Seven market-based health care solutions that have lowered health care costs and improved both access and quality of service have gone unnoticed. Congress to Healthcare Market: Drop Dead
1. Retail clinics
2. Retail clinic-hospital partnerships
3. On-site workplace healthcare clinics
4. Affordable $4 generic drugs that have already saved consumers $1 billion since Walmart introduced them in 2008.
5. Prepaid medical plans
6. Concierge medicine
7. High-deductible health insurance plans along with individually owned and managed health savings accounts.
Just for the record, the CBO released its cost analysis of the Republican health care plan and found it would reduce health care premiums and the deficit by $68 billion over 10 years.
How were the Republicans able to reduce costs?
• by creating high-risk insurance pools
• allowing people to purchase health insurance policies across state lines
• instituting medical malpractice reforms
Today, small businesses - the ones who create the majority of jobs - have difficulties finding affordable health plans for their employees because they lack the negotiating leverage a large business has. Under the Republican plan, rates would drop 7-10% for small business plans, 5-8% for the individual market and only 0-3% for large corporations.
Here are some miscellaneous health care stories from the past several days that seem worthy of notice.
I never knew that breast-feeding your baby helps you shed extra weight you gain during the pregnancy.
Breast-Feed the Baby, Love the Calorie Burn
Dr Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist who spent 20 years counseling college students is on a tear to challenge the "sex ed oligarchy" What's missing in sex education.
She specifically wants to smash the ideas that "sex trumps everything" in life, and "promiscuity, experimentation and fringe behaviors" are healthy.
In Britain with recent changes to assisted suicide rules, a group of leading lawyers, peers and former judges warn Elderly and disabled could be forced to commit suicide under changes to rules
“The current law acts as a powerful deterrent against abuse and exploitation of vulnerable people and has been firmly upheld by Parliament. Removing these safeguards could lead to increase in vulnerable and disabled people being pressured into ending their lives.”
Elder medical care is not one of the six core areas that are the focus of medical school training. The American Geriatric Society calls out to all medical schools to prepare all medical students to treat the elderly. There are just not enough geriatricians to go around (only 1 geriatrician for 2546 elderly today and in 20 years only 1 for 5000 elderly)
There are drugs that work to prevent prostate cancer and breast cancer. So why aren't people at risk taking them?
Gina Kolata tries to figure out why Medicines to Deter Some Cancers Are Not Taken
Much of what Americans do in the name of warding off cancer has not been shown to matter, and some things are actually harmful. Yet the few medicines proved to deter cancer are widely ignored.
"Rumbles through the medical community" as a third study questions the effectiveness of the popular cholesterol drugs Zetia and Vytorin.
A widely prescribed and expensive cholesterol drug is not as effective as niacin, a cheap vitamin, in helping to unclog coronary arteries in people already taking statins, the standard medicines used to lower cholesterol, according to a new study.
The Wall St Journal calls it The Worst Bill Ever
In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.
Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.
--
Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of "change," but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.
Annual Medicare Fraud: $60 Billion; Annual Profits of Top Ten Insurance Companies: $8 billion
As 60 Minutes reported last week, Medicare fraud is rampant and has now replaced the cocaine (ahem) business as the major criminal activity in South Florida
House Republicans Find 111 New 'Bureaucracies' in Health Care Bill
Among some off the new agencies, the list cites a Health Insurance Exchange; the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation; the Public Health Investment Fund; the Public Health Workforce Corps; an Assistant Secretary for Health Information; the Food and Drug Administration Office of Women's Health; grant programs for alternative medical liability laws, infant mortality programs and other issues; and about 100 other government-sponsored creations.
26 reasons to oppose Pelosi's health care bill, H.R. 3962. Here are a few:
• Permits federal taxpayer funding of abortion services, above and beyond the status quo of current law.
• Provides for a "health care czar" called the Health Choices Commissioner, who could forcibly enroll individuals in government-run insurance and whose tasks include requiring random compliance audits on Americans' health benefits plans.
• Allows for "community organizations" like ACORN and Planned Parenthood to assist the Health Choices Commissioner in enrolling individuals in the Health Insurance Exchange.
• Provides for 13 new and different tax increases, including an employer mandate excise tax.
• "Grandfathers" out of existence individual health insurance coverage.
• Retains the "death panels" by providing for bureaucrats working for a new comparative effectiveness institute funded by a tax on health benefits. The institute could publish the protocols needed to deny patients access to life-saving treatments on cost grounds.
• Contains NO ban on federal promotion of assisted suicide and/or health care rationing of treatments.
• Slashes Medicare payments to providers by more than $400 billion.
Using the English to 12-year-old -AOLer Translator, I've translated the above.
• P3RMITS FADARAL TAXPAEYR FUNDNG OF ABORTION S3RVIECS ABOVE AND BYOND DA STATUS QUO OF CURENT LAW
•!1111 PROVIEDS FOR A H3ALTH R CZAR CALED TEH H3ALTH CHOIECS COMISION3R WHO CUD FORCIBLEY ANROL INDIVIDUALS IN GOV3RNMANT-RUN INSURANC3 AND WHOS3 TASKS INCLUD3 RAQUIRNG RANDOM COMPLIANCE AUDITS ON M3RICANS H3ALTH BNEFITS PLANS
•!11!!11!! WTF ALOWS FOR COMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS LIEK ACORN AND PLANAD PAERNTHOD 2 ASIST TEH H3ALTH CHOIECS COMISION3R IN 3NROLNG INDIVIDUALS IN DA HAALTH INSURANCE 3XCHANGE
•!1!!! OMG WTF PROVIEDS FOR 13 NU AND DIFARENT TAX INCREAESS INCLUDNG AN 3MPLOY3R MANDAET EXCIES TAX
•!!1!! OMG WTF LOL GRANDFATHERS OUT OF EXISTANCE INDIVIDUAL HEALTH INSURANC3 COV3RAEG
•!1!1!1!1 WTF RETANES DA DEATH PAENLS BY PROVIDNG FOR BUREAUCRATS WORKNG FOR A NU COMPARATIEV EF3CTIEVNES INSTITUT3 FUNDAD BY A TAX ON HAALTH BN3FITS!!11!!!! OMG LOL TEH INSTITUT3 CUD PUBLISH DA PRO2COLS NEDAD 2 DANY PATEINTS ACES 2 LIEF-SAVNG TR3ATMENTS ON COST GROUNDS
•!1!1!1 WTF LOL CONTANES NO BAN ON FED3RAL PROMOTION OF ASISTED SUICIED AND/OR HAALTH R RATIONNG OF TRAATMANTS
•!1!1!11 SLASHAS R PAYMANTS 2 PROVIEDRS BY MORE THAN $40 BILION!!!11!!! WTF
There's growing evidence of a link between heart disease and gum disease.
That’s the conclusion of a “consensus’’ statement written by leading gum disease specialists and cardiologists published online earlier this year in the American Journal of Cardiology and the Journal of Periodontology.
“The mechanism of the relationship strongly points to inflammation’’ as the culprit in both cardiovascular disease and periodontitis, or gum disease, says Dr. Thomas E. Van Dyke, a professor of periodontology and oral biology at the Boston University School of Medicine.
--
Dr. Paul Ridker, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, notes that “cardiologists now understand that inflammation is a major risk factor for heart disease. Patients with periodontal disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis all have chronic inflammation, and all turn out to have higher cardiac risk than previously appreciated.’’
In 2006 the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug Gardasil as a vaccine against certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV) which is the primary cause of cervical cancer in women. Gardasil is manufactured by Merck and the company has aggressively marketed the drug including political contributions through its PAC.
Many state and local governments have proposed that Gardasil be required for school girls as young as those entering the sixth grade.
Now one of the lead researchers for the Merck drug, Dr. Diane Harper, says the "Pubic should receive more complete warnings."
"Parents and women must know that deaths occurred. Not all deaths that have been reported were represented in Dr. Slade's work, one-third of the death reports were unavailable to the CDC, leaving the parents of the deceased teenagers in despair that the CDC is ignoring the very rare but real occurrences that need not have happened if parents were given information stating that there are real, but small risks of death surrounding the administration of Gardasil."
After 26 million vaccinations, Dr. Harper says it will have NO effect on the rate of cervical cancer in the U.S.
To date, 15,037 girls have officially reported adverse side effects from Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). These adverse effects include Guilliane Barre, lupus, seizures, paralysis, blood clots, brain inflammation and many others. The CDC acknowledges that there have been 44 reported deaths."
Merck's Dr. Harper told CBS News that a girl is more likely to die from an adverse reaction to Gardasil than from cervical cancer.
What would be the point in promoting the inoculation of millions of girls and women with a useless, sometimes dangerous drug? And it really is useless: Merck's current project is to push it to pre-teen girls, but Dr. Harper pointed out that, once a girl hits puberty, any effectiveness of the vaccine disappears, and she has to start over again with the course of shots. And by the way, the efficacy of the drug in pre-teen girls hasn't actually been tested.
One thing we know about Gardasil is that each three-dose treatment costs $360, which has helped Merck a lot. It's been one of the company's top-selling drugs.
Chronic fatigue syndrome has frustrated sufferers and doctors alike because nobody knew what caused the disease or how best to treat it. That just changed.
Scientists say that a retrovirus may cause chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis)
Researchers found the virus, known as XMRV, in the blood of 68 out of 101 chronic fatigue syndrome patients. The same virus showed up in only 8 of 218 healthy people, they reported in the journal Science.
But lead scientist Judy Mikovits from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Nevada, said further blood tests revealed 95 per cent of the ME patients had antibodies to the virus. This indicated they had been infected with XMRV.
--
Researchers found the virus, known as XMRV, in the blood of 68 out of 101 chronic fatigue syndrome patients. The same virus showed up in only 8 of 218 healthy people, they reported in the journal Science. But lead scientist Judy Mikovits from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Nevada, said further blood tests revealed 95 per cent of the ME patients had antibodies to the virus. This indicated they had been infected with XMRV.
--
The XMRV virus is a retrovirus, like the HIV virus that causes AIDS. As with all viruses, a retrovirus copies its genetic code into the DNA of its host but uses RNA - a working form of DNA - instead of using DNA to do so.
Reports the New York Times
“I think this establishes what had always been considered a psychiatric disease as an infectious disease,” said Dr. Mikovits, who is research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, a nonprofit center created by the parents of a woman who has a severe case of the syndrome. Her co-authors include scientists from the National Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. Mikovits said she and her colleagues were drawing up plans to test antiretroviral drugs — some of the same ones used to treat HIV infection — to see whether they could help patients with chronic fatigue. If the drugs work, that will help prove that the virus is causing the illness. She said patients and doctors should wait for the studies to be finished before trying the drugs.
--
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, said the discovery was exciting and made sense.
“My first reaction is, ‘At last,’ ” Dr. Schaffner said. “In interacting with patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, you get the distinct impression that there’s got to be something there.”
--
He added, “This is going to create an avalanche of subsequent studies.”
A plumber by trade, Torron Eeles fell down the stairs and broke his arm on December 3, 2008.
Here he is today
Plumber with shattered arm left horrifically bent out of shape has operation 'cancelled four times'
Mr Eeles claims his first two operations at the Queen Elizabeth II hospital i... were cancelled due to a lack of beds and operating time respectively.
