We at Science-Based Medicine are very happy to announce that Dr. Val Jones will be joining us this week as a regular blogger. Her first post will appear this Thursday, October 9.
Val Jones, M.D. is the President and CEO of Better Health, PLLC, a health education company devoted to providing scientifically accurate health information to consumers. Most recently she was the Senior Medical Director of Revolution Health, a consumer health portal with over 120 million page views per month in its network. Prior to her work with Revolution Health, Dr. Jones served as the founding editor of Clinical Nutrition & Obesity, a peer-reviewed e-section of the online Medscape medical journal. Dr. Jones is also a consultant for Elsevier Science, ensuring the medical accuracy of First Consult, a decision support tool for physicians.
Dr. Jones was born in Greenwich, Conn., and raised in Nova Scotia, Canada. She completed her bachelor’s degree at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a master’s degree at Dallas Theological Seminary in Texas. She also participated in several research projects in biomedical imaging and vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
She graduated from medical school at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and was a regular contributor to the medical student section of the Journal of the American Medical Association. She received a scholarship to conduct research in the department of plastic surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, as well as did a summer research fellowship in pediatric surgery at the University of Southern California, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health. She also completed research at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City in its Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
Dr. Jones was the principal investigator of several clinical trials relating to sleep, diabetes and metabolism, and she won first place in the Peter Cyrus Rizzo III research competition.
Dr. Jones is the author of the popular blog, “Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason,” which won The Best New Medical Blog award in 2007. Her cartoons have been featured at Medscape, the P&S Journal, and the Placebo Journal. She was inducted as a member of the National Press Club in Washington, DC in July, 2008.
Dr. Jones has been quoted by various major media outlets, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times. She has been a guest on over 20 different radio shows, and was featured on CBS News.
As you will see beginning Thursday, Dr. Jones provides a viewpoint we have not yet had here at SBM in that she was initially indifferent to the infiltration of non-science-based medicine into respected institutions but was forced to confront the problem when it unexpectedly reared its ugly head in her life. We will let her tell her story herself, however, and are confident that you will soon see why we asked her to join SBM. Suffice it to say that she now understands more than most how unscientific medical modalities gain traction in the media.
Finally, this is not the end. Now that SBM has become established, we have concluded that it is time to bring on new bloggers who can increase the quantity and quality of our content, as well as fill in holes in our expertise that may exist. Consequently, over the last few weeks, we have been seeking new medical bloggers who are of a similar mind to ours when it comes to the importance of science as the basis for medicine, and Dr. Jones will be the first of what we hope will be a new wave. Two more excellent bloggers will be joining us the week of October 13. In the tradition of “leaving ’em wanting more,” however, we will hold off on an official announcement until later this week.