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American Health Insurance

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Avoiding Health Supplement Fraud

The health supplement industry can be as fickle as fashion. People hop from one fad supplement to the other, following such claims as cancer prevention and effortless weight loss. But just as fashion trends sometimes fall short of the hype, a lot of supplements don’t live up to their promises. In fact, some are downright bad for you. In a poorly regulated industry, it’s easy to fall victim to manufacturers who market their products solely on hype.

One thing to keep in mind when buying alternative health supplements is reputation. There’s no way a fad company can last more than a couple of years before authorities crack down on them. Companies that have been in business for a while owe their longevity to customer trust, which in turn is built through consistency and long-term results.

A little homework can go a long way. Look for government websites such as the Better Business Bureau, and make sure your sources are unbiased. If you’re reading a review from a website that sells the product or a competing product, it’s always going to be biased. Besides government sites, you can also look for information portals and blogs. Ads are a good way to tell if you can trust what you’re reading; if a site is chock-full of ads, chances are the content is sponsored by one or more companies, or is even owned by supplement manufacturers themselves.

Of course, any information on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt. Even the steadiest companies will have a couple of bad raps from disgruntled customers, and even bad ones might turn up glowing reviews from easy-to-please buyers. It’s not even uncommon for companies to sponsor false reviews praising their product or criticizing their competition. These are pretty easy to spot, though. Instead of relying on what one or two people have to say, get a feel of what the public generally feels about the product, and then make your choice.

The best way to make sure you’re getting the real deal is to have it come from your doctor. Talk to your doctor about taking alternative health supplements and ask what kind would work best for you. Better yet, he or she can recommend products or brands that have proven results in other patients. It may even turn out that you don’t need them—after all, you can get most of what you need from just a healthy diet and lifestyle!

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Four Secretly Cool College Majors

For decades, fields like medicine, law, and engineering have dominated both higher education and the marketplace. And for the most part, they still do; these three remain the most prestigious and sought-after careers in most surveys. But just behind them are a few college majors that lead to lucrative and meaningful careers, albeit without the glamour. If you’re not sure what to specialize in, here are some lesser-known career paths that can take you places.

Urban Planning

Urban planners concern themselves with improving life quality in communities. Although the name suggests they work in cities, they also work their magic on small towns and distant suburbs; in fact, many of them specialize in the development of urban centers from such areas. As an urban planning major, you touch on different fields including economics, finance, real estate, architecture, engineering, and environmental science. You may end up working for government agencies, private companies, or non-profit organizations, and when you rack up enough experience you can make six figures a year.

Organizational Studies

It sounds pretty commonplace, but it’s a field that’s highly specialized yet surprisingly versatile. Organizational studies majors look into the way people behave as parts of organizations—towns, companies, clubs, even governments. Courses require good leadership and analytical skills, and as expected, graduates often rise quickly up the organizational ladder and manage their own teams within a year. Salaries range from $60,000 to $100,000 a year, depending on experience.

Informatics

A fairly new term, informatics is part computer science and part social studies. It’s all about how humans relate to IT and how computers shape the modern world: how it’s made, processed, passed around, lost and preserved. On the job, you can expect to work in pretty much any field that requires data management—and these days that means just about anywhere. Banks, schools, and government offices are among the biggest customers. Because the job prospects are so varied, salaries can range from $30,000 a year to over $100,000.

Actuarial Science

Actuaries specialize in risk management and risk assessment for insurance, business, and management purposes. The field has been around for a long time, but it’s only fairly recently that a dedicated program has appeared in universities. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of math and statistics involved, as well as logic and code-cracking. It’s still a very small field, which means it’s highly competitive—once you get your degree, you have to pass a series of tests to be able to practice. But it’s all worth the trouble: an actuary can make up to $200,000 a year.

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School Colors: Why Student Diversity Matters

University rankings used to take into account little more than the obvious factors: grants, research facilities, professorships, and the average success of its graduates, financial or otherwise. These days, the judges are looking at yet another facet: student diversity. Demographics have come to mean more than skin colors in the classroom; indeed, how diverse your school is can have an impact on your eventual job opportunities.

Accessible technology, fast travel, and an increasingly “flat” global marketplace have made it a must to be able to interact in different environments with different people. In other words, if you went to school with people from all over the world, you’ve got an edge over a graduate whose school has less student variety. It’s not quite as telling as your grades or your experience, but in a job market dominated by global-minded companies (or companies that like to think they are), it’s a plus that’s worth looking into.

