Dr. Michael Brown will be speaking at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 29 at Reynolds Recital Hall as part of the “Your Health Lecture Series.”

Brown is the division director of emergency medicine and professor of epidemiology and emergency medicine at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. He is also the attending physician at Emergency Care Specialists, P.C. in Grand Rapids, a position he’s held since 1990.

Brown said he is going to talk about strokes and how to handle them in a rural setting. He also plans to talk about how research translates into practice.

“There is a whole area of work that is being done and very little is reaching day-to-day practice,” Brown said. “It is difficult to keep up with all the research and to make decisions as to whether it’s valid or not.”

Using a stroke as an example, Brown said he is going to talk about how to take research, something done in the academic world, and talk about how to get it used in the real world. He stressed the importance of collaboration throughout the medical profession.

“There needs to be this integration across professions as well as within the house of medicine,” Brown said. “We want people, no matter where they live to benefit from these advances, especially people in rural areas.”

Blue Cross Blue Shield, Marquette General Hospital, Michigan State University’s College of Medicine and Northern Michigan University sponsor the Your Health Lecture Series. According to Cindy Paavola, director of Communication and Marketing, these organizations meet once a year and decide on three or four different physicians to come to NMU and speak.

“What the physicians do is they give the presentation to the public and then go to Marquette General Hospital and talk to the staff there,” Paavola said.

According to Paavola, there have been speakers in the past that have talked about strokes, but they haven’t had a focus on how people living in rural areas should deal with them.

“It’s different for someone here in Marquette than, say someone out in Skandia,” Paavola said. “Health care in a rural setting has challenges that aren’t the same as metropolitan areas.”

These lectures are meant for everyone and are open to the public.

“We want to present real, current data, research that is being done on these health issues so people have access to the research that is being done on a state, national and even international scale,” Paavola said.

If anyone has something health related they would like to hear a lecture on, Paavola said she encourages people to send in their ideas and she would love to hear from the students on what topics they are interested in. To send in an idea and for more information, visit webb.nmu.edu/yourhealth.