His third operation in February was postponed after he was found to have high blood pressure, while the fourth, scheduled for May, was abandoned because of concerns about his smoking.
He can't work, but because he can turn on a tap and raise his arm, he doesn't qualify for temporary disability benefits.
Government health care, government rules. He didn't stop smoking, so no operation for him.
I'm all for incentives to increase the number of doctors, especially general practitioners.
But I don't know why the Administration proposes to cut the prices paid for cardiologists and oncologists by 11% and 19% respectively so they can pay general practitioners more.
this boost for GPs comes at the expense of certain specialties. The 2010 rules, which will be finalized next month, visit an 11% overall cut on cardiology and 19% on radiation oncology. They're targets only because of cost: Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease.
--
The way Medicare works is that Congress decides each year how much it wants to spend on doctors, period. If one area of medicine receives a larger slice of this pie, another must accept a smaller one.
--
Jack Lewin, who heads the American College of Cardiology, said in an interview that the crackdown will cause "a horrible disruption" that will force many community and independent practices to close their doors, lay off staff or make senior patients wait days or weeks for tests and services.
--
HHS justified its decision with a flimsy survey whose data it won't release and whose results can't be replicated. Dr. Lewin told us that both HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and budget director Peter Orszag refuse to meet with him to discuss the topic.
Why heart disease and cancer, the biggest killers as people grow older?
Especially on top of a $500 billion cut in Medicare spending in the proposed health care bills.
Will seniors and boomers who are about to swell the senior ranks and so required to use Medicare stand for this?
Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist, has Asperger's Syndrome.
This week she is offering career advice on How to deal with Asperger Syndrome at work.
People often tell me that I should write career advice for people with Asperger Syndrome. This is because I am surrounded by people who have Asperger’s, and I have it myself. Please, do not tell me I don’t have it. First of all, it looks very different in men and women, and most of you have experience with men. Second, I’m way more weird in person than I am on the blog. And surely you thought it was the other way around.
So, anyway, the reason I’m good at giving career advice is because I had to learn things systematically, which helps me break it down for everyone else.
For example, I had to learn that a candy dish on someone’s desk means “I like to talk with people.” Other people read this cue instinctively.
--
I don’t really do career coaching. I don’t have patience. But often career coaches send people with Asperger’s to me, because mostly, these people are extremely difficult to coach.
They are difficult to coach because the biggest problem is that non-verbal cues that are obvious to everyone else are totally lost on people with Asperger’s. For example, you can tell when you are boring someone, but someone with Asperger’s cannot—we just keep talking.
Does getting hit and tackled week after week affect your future life? Yes says a recent study commissioned by the National Football League.
Former players get Alzheimer's or other memory-related disease at a rate 19 times more than the normal rate for men 30-49.
Dementia Risk Seen in Players in N.F.L. Study
The findings could ring loud at the youth and college levels, which often take cues from the N.F.L. on safety policies and whose players emulate the pros. Hundreds of on-field concussions are sustained at every level each week, with many going undiagnosed and untreated.
__
“This is a game-changer — the whole debate, the ball’s now in the N.F.L.’s court,” said Dr. Julian Bailes, the chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the West Virginia University School of Medicine
Sleep boosts the immune system and Lack of Sleep Increases the Risk of Catching a Cold
Sleep and immunity, it seems, are tightly linked. Studies have found that mammals that require the most sleep also produce greater levels of disease-fighting white blood cells — but not red blood cells, even though both are produced in bone marrow and stem from the same precursor. And researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have shown that species that sleep more have greater resistance against pathogens.
“Species that have evolved longer sleep durations,” the Planck scientists wrote, “appear to be able to increase investment in their immune systems and be better protected.”
The Congressional Budget Office director told Senator Max Baucus that his
plan to cut $123 billion from Medicare Advantage—the program that gives almost one-fourth of seniors private health-insurance options—will result in lower benefits and some 2.7 million people losing this coverage.
Imagine that. Last week Mr. Baucus ordered Medicare regulators to investigate and likely punish Humana Inc. for trying to educate enrollees in its Advantage plans about precisely this fact. Jonathan Blum, acting director of a regulatory office in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), said that a mailer Humana sent its customers was "misleading and confusing to beneficiaries, who may believe that it represents official communication about the Medicare Advantage program."
--
Meanwhile, we have the case of the Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons (AARP), and its fanciful Medicare claims. The self-styled seniors lobby is using all its money and influence to cheer on ObamaCare, even though polls show that most retired persons oppose it. AARP has spent millions of dollars on its TV ad campaign and bulletins and newsletters to its members, including eight million direct-mail letters over Labor Day. The AARP Web site claims that it is a "myth" that "health care reform will hurt Medicare," while it is a "fact" that "none of the health care reform proposals being considered by Congress will cut Medicare benefits or increase your out-of-pocket costs.
Abraham Verghese is at the First Stanford Symposium on Bedside Medicine and reports
An anthropologist from Mars looking at our hospitals might conclude that the 'work' of medicine takes place in rooms far removed from the patient, typically in front of a computer screen. The actual patient and the person-hood of the patient is pushed to the margin of medical attention while the 'iPatient', the virtual patient rules.
Last night we talked about the ritual of the exam, and how important that ritual is. Rituals are about transformation, and the careful exam has all the elements of ritual, including a sacred space, a ceremonial garb (white coat and patient gown), a routine that is mysterious to the patient and includes disrobing and touch (which in any other context would be assault). Rituals are about transformation (think wedding, baptism etc) and this ritual when done well, is transformative, it establishes the physician-patient bond, it recognizes the body of the patient (the soma as opposed to the image of the body), and it is therapeutic, particularly in chronic disease, where the ritual repeated at every visit conveys to the patient that we are with them on the journey, we will not abandon them.
If We Can't Measure It, It Doesn't Exist
I've been hearing from a doctor friend just how poorly trained new residents are in developing relationships with their patients. We see fabulous technological advances in medicine, yet the art of medicine is neglected and that is where the trust and healing takes place.
via Rod Dreher
We could lose half the doctors practicing today.
45% Of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul
Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.
The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors' own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.
It also calls into question whether an overhaul is even doable; 72% of the doctors polled disagree with the administration's claim that the government can cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.
Richard Fernandez discusses Another Point of View that takes into account the thinking of Robert Fogel, Nobel Prize winning economist.
Fogel argues that because most Americans have satisfactorily met their food, shelter and clothing needs, people are willing to spend a greater fraction of each extra dollar on health care, simply because it matters more to them then say, extra comestibles, which they have enough of. To some extent the American propensity to spend more on health care resembles the demand for a luxury good [2], “a good for which demand increases more than proportionally as income rises”.
---
An aging but still functional society, in Fogel's apparent view, would naturally demand more health care than skateboards, but for so long as they can sustainably pay for it through a well functioning market, there is no need to suppress demand. On contrary, health care will be one of the fundamental demand drivers of technology for biotechnology and other new industries way into the 21st century. In the long struggle between man versus death, humanity, having basically beaten starvation and cold, would naturally turn its efforts to fighting old age and disease.
Consequently, there is no need to suppress the demand for healthcare. Expenditures on healthcare are driven by demand, which is spurred by income and by advances in biotechnology that make health interventions increasingly effective. Just as electricity and manufacturing were the industries that stimulated the growth of the rest of the economy at the beginning of the 20th century, healthcare is the growth industry of the 21st century. It is a leading sector, which means that expenditures on healthcare will pull forward a wide array of other industries including manufacturing, education, financial services, communications, and construction.
New policy changes at an office I had never heard of before -the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) - threatens access to medical services for millions of heart and cancer patients on Medicare.
Medicare facing cancer and cardiac care cuts
If enacted as scheduled on Jan. 1, 2010, policy changes recommended by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) -- the government's insurer for the elderly and disabled -- will severely cut current Medicare reimbursements to cardiologists and oncologists for critical care services that are provided to patients in physicians' offices or other out-of-hospital setting, such as chemotherapy to treat cancer, and various cardiac procedures to monitor and treat heart disease, such as nuclear imaging and heart catheterization.
--
Yet the policymakers at CMS, who base their decisions on numbers and statistics, are unilaterally and dramatically changing the delivery of heart and cancer care by proclaiming that care for heart disease and cancer is too costly, while treatment for other diseases has greater value.Seniors
In my lifetime, I have never seen such a spontaneous, self-organized rally of up to so many --- 2 million people according to the Daily Mail, 60,000 according to ABC News. The spokesman for the National Park Service is quotes as saying, "It is a record.... We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."
It was a remarkable event by ordinary people who are rightly alarmed about what's happening and not happening in Washington.
Nick Gillespie on the scene says
First, the crowd was truly huge. Second, the crowd was from all over the place (both geographically and ideologically). And third, the crowd, well-behaved and stunningly normal in the main, was genuinely pissed off at out of control spending and government policies. "Stop spending," was the basic answer to any questions about what Congress and the president should do come tomorrow. Throw the bums of either party out come next fall was the second most-common answer.
I'm with them, the people pushing back. The government is not fixing the economy, but making everything worse.
The president's chief economic advisor Larry Summers warns that the unemployment rate could stay "unacceptably high" for years which means no new jobs are being created in the private sector.
Already, 2 out of 5 Californians don't have a job!
So the idea we are starting a trade war with China at the behest of the steelworkers' union is mind-boggling because it could so easily "ratchet up into a full-blown trade war and inflict serious economic damage on both countries."
The problem that got us into this mess, the bad regulation of the financial services sector, has not and is not being fixed.
Bloomberg reports that Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist says
the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
Which brings me to health care. Why doesn't the President just fix Medicare and Medicaid which will go broke in the next 10 years? Why does he want to cut benefits to seniors by cutting the only part Medicare that is competitive?
Medicare for Dummies says the Wall St Journal, with "contradictions worthy of the Marx Brothers"
No cuts, for anyone—except, that is, for the 24% of senior beneficiaries [who] are enrolled in the Medicare Advantage program, which Democrats want to slash by $177 billion or more because it is run by private companies. Mr. Obama called that money "unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies—subsidies that do everything to pad their profits but don't improve the care of seniors."
In fact, Advantage does provide better care, which is one reason that enrollment has doubled since 2003. It's true that the program could be better designed, with more competitive bidding and quality bonuses. But Advantage's private insurers today provide the kind of care that Mr. Obama said he would mandate that private insurers provide for the nonelderly—"to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventative care."
Advantage plans have excelled at filling in the gaps of the a la carte medicine of traditional Medicare, contracting with doctors and hospitals to coordinate care and improve quality and covering items such as vision, hearing and management of chronic illness. If seniors in Advantage lose this coverage because of the 14% or 15% budget cut that Mr. Obama favors, well, that's "waste and abuse."
Who knew that recycling fat could have such astounding effects?
Fat sucked out of chunky thighs or flabby bellies might provide an easy source of stem cells made using new and promising technology, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
They found immature fat cells in the material removed during liposuction were easy to transform into cells called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.
They were easier to work with than the skin cells usually used to make iPS cells, the team at Stanford University's School of Medicine in California reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Liposuction leftovers make easy stem cells: study
In what I think is a major medical breakthrough, British scientists are using adult stem cells to avoid hip replacements.
