February 28, 2015
You already know that Marshall Medical Centers works hard to offer the very best healthcare to our community. Many requirements come with being responsible for providing medical care to a county’s entire population. One of those is supplying useful information to residents so they have the tools needed to maintain their health. A big storehouse of information is our website, www.mmcenters.com, which is packed with details on what we do, where we do it and how to find it. You may also have seen our Facebook page which is chock-full of the latest events and photos of what is happening in and around the hospitals. One source of information you may not have seen is Marshall Medical’s blog. It’s been around since 2011 but we have just revamped it and made it easier to find. Look for a button on our website called “Health News!”. Click it and it will take you right to the blog. For those who may not be familiar with a blog, let’s start with some basic info. What is a blog? "Blog" is an abbreviated version of "weblog," which is a term used to describe websites that maintain an ongoing stream of information. It’s regularly updated and is written in an informal or conversational style. A person who maintains a blog is known as a blogger and the activity of keeping a blog is known as blogging. For example, ‘It's been a week since I last blogged." There is every kind of blog imaginable: cooking, child-rearing, dating, car repair and travel, to name just a few. The focus of MMC’s blog is simple – the people who use our medical services. That’s the reason we exist. We are here solely to serve the community. For example, a recent blog features an Albertville bus driver who had a heart attack and got back in shape by working out at TherapyPlus five times a week. Another blog post spotlights an elderly lady who found that a support group really does help in surviving cancer. And you can read about a man who couldn’t maintain a healthy weight due to Crohn’s disease, but learned to manage it through exercise and nutrition. We might blog about a new treatment being offered locally, such as the Lung Nodule Clinic opening next month. Doctors there will be able to determine whether a spot on the lung is benign or early lung cancer. We’ll introduce and profile new doctors, such as our area’s newest audiologist, Dr. Hannah L. Nixon. We’ll tell you about fundraising opportunities, like the ones offered by the Marshall Medical Foundation, which funded construction of the Marshall Cancer Care Center and recently purchased new furniture for the Marshall North and South Intensive Care Units. In short, we will post things we think will be of interest to the community, from inspiring stories about patients to an article introducing a team of Athletic Trainers who keep an eye on student athletes playing sports in area schools. The best thing about a blog is that you are a part of it. Each blog post has space at the bottom for your comments. Feel free to share what you like to see and what you hope to see in the future. You can submit questions or share a good experience that you think might benefit others. It’s the casual tone and the interaction with readers that make a blog worth the time it takes to maintain it. Please take a moment to look at it. Hopefully you will find some friends, neighbors and relatives spotlighted there. Rose Myers is a journalist working in the marketing department of Marshall Medical Centers.