, fruits and whole grains is the foundation of good health.

But the idea that diet (and its cousin, exercise) as an active therapeutic method to prevent and treat disease has only recently started to gain momentum.

An article today in The New York Times highlights the woefully inadequate nutrition education in our medical schools. The partnership between the Culinary Institute of America (I took a weeklong “advanced boot camp there” and loved it) and the Harvard School of Public Health is a hopeful sign that perhaps the medical community will start to pause before plying the next patient with this pill, plus that pill to treat the side effect of the first pill, and so on.

It is this intersection — of culinary enjoyment and a healthy life — where I would love to take my career.

This is another great example of how health care marketing and communications doesn’t have to be so darned SERIOUS. After all, the phrase “serious as a heart attack” exists for a reason. Yet, taking a chance on comedy made a memorable message that people will actually watch and remember. Kudos to the American Heart Association!

Some hospitals struggle just to keep floors clean and paint un-scuffed.

Hospitals have a lot to learn from top hotels like Ritz-Carlton and The Four Seasons, but I’m not convinced it’s interior design tips. While those luxury hotels offer wonderful getaways, it’s the overall experience and dedication to customer service, staff training and the prioritization of customer convenience that really differentiate those hotels from others.

If you wouldn’t sell cigarettes in the hospital gift shop why would you sell high-fat and high-sugar items? Then again, an argument can be made that tobacco is always bad for you, whereas the occasional cookie or potato chips can still be integrated into a healthy, well-balanced diet.

What do you think?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that WellPoint Inc. is raising the stakes for reimbursing about 1,500 hospitals across the country, cutting off annual payment increases if they fail to deliver on the big health insurer’s definition of quality patient care.

Ethical concerns aside, it will be interesting to see how a company that advises others on how to handle communications crises will handle this one themselves.

The publication, Surgery News, has pulled the publication from its online archives. But you can find the editorial in its entirety here (in the interest of “judge for yourself.”).

Dr. Greenfield broke the first rule of communications in a professional environment – no jokes. In all our presentation skills coaching and media training sessions, we remind our clients that “warming up an audience” with a joke is ill-advised at best, and a catastrophe at worst.

This doesn’t mean, of course, we must be humorless. But we must be very careful to understand our audience and the situation very clearly before venturing into what Dr. Greenfield characterized as “light-hearted” comments.

Having a sense of humor and telling a joke are dramatically different things. Stand-up comedian is a painstakingly difficult thing to do well, even for the professionals. Our general recommendation is not to give up your day job.

Having humor, however, can engage an audience. Tell a personal anecdote. Use a humorous quote. Whatever you decide to do, make sure it follows these three rules:

• it’s brief
• it’s relevant to the topic of your presentation and your audience
• when in doubt leave it out

Remember, no one ever had to resign from preventing a tasteless article from running in a professional journal.