The truth is, celebrity news stories attract a lot of eyeballs. So it’s not surprising that media outlets continue to use that angle for stories on health and disease, with headlines like “14 Celebrities with Breast Cancer” or “Stars Who Have Battled Cancer.” What is surprising is that it may not be what patients actually want to read when they’re looking for health information.

Deep within the annals of Penn Medicine’s two-and-a-half centuries is a fun little story that ties together horse racing, an eccentric man with a Rip Van Winkle beard, The Matrix, and the University of Pennsylvania. It starts, as many good stories do, with a (possibly apocryphal) bet.

Held annually on the third Wednesday of October – in the heart of Breast Cancer Awareness Month – Breast Reconstruction Awareness Day is more than just an educational opportunity. It’s also a chance for women to help other women. That task was on the minds of both patients and survivors at Penn’s BRA Day event, held this year in the Smilow Center for Translational Research on October 18th.

Over the past two years, Jack Sheridan has seen his cardiovascular vital signs – total cholesterol, triglycerides and LDL (the “bad” cholesterol) – decrease dramatically. Yet, during this time, he hasn’t exercised more or changed his diet. His weight has remained the same as have his medications. So what’s his secret? He volunteers.

Like many countries in eastern and southern Africa, Kenya has a high rate of pediatric HIV, with nearly 100,000 children living with the virus. Rosa Chemwey Ndiema hopes to put Kenya on the path to virtual elimination of the virus through research on how to better involve community leaders to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV—and that brought her to Philadelphia this summer to learn from renowned physicians and researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine.

With another season of scholastic football in full swing at school districts across the country, a growing number of physicians and athletic trainers are re-evaluating how they diagnose and treat head injuries suffered during practices and games.

Since the 1980s, the costs of health care in the Unites States has risen from nine percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product to now nearly twice that amount. With a population that is steadily increasing and aging, it appears that trend is not likely to slow anytime soon. The challenge is a tricky balancing act: providing the best possible care while controlling costs within an extraordinarily complex system of insurance networks, pharmaceutical companies, care providers, and so much more.

What could medicine look like someday if, instead of focusing primarily on the organ affected by a disease — neurologists examining brain diseases, pulmonologists focusing on lung diseases — our system was centered on how cells process energy?

Starting today, Penn Medicine hospitals in Philadelphia are asking patients to share more information in their electronic health records. For example, in addition to reporting their sex at birth, patients are now offered the opportunity to provide specific information about their gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as their ethnicity and preferred spoken and written language.

A long, long time ago in a public health era far, far away, there was a world where CVS or Walgreens storefronts weren’t on every corner and drug regulations were nonexistent. This was the time of apothecaries – those fascinating druggists who meticulously mixed herbs and minerals, adding a dash of animal fat here and a bit of earwax there, all with the intent of curing the ailments of their fellow man.