The Society for Human Resource Management, a professional association based in Virginia, reports that 69% of American companies put a premium on diversity. Among other things, this means that they make it a point to ensure that all employees are able to take in different cultural backgrounds. If it isn’t already, in the next few years it might be quite common for interviewers to bring up school diversity when screening candidates.

So what exactly constitutes diversity? To be considered diverse, a college or university should aim to take in students from a broad range of backgrounds, whether it’s economic, ethnic, religious, political, or educational. The same applies for faculty members and other employees, although it’s not as pronounced. Diversity can also be reflected in the types of student organizations, campus events, internship opportunities, and student exchange programs on offer.

More than the job opportunities, however, a diverse institution makes for a much more rewarding school experience. Working with people from all walks of life allows a student to encounter different ways of thinking, as well as out-of-the-box approaches to problems ranging from calculus equations to taking a stand on tuition fee increases. Several surveys have shown that students from diverse universities have better satisfaction levels, both socially and academically.

If you want to learn more about diversity in your school or want to take it into account when choosing one, visit the school’s cultural affairs office (or the equivalent) and see what services are offered to different communities. It may not seem to matter when you’re knee-deep in papers and exams, but you just might be thankful for it down the road.

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Skin Care Attracting Top Doctors

Aspiring doctors put in countless hours and rack up thousands of dollars in student debt, but not all are aiming for prestigious fields like cancer research and cardiology. In the past few years, the most sought-after fields in medicine have been much more superficial: plastic surgery and dermatology.

Figures from the Association of American Medical Colleges show that last year, about half of medical students who put dermatology as their first choice for residency were rejected. In contrast, the acceptance rate for internal medicine was 98%, while that for family medicine was 99%.

And it’s not a matter of competence: many of those who failed to get dermatology residencies were top students in their respective classes. The reason is that dermatology continues to be a niche field, with less than 500 residencies up for grabs. Internal medicine offers over 5,000 residencies, while family medicine has about 2,500.

The demand is understandable considering the high price of aesthetic procedure. A Botox treatment can pay 20 times as much as a heart disease check on a per-hour basis, with the added perk of flexible hours and not being on call all the time. These work conditions are attracting the country’s best medical students, leaving primary-care fields to graduates of foreign medical schools. These doctors, although just as capable, seldom stay longer than a few years, choosing instead to practice in their home countries. This explains the growing shortage of practitioners in many other medical fields, which in turn contributes to the less-than-ideal state of American healthcare.

Current and would-be dermatologists see their specialty as more than skin-deep. According to them, because skin problems are more noticeable than, say, high blood pressure, they can cause psychological problems that can affect a patient’s overall well-being. And not all dermatology patients have superficial needs: plastic surgery is sometimes needed to restore facial features following an accident or when a tumor spreads to visible areas.

Another thing that lends credence to skin care is the rate at which technological developments and treatments are entering the market. Doctors have access to a wide range of tools to help diagnose and treat even the most difficult skin problems, and often, they don’t have to consult with other practitioners to reach a diagnosis.

Not all aspiring dermatologists are after the job conditions, although it’s definitely a welcome perk. Some are more interested in research, going after new treatments and crafting new procedures for diseases like skin cancer. In any case, if you’re ever in need of a capable doctor in the next few years, you’ll know where to look.

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Where to Go for Grad School Without Going Broke

The typical college graduate exits school with bleak job prospects, no thanks to a tanking economy. No wonder so many people are looking into graduate school; if there are no good jobs to be had, might as well use the time to make themselves more hireable. The catch, of course, is that university doesn’t come cheap—and most graduates are already burdened with student debt to begin with.

One attractive solution is to look abroad. There’s little doubt that American and British universities are among the world’s best, but they are notoriously expensive. Other countries have equally strong yet much more accessible educational systems—the kind that lets you pay your tuition in full, with more than enough left for food, rent, and even a little travel. Here are some places you may want to look.

Spain (and the Hispanosphere)
A full-time graduate program at a Spanish university can cost around $2,000 a year, roughly a fifth of what you would pay in the U.S. The University of Barcelona and the University of Madrid are among the best in the country. In South America, the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil is a consistent top-notcher; in Mexico, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) is a source of international acclaim. These schools are especially strong in history and the social sciences, and are fairly open to interdisciplinary interests.

