If you have followed this column, you know I’m a sailor. In fact, my family has long been associated with sailing. My wife and I both grew up around sailing boats, and our children have rarely known a year to pass without various sailing adventures at home on the Chesapeake Bay and in the Caribbean. Though I am quite proud of my career as a federal medicine physician in the Army, I fancy myself plying the world’s oceans as an 18^th century sailing captain of a frigate.

E.W. Howe was wise well beyond his time. This spring, as I mark another birthday that has placed me way on the wrong side of 40, I note with frustration that all the things I like seem to be unhealthy. Like so many middle-aged Americans, I fight a continuous battle with the things I love.

Since 2001, I have had the good fortune to serve as the leader of the Defense and Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management, Rockville, MD (DVCIPM — www.DVCIPM.org). Though this organization has had other names since its inception, it has always focused on improving pain management for warriors and their families at home and on the modern battlefield. The DVCIPM is principally a pain medicine research and coordination organization with a focus on applied science to improve the care of military families today.

William T. Jarvis, PhD, is a retired public health and preventive medicine professor at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California and president of the National Council Against Health Care Fraud. He has been an outspoken critic of the nutritional supplement industry for decades.

During the Sundance Film Festival, held in January in Park City,UT, the documentary “Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare” was debuted by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke. I have not had the opportunity to see the 98-minute documentary, yet I was enthralled with descriptions of the project on the Internet.

I recently learned through the evening news that a Dutch scientist, Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, Netherlands, has genetically engineered a deadly form of the H5N1 bird flu virus into an easily transmissible form that has the potential to cause lethal human pandemics.

As an anesthesiologist, on a purely pragmatic level, it is hard not to bear some animosity toward those who smoke.

When this issue of US Medicine reaches our readers, we will be well into the holiday season and drawing 2011 to a close. Like many, I often find myself using this time of year to reflect on the previous 12 months, new directions, challenges, successes and failures.

If I were unfortunate enough to sustain a severe trauma, I would prefer to be taken to a U.S. Military Combat Support Hospital (CSH) over nearly all other medical institutions in the world.

I had the misfortune recently of stumbling across a movie documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” narrated by Ben Stein, as I was channel-surfing with my eldest daughter following the evening news.