)
Holly Atkinson
Award-Winning Medical Journalist
Holly Atkinson
Award-Winning Medical Journalist
Biography
Dr. Holly Atkinson, a well-known media personality and a gifted speaker, has engaged audiences on achieving wellness for more than 20 years. She is the senior on-air medical correspondent and chief medical editor of HealthiNation, the leading digital consumer health video network.
Atkinson is also assistant professor of Medicine and co-director of the Advancing Idealism in Medicine Program at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and adjunct professor of Public Health at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. With degrees in both medicine and journalism, she possesses a unique blend of experience and skill—medical expertise, media savvy and business acumen. Atkinson has worked in print, broadcast television and web-based technologies for both consumers and medical professionals and has extensive international business experience.
Atkinson has a broad range of experience as a medical correspondent, including assignments with NBC’s TODAY, The CBS Morning News, Lifetime Medical Television and the PBS health show BodyWatch, having jump started her career in TV as a researcher for Walter Cronkite’s Universe Show on CBS. For more than 10 years, Atkinson worked as senior vice president for Lifetime Medical Television. Then, as an entrepreneur, she helped to found and ultimately became president and CEO of Reuters Health Information, Inc., a leading international health news agency. She has recently been a frequent guest on ABC News Now.
Atkinson is an accomplished author, having written the best-selling book Women and Fatigue. She wrote a regular health column for New Woman magazine and feature pieces for The South Beach Diet Newsletter. Atkinson has been a resident physician on Dr.Weil.com and VillageHealth.com, both leading web sites.
Atkinson was a member of the original team that launched Journal Watch, a monthly summary of important medical research findings developed for practicing physicians by Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), publisher of The New England Journal of Medicine. After writing for Journal Watch for seven years, the MMS asked her to help launch a consumer health newsletter, HealthNews. She became the founding editor-in-chief and remained at the helm of the newsletter for 12 years. Upon leaving HealthNews, she was founding medical editor-in-chief of Everydayhealth.com, one of the leading health websites, and a regular columnist for the site.
Atkinson devotes considerable time to a number of not-for-profit organizations and charities. She is past president of Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that shared in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its effort to eradicate landmines. In 1995, Atkinson conducted a medical mission to Bosnia where she documented the health effects of landmines on civilians. She has also served on the boards of Legal Momentum, the nation's oldest and largest women’s civil rights organization; the American Heart Association and the Society for Women’s Health Research.
She has received the National Council of Women’s Young Achievers Award; the Society for Women’s Health Research’s Communications Achievement Award in Women’s Health, presented by then first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton; the Physicians for Human Rights’ Health and Human Rights Award and the Unitarian Universalist’s UN Award for Human Rights.
Atkinson has a MD from the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a MS degree in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Colgate University with a BS in Biology. She is a fellow of the American College of Physicians and a member of the American Medical Women’s Association.
Speaker Videos
Maximum Health
Speech Topics
The 5 Keys to Optimal Health
"Good Health" doesn't just consist of the lack of illness and being in good physical shape. Optimal health is only achieved when an individual maximizes five key dimensions in his or her life. Dr. Atkinson will explore these five dimensions of optimal well-being, offering practical advice from recent medical research mixed with pearls of wisdom handed down through the ages for improving one's emotional, social, intellectual, physical and spiritual well-being. "The 5 Keys to Optimal Health" is down-to-earth, warm, funny, and inspirational with loads of take home messages for both sexes and all ages.
Medicine and the Media
With over 15 years of experience as a medical journalist, Dr. Holly Atkinson gives a fascinating talk on medicine and the media. She explores the challenges that consumers face today in sorting through the glut of medical information reported by the nation's press. One week the headlines rave about the benefits of antioxidant vitamins or calcium; the next week they’re panned.
Does a low-fat diet protect you against disease or not? So, how much exercise do you really need? Should menopausal women ever take hormones? Dr. Atkinson gives practical tips on how to read the medical news and sort through the clutter, and in the process, gives answers to many of burning questions that the health conscious audience is dying to ask.
Consumer Health Care Trends and the Internet
The consumer revolution continues to alter the healthcare landscape. And of course, it is now fueled by the power of the Internet. Having worked in the Internet space since 1993, Dr. Atkinson explores the current consumer healthcare trends, especially those driven by the worldwide web. The Web is empowering patients today in a way that is causing radical shifts in how healthcare is practiced and delivered.
Information, education, chat forums, blogs, support groups, drugs on line, prescribing, direct-to-consumer lab and genetic testing, report card medicine—all of this instantaneously at your fingertips. In this speech, Dr. Atkinson explores the world of health on the web and explains how it is revolutionizing healthcare. She delivers this speech for both a consumer and a business audience to rave reviews.
Women and Fatigue
Dr. Atkinson wrote what's now considered the definitive book on the subject. After 20 years, Women and Fatigue is still going strong, and Dr. Atkinson is still getting standing ovations from audiences when she delivers this incredibly inspirational speech. Fatigue is a very real problem for women that, too often, families and physicians fail to take seriously.
Dr. Atkinson stresses -- to the great relief of women—that fatigue is not a figment of the imagination. Most of time, there are several causes of a woman's fatigue and the good news is that something can be done about them. Dr. Atkinson shares with the audience the major energy drainers and major energy boosters, and gives countless practical tips on how to tip the balance in favor of the boosters. Every woman will come away from this speech having laughed a lot, and learned a lot not only about how to conquer her fatigue, but how to live her best life.
Conquering Heart Disease
Although we've made significant inroads against heart disease in the last 25 years, it is still the leading killer of American men and women. Dr. Atkinson shares with the audience the latest facts about heart disease, the recent revised weight recommendations, practical advice about diet and exercise and ways to manage stress and anger. This presentation can be specifically tailored to women, who still too often believe that only men have heart attacks.
In the women-only event, Dr. Atkinson focuses on the role that estrogen plays in protecting a woman's heart, and whether or not taking hormone replacement therapy after menopause is a good idea especially in light of the new findings of the Women's Health Initiative Study. This presentation will be followed by a very lively question and answer period.
Health and Human Rights
As we enter the 21st Century, the belief in human rights as fundamental to life everywhere on the globe has taken center stage. Violations of human rights have a particularly devastating effect on people's mental and physical health. As Past President of the non-profit group, Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Atkinson gives a fascinating talk on the intersection of Health and Human Rights.
She argues passionately that by protecting and promoting human rights both home and abroad, we can have a major impact on protecting and promoting health: our own health, the health of our children and the health and well-being of our planet. Promoting human rights is not just a luxury, but a necessity that is in our own best interest. Dr. Atkinson delivers this presentation for college audiences, business audiences and health care professionals.
)
)
)
)