Doctors in Southampton are using the pioneering technique, where a patient’s damaged bones are repaired using their own stem cells.
Patients hailed the treatment, after many found they could walk normally again without any pain and without the need for hip replacement surgery.
So far six patients have had the treatment with only one failure, doctors said.
The numbers are small but the prospects are huge.
Under the treatment, surgeons at Spire hospital used purified cells from bone marrow extracted from the pelvis.
The stem cells, which are immature cells that can develop into different kinds of tissue, were then mixed with “cleaned, ground-up” bone from another patient, after they had a hip replacement operation.
They then finished with dead tissue being removed before surgeons filled the cavity with the mixture of stem cells and donated bone.
--
Prof Oreffo, who is currently leading a team researching how stem cell technology can be used to repair human skeletal tissue, told Sky News that stem cells used chemical signals to attract blood vessels.
"Bone is a living vibrant tissue. These stem cells generate new tissue and drive new blood vessel formation to bring in nutrients," he said.
In Wired, Placebos getting more effective. Drugmakers are desperate to know why. So what's the problem?
In a 1955 paper titled "The Powerful Placebo," published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Beecher described how the placebo effect had undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly attributed to the drugs being tested. He demonstrated that trial volunteers who got real medication were also subject to placebo effects; the act of taking a pill was itself somehow therapeutic, boosting the curative power of the medicine. Only by subtracting the improvement in a placebo control group could the actual value of the drug be calculated.
--
Beecher's double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial—or RCT—was enshrined as the gold standard of the emerging pharmaceutical industry. Today, to win FDA approval, a new medication must beat placebo in at least two authenticated trials.
Beecher's prescription helped cure the medical establishment of outright quackery, but it had an insidious side effect. By casting placebo as the villain in RCTs, he ended up stigmatizing one of his most important discoveries. The fact that even dummy capsules can kick-start the body's recovery engine became a problem for drug developers to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could guide doctors toward a better understanding of the healing process and how to drive it most effectively.
After prodding by Potter and others, the NIH focused on the issue in 2000, hosting a three-day conference in Washington. For the first time in medical history, more than 500 drug developers, doctors, academics, and trial designers put their heads together to examine the role of the placebo effect in clinical trials and healing in general.
--
Ironically, Big Pharma's attempt to dominate the central nervous system has ended up revealing how powerful the brain really is. The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.
Atul Gawande is one of the those writers I never miss. Writing in the Annals of Medicine in The New Yorker, he writes unforgettable articles that have illuminated the world of medicine for me like no one else. They "open up like an umbrella" said his New Yorker editor Henry Finder.
Some of my favorites are:
The Cost Conundrum
The Itch
The Checklist
The Way We Age Now
So I was quite interested in this profile on Atul Gawande in Harvard Magazine, Surgeon, Health Policy Scholar and Writer.
On the desk in his office at the Brigham is a framed copy of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” She describes a patient’s innards as “tubers and fruits/Oozing their jammy substances.” From the surgeon’s perspective, she writes: “I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.” Gawande notes that Plath, not a surgeon, nevertheless got things just right. “That,” he says, “is the really amazing thing, and that’s the difference between me and a real writer.”
He likes the Plath poem because it casts the surgeon in an ambiguous light. “Most writing about people in medicine casts them as either heroes or villains,” he says. “That poem captures the surgeon as a merely human, slightly bewildered, a little bit benighted person in a world that is ultimately beyond his control.”
I'm putting together a post about all the good ideas for health care reform, but I couldn't resist this
Chocolate 'cuts death rate' in heart attack survivors
PARIS (AFP) – Heart attack survivors who eat chocolate two or more times per week cut their risk of dying from heart disease about three fold compared to those who never touch the stuff, scientists have reported.
Smaller quantities confer less protection, but are still better than none, according to the study, which appears in the September issue of the Journal of Internal Medicine.
Earlier research had established a strong link between cocoa-based confections and lowered blood pressure or improvement in blood flow.
It had also shown that chocolate cuts the rate of heart-related mortality in healthy older men, along with post-menopausal women.
But the new study, led by Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is the first to demonstrate that consuming chocolate can help ward off the grim reaper if one has suffered acute myocardial infarction -- otherwise known as a heart attack.
"It was specific to chocolate -- we found no benefit to sweets in general," said Kenneth Mukamal, a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a co-author of the study.
--
"Our findings support increasing evidence that chocolate is a rich source of beneficial bioactive compounds," the researchers concluded.
Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.
Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon’s decision to remove a child’s tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what’s right for the patient.
We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President’s remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.
We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.
La Paglia on Obama's healthcare horror
But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.
You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.
I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.
As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.
Theodore Dalrymple on the British health service, Man vs. Mutt
In the last few years, I have had the opportunity to compare the human and veterinary health services of Great Britain, and on the whole it is better to be a dog.
As a British dog, you get to choose (through an intermediary, I admit) your veterinarian. If you don’t like him, you can pick up your leash and go elsewhere, that very day if necessary. Any vet will see you straight away, there is no delay in such investigations as you may need, and treatment is immediate. There are no waiting lists for dogs, no operations postponed because something more important has come up, no appalling stories of dogs being made to wait for years because other dogs—or hamsters—come first.
The conditions in which you receive your treatment are much more pleasant than British humans have to endure. For one thing, there is no bureaucracy to be negotiated with the skill of a white-water canoeist; above all, the atmosphere is different. There is no tension, no feeling that one more patient will bring the whole system to the point of collapse, and all the staff go off with nervous breakdowns. In the waiting rooms, a perfect calm reigns; the patients’ relatives are not on the verge of hysteria, and do not suspect that the system is cheating their loved one, for economic reasons, of the treatment which he needs. The relatives are united by their concern for the welfare of each other’s loved one. They are not terrified that someone is getting more out of the system than they.
People are legitimately worried about the end-of-life provisions in the health care bill. While I am all for end-of-life planning with the necessary documents and I'm also against unnecessary medical treatments that can make the end of life a hell on earth, I believe these are private decisions by the person and the family involved. When doctors are paid to initiate these conversations and have the ability to execute documents on the spot, I am very concerned that economic and political concerns will have too great an influence on a vulnerable population.
So is Charles Lane, a member of the editorial staff of the The Washington Post, who writes in Undue Influence
About a third of Americans have living wills or advance-care directives expressing their wishes for end-of-life treatment. When seniors who don't have them arrive in a hospital terminally ill and incapacitated, families and medical workers wrestle with uncertainty -- while life-prolonging machinery runs, often at Medicare's expense. This has consequences for families and for the federal budget.
Enter Section 1233 of the health-care bill drafted in the Democratic-led House, which would pay doctors to give Medicare patients end-of-life counseling every five years -- or sooner if the patient gets a terminal diagnosi
--
Patients may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority. Once they're in the meeting, the bill does permit "formulation" of a plug-pulling order right then and there. So when Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) denies that Section 1233 would "place senior citizens in situations where they feel pressured to sign end-of-life directives that they would not otherwise sign," I don't think he's being realistic.
--
But Section 1233 goes beyond facilitating doctor input to preferring it. Indeed, the measure would have an interested party -- the government -- recruit doctors to sell the elderly on living wills, hospice care and their associated providers, professions and organizations. You don't have to be a right-wing wacko to question that approach.
Mickey Kaus puts it more succinctly
Tip for Dems: If you don't want people to think that subsidized, voluntary end-of-of-life counseling sessions are the camel's nose of an attempt to cut costs by limiting end of life care, then don't put them in a bill the overarching, stated purpose of which is to cut health care costs! .
Meanwhile we learn more about Oregon health care from a newspaper in Britain than we do in our own press
The chilling truth about the city where they pay people to die
His body ravaged by cancer, lumberjack David Prueitt barely had the strength to raise the cup to his lips.
In it was a mix of apple sauce and dozens of crushed barbiturate pills, legally prescribed by the 42-year-old's doctor to end his life.
Within minutes, the drugs had started to take effect, the terminally-ill man slipping into unconsciousness as his wife sat by his side.
If all had gone to plan, David would have quickly and peacefully passed away, his breathing becoming more laboured until it eventually stopped altogether.
But it did not happen like that. Instead, after three days in a deep coma, David suddenly woke up. 'Honey?' he said to his wife. 'What the hell happened? Why am I not dead?'
For another 13 days, coherent but racked with pain, David survived before finally succumbing to the disease and dying naturally in his home near Portland, Oregon's most populous city.
In that time he would be transformed from just another death to be recorded under Oregon's policy of assisted suicide into a figurehead for opponents of the U.S. state's deeply controversial Death With Dignity Act.
'He took five times the amount of barbiturates that should kill somebody and he still didn't die,' his older brother Steve told the Daily Mail this week.
'If anything, he should have been brain-dead. But he told us that, while unconscious, he had found himself before God and been told: "Not this way, David." God chose David as his spokesman, absolutely.'
He adds: 'It definitely made it very clear to me that we are not supposed to determine our own deaths.'
graphic from American Digest
When Barbara’s lung cancer reappeared during the spring of 2008 her oncologist recommended aggressive treatment with Tarceva, a new chemotherapy. However, Oregon’s state run health plan denied the potentially life altering drug because they did not feel it was "cost-effective." Instead, the State plan offered to pay for either hospice care or physician-assisted suicide.
--
The answer is simple. Oregon state officials controlled the process of healthcare decision-making—not Barbara and her physician. Chemotherapy would cost the state $4,000 every month she remained alive; the drugs for physician-assisted suicide held a one-time expense of less than $100. Barbara’s treatment plan boiled down to accounting. To cover chemotherapy state policy demanded a five percent patient survival rate at five years. As a new drug, Tarceva did not meet this dispassionate criterion. To Oregon, Barbara was no longer a patient; she had become a "negative economic unit."
Physicians for Reform want you to know What This Means for You
From the trenches, the perspective of a doctor, ObamaCare and me.
in the past 6 months I have cared for three young children on Medicaid who had corneal ulcers. This is a potentially blinding situation because if the cornea perforates from the infection, almost surely blindness will occur. In all three cases the antibiotic needed for the eradication of the infection was not on the approved Medicaid list.
Each time I was told to fax Medicaid for the approval forms, which I did. Within 48 hours the form came back to me which was sent in immediately via fax, and I was told that I would have my answer in 10 days. Of course by then each child would have been blind in the eye.
Each time the request came back denied. All three times I personally provided the antibiotic for each patient which was not on the Medicaid approved list. Get the point -- rationing of care.
--
We are being lied to about the uninsured. They are getting care. I operate at least 2 illegal immigrants each month who pay me nothing, and the children's hospital at which I operate charges them nothing also.This is true not only on Atlanta, but of every community in America.
The bottom line is that I urge all of you to contact your congresswomen and congressmen and senators to defeat this bill. I promise you that you will not like rationing of your own health.
15 Facts You Didn't Know About Your Body
#4. Every person has a unique tongue print
Did you ever wonder how so many Americans became obese, seemingly all of a sudden?
Blue Crab Boulevard explains
The sudden upward spike is actually the result of bureaucratic fiat. The fact is that in 1998 the National Institutes of Health waved its magic wand and simply created the sudden, sharp spike with some bureaucratic prestidigitation:
In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold for BMI 27.8 to 25 to match international guidelines. The move added 30 million Americans who were previously in the “healthy weight” category to the “overweight” category.
