How far are you from the nearest heart monitor or ultrasound machine or high-tech imaging equipment? Reach in your pocket. Soon, cell phones will be able to provide these and other medical diagnostics.

"The cell phone is going to solve rural health-care problems, whether it's rural India or rural Indiana," Kristin Tolle, Microsoft Research's program manager for external research in biomedical computing, told Business Week's Olga Kharif. Microsoft is funding 17 research efforts into using cell phones for an array of medical purposes.

Kharif writes that Apple's iPhone is being adapted for medical applications too. A new software program that works with the iPhone makes it possible to physicians far from a patient's bedside to review that patient's records -- even brain scans and X-rays -- with accuracy.

Richard Oswald turns consumer health advisor, with a farm fresh, cheap, and labor-intensive cure for eczema.

"Danville (above) is one of a handful of American communities where men and women are living shorter lives," begins a forthright editorial published in the Register Bee, the Virginia town's daily newspaper. "By almost every statistical measure, Danville has problems."

Danville has "old problems," says the editorial. Population has been stagnate for 50 years. People are living shorter lives because of AIDS and homicides and because too many people are without medical insurance. See this Yonder story on rural longevity.

"The best long-term solution is raising education levels and worker skills," the editorial says, but the underlying problem is the "long slumber that Danville has only recently started to awaken from. If we understand how we wound up with these problems, it's easier to get started on the solutions."

The poor health found in many communities is too often self-inflicted. It's time to teach our kids a new way of living.

For the first time in a century, people born in some communities in the U.S. can expect to live shorter lives than those born a generation before. Most of those places are in rural America.