Monday, August 10, 2009

ATLANTA? At 10:00 a.m. on Monday, August 10, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will have an unusual visitor: a singing medical doctor named Mache Seibel.

Dr. Seibel, who once performed the first successful in vitro fertilization in Massachusetts, is the founder of HealthRock http://www.healthrock.com), where he writes and sings songs about health.

Guitar in hand, Dr. Seibel will address a CDC-wide audience with sonorous snippets of ?Wash your Hands,? ?Phat Fat Rap,? and other popular HealthRock songs.

His talk, entitled ?Using Music to Transform Health Education,? comes at a crucial point in the U.S. health care debate. As Congress decides how to best address the growing health care crisis, Dr. Seibel is using HealthRock to focus on prevention.

As a study by researchers at RTI International, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed, obesity alone is responsible for over 9% of all U.S. health care spending. Yet in most cases, obesity (and all of the additional health care spending it leads to) is preventable.

Dr. Seibel says he focuses on prevention because ?it?s better to stay well than to get well.? Preventing avoidable conditions like obesity would help Americans keep extra money in their pockets and extra years in their lives.

Notably, health illiteracy is a major contributor to many preventable conditions. By simplifying health information and making it easy to remember, Dr. Seibel tackles health illiteracy head on. According to Dr. Seibel, ?if you can sing about a medical problem, you can talk about it. If you can talk about it, you can act on it.?

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