To be amazed and shocked by this shows a basic lack of fact-checking. People who had previously been completely “normal” (as if anyone really were) were suddenly reclassified as obese. Now the bureaucrats are demanding solutions to the crisis they manufactured out of thin air, so to speak.
Who knew that a spleen was so important?
Finally, the Spleen Gets Some Respect
Scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.
Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.
“The parallel in military terms is a standing army,” said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. “You don’t want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it.”
In the long run obese people die sooner thus saving us money. Sure, they are more expensive to treat on an annual basis, but since they die sooner, their lifetime health care costs are less.
If Obesity Saves Taxpayers Money, Should It Be Encouraged?
I am, alone of all my friends, a big milk drinker. Yes, the milkman still delivers my milk in glass bottles each week straight from Crescent Ridge Farm.
But I'm not going to lord it over them that milk drinkers have longer lives because of the reduced incidences of coronary heart disease and stroke, up to 15-20%
But I will warn them against sunbeds. Even before studies showed that tanning beds definitely cause cancer, DEFINITELY cause cancer, I wouldn't go near them given my red hair and pale and freckled skin. I used to use those self-tanners but now I can't be bothered.
A large independent review has show that organic food 'has no health benefits' over conventionally grown food, but when it comes to certain fruits and vegetables, I discern a far better flavor.
But the worse health news of all is that Divorce damages your health - and getting remarried barely helps.
Divorced people have 20 per cent more chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer than married people, according to the study of 8,652 people aged between 51 and 61 by Professor Linda Waite of the University of Chicago.
They also have 23 per cent more mobility problems, such as difficulty climbing stairs or walking short distances.
Do they have a 'right' to health care? Do the obese? Do alcoholics?
No says Theodore Dalrymple in the Wall St. Journal There is no 'right' to health care - for anyone.
If there is a right to health care, someone has the duty to provide it. Inevitably, that “someone” is the government. Concrete benefits in pursuance of abstract rights, however, can be provided by the government only by constant coercion.
--
The question of health care is not one of rights but of how best in practice to organize it. America is certainly not a perfect model in this regard. But neither is Britain, where a universal right to health care has been recognized longest in the Western world.
Not coincidentally, the U.K. is by far the most unpleasant country in which to be ill in the Western world.
I wondered about this talk of right to health care because if you have a right, how can the government can decide who gets what medical procedure?
Econoblogger Megan McCardle describes it far more vividly
The other major reason that I am against national health care is the increasing license it gives elites to wrap their claws around every aspect of everyone's life. Look at the uptick in stories on obesity in the context of health care reform. Fat people are a problem! They're killing themselves, and our budget! We must stop them! And what if people won't do it voluntarily? Because let's face it, so far, they won't. Making information, or fresh vegetables, available, hasn't worked--every intervention you can imagine on the voluntary front, and several involuntary ones, has already been tried either in supermarkets or public schools. Americans are getting fat because they're eating fattening foods, and not exercising. How far are we willing to go beyond calorie labelling on menus to get people to slim down?
--
These aren't just a way to save on health care; they're a way to extend and expand the cultural hegemony of wealthy white elites. No, seriously. Living a fit, active life is correlated with being healthier. But then, as an economist recently pointed out to me, so is being religious, being married, and living in a small town; how come we don't have any programs to promote these "healthy lifestyles"? When you listen to obesity experts, or health wonks, talk, their assertions boil down to the idea that overweight people are either too stupid to understand why they get fat, or have not yet been made sufficiently aware of society's disgust for their condition. Yet this does not describe any of the overweight people I have ever known, including the construction workers and office clerks at Ground Zero. All were very well aware that the burgers and fries they ate made them fat, and hitting the salad bar instead would probably help them lose weight. They either didn't care, or felt powerless to control their hunger. They were also very well aware that society thought they were disgusting, and many of them had internalized this message to the point of open despair. What does another public campaign about overeating have to offer them, other than oozing condescension?
For some time now parents with autistic children, in numbers increasing every year, wondered whether the vaccines given them had been contaminated with mercury in the form of Thimerosal, a mercury containing organic preservative.
The FDA has removed thimerosal from all vaccines given to children under 6 while conducting studies to determine whether vaccines containing trace amounts of mercury as a preservative in vaccines against contamination by microbes could have a causal relationship to autism. They concluded on the basis of their studies and studies in the U.K. Denmark, and Sweden that it did not.
Now an even graver question has arisen.
Is Aborted Fetal DNA in Vaccines Linked to Autism?
Despite research ruling out mercury (Thimerosal) or the measles portion of one specific vaccine, autism continues to rise to a level of one in every 64 children in the UK.
The NVAC [1] draft report recommends further study of the potential for vaccines to contribute to autism in children who have underlying mitochondrial disease, a worthwhile study given the clinical history of such children developing autism after vaccinations (see [2] Poling case). What the NVAC has overlooked, however, in their recommendations, is that epidemic regressive autism is associated with the switch from using animal cells to produce vaccines to the use of aborted human fetal cells for vaccine production. Now when we vaccinate our children, some vaccines also deliver contaminating aborted human fetal DNA. The safety of this has never been tested.
Autism and autism spectrum disorder are polygenic diseases, meaning that multiple genes have been shown to be associated with these diseases. Studies have also clearly shown that there is an environmental component, a trigger, that is required. Vaccines are an obvious potential environmental trigger for autism because of the almost universal childhood exposure to vaccines in first world countries.
--
Those studies have largely ruled out the new measles portion of the MMR II or mercury as the environmental trigger for autism. However, the compelling temporal association between this new MMR vaccine and autism cannot be ignored or explained away. What has been ignored is the fact that this new MMR vaccine introduced the use of aborted fetal cells for vaccine production. At one point, as much as 94 percent of children in the U.S. and 98 percent of children in the UK were given this vaccine.
Today, more than 23 vaccines are contaminated by the use of aborted fetal cells. There is no law that requires that consumers be informed that some vaccines are made using aborted fetal cells and contain residual aborted fetal DNA.
--
Preliminary bioinformatics research conducted at SCPI indicates that “hot spots” for DNA recombination are found in nine autism-associated genes present on the X chromosome. These nine genes are involved in nerve-cell synapse formation, central nervous system development and mitochondrial function.
Could genomic insertion of the aborted fetal DNA, found in some of our childhood vaccines since 1979, be an environmental trigger for autism? Could the fact that genes critical for nerve synapse formation and nervous system development are found on the X chromosome provide some explanation of why autism is predominantly a disease found in boys? Could the “hot spots” identified in these autism-associated genes be sites for insertion of contaminating aborted fetal DNA?
These questions must be answered, and quickly. Recent literature suggests that autism spectrum disorder may now impact one out of every 100 children. The pharmaceutical industry is also currently moving to replace more animal-produced vaccines with aborted-fetal-cell production and also to produce biologic drugs using aborted fetal cells.
GovernmentCare’s Assault on Seniors
Since Medicare was established in 1965, access to care has enabled older Americans to avoid becoming disabled and to travel and live independently instead of languishing in nursing homes. But legislation now being rushed through Congress—H.R. 3200 and the Senate Health Committee Bill—will reduce access to care, pressure the elderly to end their lives prematurely, and doom baby boomers to painful later years.
The Congressional majority wants to pay for its $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion health bills with new taxes and a $500 billion cut to Medicare. This cut will come just as baby boomers turn 65 and increase Medicare enrollment by 30%. Less money and more patients will necessitate rationing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 1% of Medicare cuts will come from eliminating fraud, waste and abuse.
How it began with comparative effectiveness research which Betsy McCaughey writes is code for limiting care based on the patient's age.
The assault against seniors began with the stimulus package in February. Slipped into the bill was substantial funding for comparative effectiveness research, which is generally code for limiting care based on the patient’s age. Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of a treatment is divided by the number of years (called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit. In Britain, the formula leads to denying treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care than younger patients.
When comparative effectiveness research appeared in the stimulus bill, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., (R., La.) a heart surgeon, warned that it would lead to “denying seniors and the disabled lifesaving care.” He and Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) proposed amendments to no avail that would have barred the federal government from using the research to eliminate treatments for the elderly or deny care based on age.
From Family Security Matters who, unlike just about everyone in Congress, has read the health care bill
PG 425 Lines 4-12 Government mandates Advance Care Planning Consultations. Think Senior Citizens end of life prodding.
Pg 425 Lines 17-19 Government will instruct & consult regarding living wills, durable powers of attorney. Mandatory!
PG 425 Lines 22-25, 426 Lines 1-3 Government provides approved list of end of life resources, guiding you in how to die.
PG 427 Lines 15-24 Government mandates program for orders for end of life. The Government has a say in how your life ends.
Pg 429 Lines 1-9 An "advanced care planning consultant" will be used frequently as patients’ health deteriorates.
PG 429 Lines 10-12 "advanced care consultation" may include an ORDER for end of life plans. AN ORDER from the Government to end a life!
Pg 429 Lines 13-25 - The Government will specify which Doctors can write an end of life order.
PG 430 Lines 11-15 The Government will decide what level of treatment you will have at end of life.
Who will decide what treatment you will get? Your doctor or the government. George Will asks about Our New Medical Judges?
If President Obama has his way, another such unelected authority will be created -- a manager and monitor for the vast and expensive American health-care system. As part of his health-reform effort, he is seeking to launch the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, or IMAC, a bland title for a body that could become as much an arbiter of medicine as the Fed is of the economy or the Supreme Court of the law.
--
Under his plan, the president would name five physicians or other health-care-savvy members to serve for five-year terms on its board, picking one of them as chairman. Like the nominees to the Fed and the Supreme Court, they would have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Each year, IMAC would have two responsibilities. First, it would recommend to the president updated fees that Medicare would pay doctors, hospitals, rehab centers, nursing homes, labs, home-care and ambulance services, equipment manufacturers, and all other providers. That is now done by Congress itself, and the lobbying by potent hometown individuals and institutions is one reason Medicare costs keep growing.
--
....Second, IMAC would annually recommend a set of broader reforms to improve the quality or reduce the cost of medical care. On each report, the president would have 30 days to approve or reject the recommendations, but he would have to act on the whole package, not pick it apart.
If he approved, the package would go to Congress and could be overruled only by joint action of the Senate and House within 30 days. Absent that, the secretary of health and human services would order the changes into effect.
---
Americans will have to decide if they are comfortable having those commissioners determine how they will be treated when they are ill.
Just as the Obama administration has promulgated federal funding rules for embryonic stem cells, Forbes magazine reveals The Dirty Secret of Embryonic Stem Cell Research
Hope for any benefits from ES research is decades away.
Thomson blamed simple biology. Among other problems, ES cells require permanent use of dangerous immunosuppressive drugs. They have a nasty tendency to form tumors both malignant and benign including teratomas--meaning "monster tumor." Teratomas can grow larger than a football and can contain eyeball parts, hair and teeth. Yech!
OK, so how many "decades?"
"The routine utilization of human embryonic stem cells for medicine is 20 to 30 years hence," embryonic stem cell research advocate William Haseltine and then-chief executive officer of Human Genome Sciences.
Others say 'three to five decades' or 'never in my lifetime'.
Meanwhile adult stem cells (AS) have proved to be just as flexible as embryonic stem cells (ES) without the health concerns or moral baggage.