France
The French take pride in their intellectual culture, and they have the educational tools to prove it. Foreign grad students pay as little as €200 ($265) for a year of internationally renowned education. The École Normale Supérieure de Paris is ranked 28th in the world and offers master’s programs in 50 areas, including arts and literature, social sciences, science, health, and law.

Singapore
There’s a reason Singapore has become the favourite destination of Asian grad students. The best universities charge under $5,000 per year of graduate study for foreign students; this includes Singapore National University, which ranks just behind the École Normale Supérieure de Paris in world rankings. Selections outside Asian studies and history may be limited, but travel opportunities are cheap and abundant.

South Africa
Education was one of the first things to bloom in South Africa after the apartheid, with locals more than ready to enjoy their newfound intellectual freedom. Johannesburg, the capital, and the tourist city of Cape Town have the strongest offerings in the country, with international student tuition averaging $4,000 a year. The cost of living is also quite low, which is why a lot of graduate students seem to spend as much time on the beach as they do in the library.

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Facebook App Helps Trace Virus Spread

Scientists at a Tel Aviv University (TAU) in Iran have turned to Facebook to help them track the spread of viruses and infections. Researchers Nir Ben-Tal  and Gal Almogy at the university’s Faculty of Life Sciences developed an app dubbed PiggyDemic, in which users can pass a simulated virus onto their friends or vice versa. Their plan is to see how social interaction affects where a virus spreads and how many people it infects.

The method challenges the current system of tracking virus spread through mathematical algorithms. The latter’s flaw is that it assumes that every virus is equally spread from one population to another, which is hardly ever the case—social interaction always comes into play and throws the pattern off track. For example, according to Almogy, Africa has a high concentration of HIV while Asia and North America have the largest share of some flu strains. This is proof that viral infections are in part a social phenomenon.

By adding (digital) human interaction into the mix, the researchers expect to get a more realistic look at viral interaction. Facebook, the world’s largest social network with 800 million active users, is an ideal place for such a study. Once a user installs PiggyDemic, the app follows his or her news feed to see which people they interact with. Uninfected users are given risk rankings such as “immune” or “susceptible” based on their interactions with infected contacts. A network visualization tool allows them to see how the viruses are passed on from one person to another.

Besides tracking, PiggyDemic also doubles as a health guide for users who install it, offering tips to help users make healthy choices. It can also be used as a game, with people trying to “infect” as many of their friends as they can. Perhaps most importantly, the app has also been designed to track real-life virus outbreaks in real time by allowing people to report when they are actually infected. Such a tracking method can alert people in the network of the added risk.

The initial findings already seem to challenge current beliefs about virus spread. For instance, although the app is not configured to incorporate seasonal changes, the flu “virus” has spread more in the winter, the usual peak period. This suggests that in addition to environmental factors, social patterns can account for the rise and fall of different viruses through the seasons.

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Should You Homeschool Your Child?

It’s a daunting task for parents to take their children’s education into their own hands. But more and more people are doing it: about 2 million students in North America are homeschooled, and that’s only counting those whose parents have registered their kids with school boards. The real number could be a lot bigger. But what makes parents decide to homeschool their children?

The reasons vary from the practical, such as the lengthy trip to school and the constant threat of teacher strikes, to situation-specific, as is the case with children who show promise in art, sports, or other areas outside the curriculum. Some parents simply enjoy the experience and want to monitor their child’s progress with things other than grades. There’s no universal rule as to whether or not a child should be homeschooled—it’s a decision that should take into account several factors, including the child’s learning style, the parents’ commitment, and the many implications it can have for the child’s future.

The first thing you should ask yourself is whether you have the time and energy for homeschooling. It takes more than a couple of hours of spelling and math on the kitchen table; you need to follow a curriculum, prepare lessons, give and grade assignments. You should also be careful not to take the ‘home’ in homeschooling too seriously: a child needs to get out of the home and learn from things other than schoolbooks. Trips to the park, museums, and local libraries are essential to rounding out a homeschool program.

Next, make sure you can afford it—you may not have to pay tuition or buy as many school supplies, but it’s a given that at least one parent will have to commit to the task full-time. If you’ve lived with two incomes for a while, this may take some getting used to. Compare the annual costs of sending a child to school to the income you’ll be giving up if you decide to go this route.

The most important factor, of course, is whether your child is ready for it. Some children simply thrive better with parents as teachers, but others will feel they are missing out on things like making friends, learning from a variety of mentors, and getting to know other people. It’s often a good practice to take it one year or one semester at a time, and leave a door open so that your child can go back to traditional schooling any time they want.

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