AS cells have now treated scores of illnesses including many cancers, autoimmune disease, cardiovascular disease, immunodeficiency disorders, neural degenerative diseases, anemias and other blood conditions. They've been used in over 2,000 human clinical trials. There has never been an ES cell clinical trial. Former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Bernadine Healy, once an ES cell research enthusiast," now calls them "obsolete."
That's why it hardly makes sense to vastly increase federal research funding for ES cells. Medical research spending is always a zero-sum game. However big the overall budget, every dollar approved for one grant is a dollar lost to others.
UPDATE; Researchers produce cells they say are identical to embryonic stem cells
Two groups of Chinese researchers have performed an unprecedented feat, it was announced today, by inducing cells from connective tissue in mice to revert back to their embryonic state and producing living mice from them.
By demonstrating that cells from adults can be converted into cells that, like embryonic stem cells from fetuses, have the ability to produce any type of tissue, the researchers have made a major advance toward eliminating the need for fetal cells in research and clinical applications.
I dislike being pressed to make any financial decision "right now" because I feel I'm being swindled. I feel that same way about the health care proposal now before the Congress.
What I read and see makes me want to yell to all of Congress, "Stop, stop. Go home. Take a break and come to your senses."
Mr. Obama's February budget provided the outline, but the House bill now fills in the details. To wit, tax increases that would take U.S. rates higher even than most of Europe. Yet even those increases aren't nearly enough to finance the $1 trillion in new spending, which itself is surely a low-ball estimate. Meanwhile, the bill would create a new government health entitlement that will kill private insurance and lead to a government-run system.
---
The most remarkable quality of this health-care exercise is its reckless disregard for economic and fiscal reality. With the economy still far from a healthy recovery, and the federal fisc already nearly $2 trillion in deficit, Democrats want to ram through one of the greatest raids on private income and business in American history. The world is looking on, agog, and wondering why the United States seems intent on jumping off this cliff.
The Congressional Budget Director says all the various health care proposals will increase, not reduce federal government spending and so the Federal Budget is on an unsustainable path
While the Vice President says We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt
The Investors' Business Daily says the individual private health insurance is illegal under the House plan. It's Not an Option
It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
--
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
--
What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.
-
The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.
Dick Morris points out that rationing health care is inevitable and it's older people who will suffer the most.
Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access. Indeed, the principal impact of the Obama health care program will be to reduce sharply the medical services the elderly can use. No longer will their every medical need be met, their every medication prescribed, their every need to improve their quality of life answered.
It is so ironic that the elderly - who were so vigilant when Bush proposed to change Social Security - are so relaxed about the Obama health care proposals. Bush’s Social Security plan, which did not cut their benefits at all, aroused the strongest opposition among the elderly. But Obama’s plan, which will totally gut Medicare and replace it with government-managed care and rationing, has elicited little more than a yawn from most senior citizens.
The organizational chart of the Democratic plan charted.
click image to enlarge. Via Maggie's Farm who Says it all.
Rick Moran asks
So what do we get after spending at least a trillion dollars over 10 years? The [5] CBO says we would still have 17 million legal Americans not insured. We would also almost certainly have some form of rationing. And the chances are good that we would have a system performing much worse for people who are insured today.
Without the doctor she found in Boston who did operate successfully, Meg would not be alive, married and with a new job in publishing and a new charity to give support to other people suffering with brain tumors.
Meg was out of hospital within three days and back home within the month, just in time to celebrate her 2:1 degree result. Soon after she took a job in publishing.
'I can't forget about my brain tumour as I still have annual scans and will need them for the rest of my life,' she says. 'But they show that everything is fine and there are no cancer cells. I'm incredibly lucky.'
Meg didn't hesitate when Josh, an investment consultant, proposed on a trip to Venice last summer.
'Sadly Professor Black wasn't able to come to the wedding,' says Meg. 'But Josh and I thought about him so much that day. I owe my life to him - and to my mum who wouldn't give up until she had found a cure.
--
'I've no doubt that, without my operation, I'd now be dead. Britain is gradually catching up with America. But, sadly, we still don't yet have the same high level of technology. I wish everyone could have the same chance I had.'
Daily caffeine dose may delay progress of Alzheimer's, researchers say
Three large cups of coffee a day could help to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s disease and even reverse the condition, researchers say.
A daily dose of caffeine can suppress the degenerative processes in the brain that can lead to confusion and memory loss, a study in mice suggests.
Although drinking coffee has previously been linked to a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s, this is the first study to suggest that caffeine can directly target the disease itself.
My mother drank coffee from morning to night and never had any problems sleeping or any trouble with her memory, so I believe this
Mark Steyn on why "stirring up apathy" is the key to understanding the health care debate
Willie Whitelaw, a genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher's deputy for many years, once accused the Labour Party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw's apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big government depends, in large part, in going around the country stirring up apathy – creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it's easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
Take health care. Have you read any of these health care plans? Of course not. They're huge and turgid and unreadable. Unless you're a health care lobbyist, a health care think-tanker, a health care correspondent or some other fellow who's paid directly or indirectly to plow through this stuff, why bother? None of the senators whose names are on the bills have read 'em; why should you?
Now this makes sense for lifelong and life-threatening conditions: Tattoos being used for medical alerts
Increasing numbers of people who have serious medical conditions, such as diabetes, are turning to tattooing to identify themselves on the chance a health emergency leaves them unable to communicate.
--
At Fatty's Custom Tattooz in Washington, D.C., owner Matthew "Fatty" Jessup says he has carved numerous health-related tattoos. "I've done a biohazard symbol for a few people with HIV," he says.
Stem cells used to help cure sight loss
COATING a common contact lens with stem cells could help restore a person's sight, Australian scientists have found.
University of New South Wales medical researchers used the technique to treat the damaged corneas of three patients, all of whose vision improved within weeks of the groundbreaking procedure.
--
Stem cells were harvested from the eyes of each patient and then cultured inside a contact lens, which was then stuck onto a damaged cornea in a "transplant'' of regenerative cells.
"The procedure is totally simple and cheap,'' said the university's Dr Nick Di Girolamo.
"Unlike other techniques ... there's no suturing, there is no major operation, all that's involved is harvesting a minute amount - less than a millimetre - of tissue from the ocular surface.''
The lens stayed on for 10 days allowing stem cells to change their form, colonise and repair the cornea.
With so many successes from adult stem cells, I can not understand why any scientist or researcher would want to get entangled with the moral quagmire of embryonic stem research
A newly-discovered astonishing surprise of life: the extra chromosome carried by people with Down's syndrome carries a gene that causes cancer tumors to be starved of the blood they need to survive.
"Most people don't appreciate the fact that these individuals with Downs potentially hold a secret that might lead to quite substantial and revolutionary new treatments for cancer," said Dr. David Sweetser, who treats patients and researches cancer at MassGeneral Hospital for Children but was not involved in the Downs project. "The obvious hope is that this is going to give us information to help develop a tool that we could use to treat a whole variety of solid tumors."
A tale of scientific serendipity
The good news is Gimundo is back with good news served daily like
Delaying Retirement Can Ward Off Alzheimer's Disease
“The intellectual stimulation that older people gain from the workplace may prevent a decline in mental abilities, thus keeping people above the threshold for dementia for longer,” Simon Lovestone, one of the study’s co-authors, said in a press statement.
Happy News from the Recession: 5 Good Things about Hard Times
I quite liked the idea of Job Angels and Estonia's Bank of Happiness
The Bank of Happiness has no physical presence, but is merely an Internet portal where Estonians can register their contact details, along with details on what personal and professional skills they can use to help community members, as well as requests for what they’d like help with from others.
“I think young people would love to do this. Not everything has to be based on money,” 18-year-old student Evelin Tamm told the Times Online. “I love to clean and to babysit. Perhaps, in return, someone could help me with my maths and physics.”
Last week the trustees reported that the Medicare will run out of money in less than 10 years, by 2017, two years ahead than projected last year. Social security will run out of money in 2037. It will start running deficits in 2017. The trust funds have always been a fiction since the surpluses have been used to reduce budget deficits.
From the summary issued by the trustees
Medicare's annual costs were 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2008, or about three quarters of Social Security's, they are projected to surpass Social Security expenditures in 2028 and reach 11.4 percent of GDP in 2083.
The argument goes Medicare is going to bankrupt us which is why we have to have universal health care. To which Megan McArdle replies
I hear this argument quite often, and it's gibberish in a prom dress. Any cost savings you want to wring out of Medicare can be wrung out of Medicare right now:
The Wall St Journal reports that the "unfunded liability" of Medicare over the next 75 years is $38 trillion. Yes, trillion. It's hard to wrap your mind around just how big a trillion is.
A trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet could read and write. Neither the Roman Empire nor the ancient Chinese dynasties had yet come into existence. None of the founders of the world's great religions today had yet been born.
A million seconds is 13 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years
Do you believe the White House estimate that it could save $2 trillion in health care over 10 years just like that the Boston Globe asks.
President Obama is right that the cost of healthcare, now more than 16 percent of the economy, is simply unsustainable.
--
But will the industry's gauzy pledges of better coordination of care, more standardization of insurance claim forms, reduced administrative costs, and greater efficiency actually yield the promised savings?
Wesley Smith says we're Pushing Health Care Rationing By Not Discussing Health Care Rationing
rationing prohibits health care funders from paying for otherwise covered treatments, based on the patient’s age, state of health, disability, or perhaps, because the patient committed politically incorrect lifestyle crimes such as smoking or being overweight.
The rationing has already begun and the elderly are hardest hit.
Viking Pundit reports on a story in the Boston Globe on the "pathbreaking effort to cut medical costs" begun by Massachusetts General Hospital: send home the frail elderly from the hospital sooner and reduce their emergency room visits.
Medicare is now the country's largest purchaser of health care. OMB budget chief Peter Orszag believes that "comparative effectiveness research" will determine what works best. Problem is virtual colonoscopies work best for the elderly but not for anyone else. So as the WSJ reports in How Washington Rations, Medicare now will refuse to reimburse for virtual colonoscopies.
The problem is that what "works best" isn't the same for everyone. While not painless or risk free, virtual colonoscopy might be better for some patients -- especially among seniors who are infirm or because the presence of other diseases puts them at risk for complications. Ideally doctors would decide with their patients. But Medicare instead made the hard-and-fast choice that it was cheaper to cut it off for all beneficiaries. If some patients are worse off, well, too bad.
---
All this is merely a preview of the life-and-death decisions that will be determined by politics once government finances substantially more health care than the 46% it already does. Anyone who buys Democratic claims about "choice" and "affordability" will be in for a very rude awakening.
David Brooks in Fiscal Suicide Ahead says that for Obama Health care costs are now the crucial issue of his whole presidency.
For the past 50 years, we've tried to control health care spending and no one is satisfied with the results. Yet, for the most part, we have better care, more advanced technology and more effective medicines than we did 50 years ago. But there's no question we waste enormous amounts of money and even more is lost to fraud. We cut back again and again on payments to doctors who treat Medicaid and Medicare patients with the result that make almost no money treating such patients.
Seems to me there are two ways to go. Either the government takes over and imposes price controls and rations health care or we let the market do it. Now, I can hear you say, but the market hasn't done it and it's not fair.
One country did it and did it well while spending far less. Singapore put the consumer in control with money each individual was required to put aside for health care. By using the money wisely and getting the care they wanted, they had money left over they could use in retirement. A twofer.
American health care policies are sick by Robert Herbold
I believe it's just plain silly for the folks in Washington D.C. to consider spending an additional $600 billion for healthcare. Why throw money at an ineffective and bureaucratic system that is totally out-of-control? Why not figure out how to get it under control before deciding to drown it with more borrowed money from the Chinese or, even worse, further taxing the rich and thus retarding investment that might have a chance of turning around our economy?
--
So, what countries seem to be handling healthcare most effectively and efficiently? Well, there's one nation that has the lowest infant mortality rate in the world as well as the third longest average lifespan for its citizens - and it spends only 3.7 percent of its GDP on healthcare. That country is Singapore.
--
Singaporeans participate in a mandatory savings program that sets up a "Medisave" account for each individual. The individual is required to pay a small percentage of his or her income each month into that account, and employers also make a contribution. For individuals who are unemployed, there is a government subsidy. Singaporeans also engage in a "Medishield" program, which is a national catastrophic illness insurance plan. Premiums for the Medishield program are small, because it is government subsidized; as a result, the premiums are paid for out of an individual's Medisave account.
Choice and Competition
Most significantly, when individuals in Singapore feel the need to go to a physician, they select the doctor based on the quality of the care they believe they will get and the cost associated with going to that physician. In essence, physicians compete for the patient's business. Individuals select carefully since it's their Medisave account money that's used to pay for the chosen physician.
Individuals cannot take money out of their Medisave accounts except for medical use. On the other hand, these accounts grow steadily over time because the government invests these funds for the individual in a safe and modestly performing investment fund.
What's important here is that the money is not the government's. It's the individual's money and, at retirement age, people actually have access to these funds. That's why individuals use the funds wisely.
Eating fatty foods may boost your memory, say scientists
Researchers at the University of California-Irvine think so. A team of scientists found that oleic acids from fats are converted into a memory-enhancing signals in the part of the brain responsible for remembering emotional events.
Oleic acid, or OEA, is found in unsaturated fats - or so-called "good fat" - such as olive oil, grape seed oil and acai berries.
---
Researchers said OEAs helps animals remember where they found a nice, fatty meal.
"By helping mammals remember where and when they have eaten a fatty meal, OEA's memory-enhancing activity seems to have been an important evolutionary tool for early humans and other animals," Dr. Daniele Piomelli said.
"Remembering the location and context of a fatty meal was probably important survival mechanism for early humans."
My sister has had multiple sclerosis for thirty years so I really appreciate this quite good news Adult stem cells cure multiple sclerosis patient in Canada
Alex Normandin, 26, of Montreal, Canada has been cured of his Multiple Sclerosis following the implantation of his own Adult Stem Cells. The stem cell therapy was done in conjunction with a research program in Ottawa with Dr. Mark Freedman.
Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler explores why we just can't resist fat, salt and sugar food when wrapped up together in "highly palatable" junk food.
Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will stimulate that diner's brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the come-on offered by Lay's Potato Chips -- "Betcha can't eat just one" -- is scientifically accurate.
--
"Highly palatable" foods -- those containing fat, sugar and salt -- stimulate the brain to release dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the pleasure center, he found. In time, the brain gets wired so that dopamine pathways light up at the mere suggestion of the food, such as driving past a fast-food restaurant, and the urge to eat the food grows insistent. Once the food is eaten, the brain releases opioids, which bring emotional relief. Together, dopamine and opioids create a pathway that can activate every time a person is reminded about the particular food. This happens regardless of whether the person is hungry.
Now that we know that, we can drink white tea that contains anti-obesity substances.
Marc Winnefeld led a team of researchers from Beiersdorf AG, Germany, who studied the biological effects of an extract of white tea – the least processed version of the tea plant Camellia sinensis. He said, "In the industrialized countries, the rising incidence of obesity-associated disorders including cardiovascular diseases and diabetes constitutes a growing problem. We've shown that white tea may be an ideal natural source of slimming substances".
With the rise of autistic disorders among Somali immigrants in Sweden and Minnesota, a condition that never appeared in Somalia,
scientists are now asking whether Vitamin D deficiency is a cause of autism
Proponents of the vitamin D–autism link say there is biological plausibility to their theory. They cite a 2007 review by Allan Kalueff, a researcher now at Tulane University, in Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care. That review—based on more than 20 studies of animals and humans—concluded that vitamin D during gestation and early infancy was essential for "normal brain functioning."
The swine flu (H1N1) is transmitted from person to person like this.
I'm late to post on the swine flu because I've spent much of my time trying to figure out how serious it is and what the average person can do about it aside from washing their hands a lot and postponing any vacation to Mexico. Apart from the baby who died in Texas, swine flu in the U.S. seems to be quite mild. In Mexico, the crisis is severe with 149 deaths; the government is going all out to stem the spread canceling public events, closing schools and restaurants in Mexico City.
One of the most alarming bits of new was that Obama in Mexico earlier this month was showed around the city's anthropology museum by Dr. Felipe Solis who died the next day from "flu-like" symptoms, making the President coming closer to almost anyone in the country to contracting the virus. We did learn later that the President was fine and that Dr. Solis has died of pneumonia.
There's no question that one of the consequences of a flat world, interconnected in ways unimaginable, that fears of a global pandemic will characterize our future.
Contagion on a Small Planet
An urbanizing planet knitted by transportation is an extraordinarily welcoming world for infectious disease, particularly easily transmitted viruses like the flu. That’s why it wasn’t surprising Saturday when the World Health Organization concluded that the outbreaks of swine flu focused in central Mexico as well as a school in New York City and several other places around the United States officially constituted “a public health emergency of international concern".
My brother works for the WHO in Geneva and yesterday sent me this graph after WHO raised the global alert level to phase 4. Click for larger image.
The good news is that the U.S. government is far better prepared to deal with a pandemic than it was a few years ago. After the avian flu scare, President George Bush issued a pandemic flu preparedness plan. Since 2006, $6.2 billion has been appropriated to stockpile antivirals, step up surveillance and improve vaccine-making and technology.
How Not to Battle Flu - Lessons from the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918
CDC tips for individuals
What should you do?
1. Don't panic. Eat pork if you want.
2. Wash your hands often with soap and water.
3. Have antibacterial handwash in your car so you can use it wherever you are.
4. If you are sick, stay home. If you have flu symptoms, stay home unless you have difficulty in breathing, dizziness, pain in the chest or vomiting. Then see a doctor. The anti-viral drugs Tamiflu and Reflenza are only available with a doctor's prescription.
5. You might want a mask if you come into close contact with flu-infected people, either a disposable surgical mask or a painter's mask. The most effective are N95 respirators but make sure they are approved by the CDC.
5. Check your own state of preparedness.
Do you have two weeks worth of food and water and necessary medications?
Close friendships often have a greater effect on health than a spouse or a family member. They will shape your life, sustain it and make it better.
What Are Friends For? A Longer Life
Researchers are only now starting to pay attention to the importance of friendship and social networks in overall health. A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained weight. And last year, Harvard researchers reported that strong social ties could promote brain health as we age.
“In general, the role of friendship in our lives isn’t terribly well appreciated,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “There is just scads of stuff on families and marriage, but very little on friendship. It baffles me. Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.
- Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) British lexiographer.
My friends are my estate.
- Emily Dickinson
Those nocturnal tiny insects that feed on the blood of humans are back. Jane Brody tells you how to keep them from biting.
Although this blood-sucking parasite has been around for thousands of years, it was mainly associated with impoverished dwellings and fleabag hotels. Now, as the authors pointed out, “international travel, immigration, changes in pest control practices, and insecticide resistance” have ganged up to create “a resurgence in developed countries,” including the United States.
“Bed bug infestations have been reported increasingly in homes, apartments, hotel rooms, hospitals and dormitories in the United States since 1980,” they wrote. Reported infestations in San Francisco doubled from 2004 to 2006; telephone complaints in Toronto rose 100 percent in six months during 2002; and the number of bed bug samples sent to authorities in Australia was 400 percent higher from 2001 to 2004, compared with the previous three years.
--
Most people who are bitten by bed bugs do not react. Of the 30 percent or so who do, many mistake the small, pink, itchy bumps for mosquito bites, although people may become more suspicious and more sensitive with repeated bites....People who are highly sensitive react with intense itching that prompts scratching and can lead to infections......most bed bug lesions can be treated with an anti-itch product like calamine lotion or a topical or oral corticosteroid and antihistamine. If bites become infected, a topical or oral antibiotic may be needed.
Just don't pick up discarded mattresses, sofas or cushioned chairs off the street.
When you travel, check for bedbugs with the small flashlight you should always have with you.
If your bed has been infested, you have no choice but to call a professional.
Nasal irrigation works, as many recent studies attest, to ease allergy symptoms, stuffy nose and other nasal problems.
One benefit is that irrigation can clear nasal passages without dryness or “rebound” congestion, which occurs when overuse of decongestants leads to dependence and irritated tissue.
In one independent study in 2008, researchers examined a group of children with severe allergies. They found that regular nasal irrigation with a mild saline solution significantly eased symptoms and helped reduce the need for steroid nasal sprays. A 2007 study at the University of Michigan looked at 121 adults with chronic nasal and sinus problems. Over two months, the scientists found that those treated with nasal irrigation reported greater improvements than those treated with a spray.
The neti pot has been used for thousands of years, but some find it too awkward to use. Today you can easily buy a saline spray that will remain sterile as long as you don't share it. Natural and cheap.
If you or someone you love has to take a complicated regime of medicines, you might be pleased to learn that soon a microchip that tells the doctor if you've taken your pills.
Digestible sensors in pills activate a harmless electrical charge when the pill is digested by the stomach which charge is picked up on a sensing patch on the patient's stomach that records the time and date the pill is digested, sends it off to a mobile phone which in turn sends it to a secure web page. Just 1 mm wide, the silicon microchips can't be seen by patients and can be added to any standard drug during the manufacturing process.
New research suggests that one speck of blood or tissue may be enough to diagnose cancer.
Researchers at Stanford University, California, have developed a machine that separates cancer-associated proteins by means of their electric charge, which varies according to modifications on the protein’s surface.
There may be a "good" fat tissue - brown fat -that fights obesity but the downside is that it works only when you turn down the heat and shiver.
And the best news of all. Bacon sandwich really does cure a hangover by boosting the level of amines which clear the head.
Even after a heart attack, the muscles of the heart can regenerate says the NIH
It has long been assumed that when the heart is damaged — such as after a heart attack — heart muscle cells do not regenerate and the damage is permanent. This assumption has been challenged in recent years by evidence that heart muscle cells may in fact regenerate. Now, this latest research provides the most dramatic and clear-cut demonstration to date of heart cell regeneration after cardiac injury," says Claude Lenfant, M.D., director of the NHLBI, a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
You don't die with the same heart you were born with
Heart muscle renewed over lifetime, study finds
About 1 percent of the heart muscle cells are replaced every year at age 25, and that rate gradually falls to less than half a percent per year by age 75, concluded a team of researchers led by Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The upshot is that about half of the heart’s muscle cells are exchanged in the course of a normal lifetime, the Swedish group calculates. Its results are to be published Friday in the journal Science.
Those nuclear weapons tested in the atmosphere until 1963 in essence "labelled the cells of the entire world's population".
By measuring the amount of carbon 14 in the heart muscles, the scientists were able to calculate the turnover of cells in what was called a "scientific tour de force"
In the past couple of years, the vaccine Gardasil has been touted as the best way to protect young women against cervical cancer.
Manufactured by Merck & Co, the vaccine is designed to prevent the initial establishment of HPV, the human papillomavirius, that causes cervical cancer and is transmitted sexually. Administered in three injections over six months, Gardasil is expensive ($360).
So effective was the new vaccine, many urged that it be given to all young teenage girls as a prophylactic before they became sexually active. Some parents were horrified at the idea; most greeted the idea with great relief.
Since HPV infection shows no symptoms and has no cure, the vaccine was heavily promoted in commercials which showed teenage girls saying "I want to be one less" who gets the HPV virus.
A number of states mandated the vaccine despite the fact that no one knew the long term effects.
Now from CBS news comes new worries about Gardasil safety and very serious side effects.
The National Vaccine Information Center, a private vaccine-safety group, compared Gardasil adverse events to another vaccine, one also given to young people, but for meningitis. Gardasil had three times the number of Emergency Room visits - more than 5,000.
Reports of side effects were up to 30 times higher with Gardasil.
"If I'd have known, we never would have gotten the shot," said Emily Tarsell, whose daughter, Chris, died three weeks after her third Gardasil shot. She was one of the 29 fatalities reported in two years. "And she'd be here to hug."
Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the NVIC, said: "Now we know from this report that there are more reactions and deaths associated with Gardasil than with another vaccine given in the same age group. It's irresponsible not to take action."
Mary Beth Bonacci says "The vaccine is unnecessary, it's dangerous, and it's disabling and killing young women."
We have pap smears, which detect HPV-related warts and pre-cancerous changes to the cervix. It is because of our friend the pap smear that cervical cancer deaths declined 74% between 1955 and 1992 - - the same time period wherein the rate of unmarried sexual activity was rising dramatically. Those cervical cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society, continue to decline at a rate of about 4% a year.
We don't need Gardasil to prevent cervical cancer. Gardasil is the closest thing I've ever seen to an out and out pharmaceutical hoax foisted on American women under the guise of "public health."
After little Morgan McCracken, 7, was hit in the head with a baseball in a backyard game, she seemed fine, but her parents, after reading about the death of Natasha Richardson took her to the emergency room after the little girl complained of a headache.
Morgan was in such bad shape by the time they got there that she had to be transferred to a children's hospital by helicopter, where she was immediately taken into surgery, according to CNN.
The McCrackens learned there that Morgan had the same injury that Natasha Richardson had died of -- according to CNN, an epidural hematoma. Mr. McCracken told the cable news outlet: "[Our doctor] told us that if we hadn't brought her in Thursday night, she never would have woken up."
But after Morgan's surgery and five days in the hospital, she's "doing fine," according to CNN, which lists the danger signs to look out for in a head injury on their web site.
Little girl saved after Natasha Richardson's death
Any head injury should be checked out.
Another reason why Alzheimer's is the last thing you want to get.
The health care costs of treating Alzheimer's are triple those of other older people and that doesn't include the billions of hours of unpaid care from family members.
That all adds up to at least $33,007 in annual costs per patient, compared with $10,603 for an older person without Alzheimer's, according to a report issued Tuesday by the Alzheimer's Association.
--
An estimated 5.3 million Americans have the disease; by next year nearly half a million new cases will be diagnosed, according to the Alzheimer's Association.
From 2000 to 2006, while deaths from heart disease, stroke, breast and prostate cancer declined, Alzheimer's deaths rose 47 percent.
The Pope is in Africa, so naturally the talk turns to condoms.
"I would say the opposite. I think that the reality that is most effective, the most present and the strongest in the fight against AIDS, is precisely that of the Catholic Church, with its programs and its diversity. I think of the Sant'Egidio Community, which does so much visibly and invisibly in the fight against AIDS ... and of all the sisters at the service of the sick.
"I would say that one cannot overcome this problem of AIDS only with money -- which is important, but if there is no soul, no people who know how to use it, (money) doesn't help.
"One cannot overcome the problem with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem.
"The solution can only be a double one: first, a humanization of sexuality, that is, a spiritual human renewal that brings with it a new way of behaving with one another; second, a true friendship even and especially with those who suffer, and a willingness to make personal sacrifices and to be with the suffering. And these are factors that help and that result in real and visible progress.
"Therefore I would say this is our double strength -- to renew the human being from the inside, to give him spiritual human strength for proper behavior regarding one's own body and toward the other person, and the capacity to suffer with the suffering. ... I think this is the proper response and the church is doing this, and so it offers a great and important contribution. I thank all those who are doing this."
Let's look at the research done by Harvard professor Edward Green, senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies in "Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Learning from Successes in Developing Countries" , a book reviewed by Douglas Sylva in Saving Life
There are, however, no condom "successes" in Africa. Something like 700 million condoms are shipped to the continent, year in and year out, courtesy of the U.N., the U.S., and the EU, yet infection rates remain stubbornly high. The UNICEF official approvingly cites Botswana's commitment to condoms — "Let us follow the decision of the government of Botswana" — but about 35 percent of that country's population is infected. That's the example the rest of the world should follow?
Whenever someone, usually an obscure African churchman, dares to raise such uncomfortable questions, the full might of the AIDS establishment comes down to smite him, and he is condemned as a religious zealot. Finally, though, there is a challenger to condom dominance who cannot be so easily dismissed. He is a distinguished public-health official, a paragon, in fact, of establishment credentials: Edward C. Green, senior research scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Green has had an epiphany of common sense and now has the courage to criticize the role of his colleagues as prophylactic missionaries to the Third World. In his important new book, Rethinking AIDS Prevention, he exposes the failure of the condom approach, and explains why AIDS experts cling to this failure.
--
Obviously, such people have a personal interest in ensuring that the basic lesson of the AIDS epidemic — promiscuous sex cannot be made consequence-free — never gets learned. As our "polypartnering" devotee makes clear, "we should not use the HIV/AIDS crisis as an excuse to revert back" to the bad old days of monogamy. And thus enters the lowly condom; it allows proponents of the sexual revolution to trumpet as "safe" risky sexual behavior.
--
Green makes the reasonable request that African public-health measures should be designed with the best interests of Africans in mind; most especially, that the schoolchildren of Africa should not be handed a box of condoms, and subjected to a program designed for the clients of New York's gay bathhouses, but encouraged instead to delay sexual activity.
It doesn't matter what your diet, only calories count.
That is the finding of the largest-ever controlled study of weight-loss methods published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. More than 800 overweight adults in Boston and Baton Rouge, La., were assigned to one of four diets that reduced calories through different combinations of fat, carbohydrates and protein. Each plan cut about 750 calories from a participant’s normal diet, but no one ate fewer than 1,200 calories a day.
While the diets were not named, the eating plans were all loosely based on the principles of popular diets like Atkins, which emphasizes low carbohydrates; Dean Ornish, which is low-fat; or the Mediterranean diet, with less animal protein. All participants also received group or individual counseling.
--
The lesson, researchers say, is that people lose weight if they lower calories, but it does not matter how.
“It really does cut through the hype,” said Dr. Frank M. Sacks, the study’s lead author and professor of cardiovascular disease prevention at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It gives people lots of flexibility to pick a diet that they can stick with.”
The brain uses two forms of attention. “Directed” attention allows us to concentrate on work, reading and tests, while “involuntary” attention takes over when we’re distracted by things like running water, crying babies, a beautiful view or a pet that crawls onto our lap.
Directed attention is a limited resource. Long hours in front of a computer or studying for a test can leave us feeling fatigued. But spending time in natural settings appears to activate involuntary attention, giving the brain’s directed attention time to rest.
“It’s pretty clear that all human beings experience attentional fatigue,” Dr. Faber Taylor said. “Our attention has to be restored from that fatigue, and there is a growing body of research evidence that nature is one way that seems particularly effective at doing it.”
The New York Times reports on recess. Tara Parker-Pope concludes:
The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.
New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
--
Playtime and nature time are important not only for learning but also for health and development.
Alzheimer's study finds parental link
Children of parents with Alzheimer's disease can develop memory problems in their 50s or even younger - much earlier than previously thought - according to a large study released yesterday by researchers at Boston University School of Medicine.
The study subjects, who carried a gene strongly linked to Alzheimer's, performed worse in memory tests, on average, than other middle-aged people who had the same gene but did not have a parent diagnosed with Alzheimer's. The difference in memory between the two groups was equivalent to approximately 15 years of brain aging, researchers found..
"How big an effect we saw was surprising," said Dr. Sudha Seshadri, a BU associate professor of neurology and senior author of the study. "It was like you were comparing two groups, 55-year-olds to 70-year-olds."
Surely you've heard about the link between autism and vaccines. Some parents have been terrified to have their young children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella. The fear of such vaccination led to the return of measles in England, Germany, Switzerland and Italy
The London Times reports that the doctor who sparked the scare with his study in the British medical journal Lancet
linking autism with vaccinations fixed the data to make the link.
MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism.
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.
--
Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.
Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.
Maybe you've heard the quote "Genes Load the Gun, But Environment Pulls the Trigger". That's what I thought of when I read this article in the London Times.
Vitamin D is a ray of sunshine for multiple sclerosis patients
Multiple sclerosis could be prevented through daily vitamin D supplements, scientists told The Times last night.
The first causal link has been established between the “sunshine vitamin” and a gene that increases the risk of MS, raising the possibility that the debilitating auto-immune disease could be eradicated.
George Ebers, Professor of Clinical Neurology at the University of Oxford, claimed that there was hard evidence directly relating both genes and the environment to the origins of MS. His work suggests that vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and childhood may increase the risk of a child developing the disease.
He has also established the possibility that genetic vulnerability to MS, apparently initiated by lack of vitamin D, may be passed through families. These risks might plausibly be reduced by giving vitamin D supplements to pregnant woman and young children.
“I think it offers the potential for treatment which might prevent MS in the future,” Professor Ebers said. “Our research has married two key pieces of the puzzle. The interaction of vitamin D with the gene is very specific and it seems most unlikely to be a coincidence of any kind.”
--
Until now there has been no scientific proof of the links. However, Professor Ebers and his team have shown that vitamin D affects a particular genetic variant, identified as the one that increases the risk of developing MS threefold.
They suggest that a shortage of the vitamin alters this variant, thus preventing the immune system from functioning normally.
This comes to late for my sister Debby who has had MS for more than 30 years but it offers great hope for early phase MS.
Stem cells 'reset' immune system in MS patients in study.
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that impairs movement and coordination, while causing muscle weakness, cognitive impairment, slurred speech and vision problems.
--
But in the decade or more after onset, MS is characterised by gradual but irreversible neurological impairment. There is no known cure.
In clinical trials, a team of scientists led by Richard Burt of Northwestern University in Chicago essentially rebuilt the immune system of 21 adults -- 11 women and 10 men -- who had failed to respond to standard drug treatments.
First they removed defective white blood cells that, rather than protecting the body, attacks the fatty sheath, called myelin, that protects the nervous system.
The immune systems were then replenished with so-called haemopoeitic stem cells -- extracted from the patient's bone marrow -- capable of giving rise to any form of mature blood cell.
--
The procedure "not only seems to prevent neurological progression, but also appears to reverse neurological disability," concluded the study, published in the British medical journal The Lancet.
It's wise to be wary of the pill
According to the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, an alarming rise in male infertility in developed nations is possibly caused by the quantities of synthetic female hormones, particularly estrogen, in the food chain and water. These quantities are directly attributable to increased use of the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy.
--
Indeed, according to Canberra Hospital professor Peter Collignon, an opponent of recycling sewage water into the potable supply, estrogen can be more of a problem in recycled water than microbes because it cannot be filtered out and we simply do not know how well it breaks down. Just as the Romans drinking from lead cups unwittingly caused infertility in themselves, perhaps we are seeing after 30 years of contraceptive pill use the long-term effects of introducing artificial estrogen into our wider environment. So you see this is not just a preoccupation of the misogynistic old Vatican.
__
The evidence that synthetic hormones can have grotesque environmental effects has actually been around for a long time and it is mounting. As long ago as the 1980s, studies were done in the US which showed the effects of estrogen pollution on wildlife, famously alligators in Florida with deformed genitals.
--
There are so many reasons for being wary of the contraceptive pill. Why are we not questioning its prevalence?
The reason is, of course, that it is the sacred cow of the sexual revolution. One imaginative letter writer claimed the Catholic view of the pill was that it was "the great Satan", and actually that is not a bad description. It was marketed as an instrument of sexual freedom, and it has provided that, particularly for men. But one might ask if for women it has been the means of sexual liberation or just a way of turning us into empty vessels for sex? Is it like the sexual revolution itself: a pretty and alluring package that turns out to be - for both sexes - like a series of empty boxes, one inside the other. At the end, there is nothing but an empty box.
It's astonishing when you think of it. If there were any other cause for worldwide male infertility and environmental degradation, people would be up in arms.
Where is the EPA? Where is the UN? Where is the outrage?
Maybe they don't pay professional athletes enough. Take a look at the photo below to see the effect that repeated concussions have on a formerly healthy brain.
Until recently, the best medical definition for concussion was a jarring blow to the head that temporarily stunned the senses, occasionally leading to unconsciousness. It has been considered an invisible injury, impossible to test -- no MRI, no CT scan can detect it.
But today, using tissue from retired NFL athletes culled posthumously, the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE), at the Boston University School of Medicine, is shedding light on what concussions look like in the brain. The findings are stunning. Far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. That damage has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Dead athlete's brains show damage from concussions.
CTE has thus far been found in the brains of six out of six former NFL players.
"What's been surprising is that it's so extensive," said McKee. "It's throughout the brain, not just on the superficial aspects of the brain, but it's deep inside."
CSTE studies reveal brown tangles flecked throughout the brain tissue of former NFL players who died young -- some as early as their 30s or 40s.
McKee, who also studies Alzheimer's disease, says the tangles closely resemble what might be found in the brain of an 80-year-old with dementia.
"I knew what traumatic brain disease looked like in the very end stages, in the most severe cases," said McKee. "To see the kind of changes we're seeing in 45-year-olds is basically unheard of."
The damage affects the parts of the brain that control emotion, rage, hypersexuality, even breathing, and recent studies find that CTE is a progressive disease that eventually kills brain cells.
One man Chris Nowinski, once a Harvard football star, is responsible for starting these studies in the first place.
"I realized when I was visiting a lot of doctors, they weren't giving me very good answers about what was wrong with my head," said Nowinski. "I read [every study I could find] and I realized there was a ton of evidence showing concussions lead to depression, and multiple concussion can lead to Alzheimer's."
Nowinski decided further study was needed, so he founded the Sports Legacy Institute along with Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and the co-director of the CSTE. The project solicits for study the brains of ex-athletes who suffered multiple concussions.
More evidence that coffee is good for you, in the short term and the long.
Coffee Linked to Lower Dementia Risk
Drinking coffee may do more than just keep you awake. A new study suggests an intriguing potential link to mental health later in life, as well.
--
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less.
--
First, earlier studies have linked coffee consumption with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, which in turn has been associated with a greater risk of dementia. In animal studies, caffeine has been shown to reduce the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, coffee may have an antioxidant effect in the bloodstream, reducing vascular risk factors for dementia.
Dr. Kivipelto noted that previous studies have shown that coffee drinking may also be linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Harvard researchers report in the Boston Globe
Deaths and complications dropped by an astounding one-third when operating room doctors and nurses completed a simple safety checklist before, during, and after surgery, according to a study led by Harvard researchers.
The eight hospitals that participated in the international study collectively reduced complications during hospital stays from 11 percent of patients before they began using the checklist to 7 percent of patients when using the checklist. Deaths dropped from 1.5 percent of patients to 0.8 percent.
"It was beyond anything we expected," said Dr. Atul Gawande, senior author of the Harvard School of Public Health paper and a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The impact of all the items on the checklist "put together seems to have produced these really remarkable results," he said.
--
Completing the checklist out loud as a team is crucial to uncovering lapses that lead to problems, said Dr. Alex Haynes of the Harvard School of Public Health, the lead author and a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"Saying it verbally codifies things more than simply having one person check a box," Haynes said. It requires more attention, he said, and a greater sense of collective responsibility.
I posted The Art of Managing Extreme Complexity in the ICU over a year ago which excerpted chunks of Atul Gawande's article in the New Yorker.
One doctor looked at what happens when procedures are too complex to carry out reliably from memory alone by taking a page from pilot checklists.
Checklists help people with memory recall and make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.
What checklists do you use?
Probably the best investment you can make in your own health and that of your family is to put together your family health history.
The Surgeon General agrees. He's upgraded and simplified the software and it's all free. Better yet, when you share your family health tree with a relative, the software can "'reindex" so that relative becomes the center of his or her own tree and all that information you share takes its proper place.
Tracking red flags in family history
A good family health history is more important than a gene test in predicting your future medical needs, but it's hugely underused. Today, the government begins offering a free new service to try to change that - helping people compile a health history at home, e-mail it to relatives who can fill in the gaps, and even pop it into their doctors' computers.
"That is an amazingly positive investment," acting Surgeon General Steven Galson, whose office spearheaded the initiative, said. "You're going to help your doctor learn a lot more about you by spending those 20 minutes, and you can share that invested time around your family and with your physicians."
The goal: Just as people create ancestral family trees, create a family "health tree." It may sound old-fashioned in this era of gene discovery. But genetics specialists use these "pedigrees" to look for patterns of inherited illnesses that can provide a powerful window on someone's brewing health risks.
"Family health history is the first genetic test, but it encompasses much more than genes," says James O'Leary of the nonprofit Genetic Alliance.
A family's shared environmental or lifestyle factors are key, too. Add those together, and a family health tree "is the way you identify what is important to pay more attention to," he explains.
---
A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found fewer than 30 percent of Americans have ever collected health information from relatives to compile such a history.
Today, the site reopens - at https://familyhistory.hhs.gov - after a high-tech facelift.
It's private; users download the information to their own computers. Then they can e-mail a tree-in-progress to relatives to fill in missing information.
Now, that a 'Cancer-free' baby is born in London, what will she die of?
The first child in Britain known to have been screened as an embryo to ensure she did not carry a cancer gene was born Friday, a spokesman for University College London told CNN.
Genetic screening allows lab-fertilized embryos to be tested for genes likely to lead to later health problems.
Her embryo was screened in a lab days after conception to check for the BRCA-1 gene, linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
People with the gene are known to have a 50-80 percent chance of developing breast or ovarian cancer in their lifetime.
Not everyone is thrilled with this development.
"This is not a cure for breast cancer," said Josephine Quintavalle, co-founder of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, which describes itself as group that focuses on ethical dilemmas related to reproduction.
What do you think about testing embryos for gene defects?
"This is simply a mechanism for eliminating the birth of anybody (prone to) the disease," she said. "It is basically a search-and-kill mechanism."
She opposes the procedure because embryos found to carry disease-causing genes often are discarded. She says that is essentially murder.
"They will be destroyed," she said. "They will never be allowed to live."
--
Quintavalle opposes any form of in-vitro fertilization where embryos are "killed," she said. But she is particularly troubled by the idea of screening an embryo for the BRCA-1 gene because carriers of the gene do not always develop the disease, and the disease is not always fatal.
"The message we are sending is: 'Better off dead than carrying (a gene linked to) breast cancer,'" she said. "We have gone very much down the proverbial slippery slope."
--
Yeew. Guess what happened when hospitals stopped providing freshly-laundered scrubs for their doctors and nurses.
Hospital Scrubs Are a Germy, Deadly Mess. Bacteria on doctor uniforms can kill you.
Dirty scrubs spread bacteria to patients in the hospital and allow hospital superbugs to escape into public places such as restaurants. Some hospitals now prohibit wearing scrubs outside the building, partly in response to the rapid increase in an infection called "C. diff." A national hospital survey released last November warns that Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections are sickening nearly half a million people a year in the U.S., more than six times previous estimates.
The problem is that some medical personnel wear the same unlaundered uniforms to work day after day. They start their shift already carrying germs such as C.diff, drug-resistant enterococcus or staphylococcus. Doctors' lab coats are probably the dirtiest. At the University of Maryland, 65% of medical personnel confess they change their lab coat less than once a week, though they know it's contaminated. Fifteen percent admit they change it less than once a month. Superbugs such as staph can live on these polyester coats for up to 56 days.
Do unclean uniforms endanger patients? Absolutely
A quick round-up of health stories you may have missed.
Beer marinade cuts steak cancer risk, The New Scientist
If you are frying a steak and mindful of your health, then marinate it in either beer or red wine. So say food scientists who measured amounts of a family of carcinogens found in fried steaks after steeping them in booze.
Blood Sugar Control Linked to Memory Decline
Spikes in blood sugar can take a toll on memory by affecting the dentate gyrus, an area of the brain within the hippocampus that helps form memories, a new study reports.
--
“When we think about diabetes, we think about heart disease and all the consequences for the rest of the body, but we usually don’t think about the brain,” he said. “This is something we’ve got to be really worried about. We need to think about their ultimate risks not only for cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, but also about their cognitive skills, and whether they will be able to keep up with the demands of education and a fast-paced complex society. That’s the part that scares the heck out of me.”
Too much thinking 'can make you fat'
Researchers found the stress of thinking caused overeating with heavy thinkers seeking out more calories.
--
Mr Chaput added: "Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialised countries.
"This is a factor that should not be ignored, considering that more and more people hold jobs of an intellectual nature."
Sarcasm used to diagnose dementia
Researchers at the University of New South Wales found that patients under the age of 65 suffering from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), the second most common form of dementia, cannot detect when someone is being sarcastic.
The health benefits of a well-developed derriere may be good news to ears of many women
Big bottoms could be good for your health as the fat may protect against type 2 diabetes.
Via Ronnie Bennett, the pre-eminent elder blogger comes this news
Memory can be an issue as we get older even without fear of dementia. Now, two new studies each have a different idea of what might help. You could try marijuana. Or, some different researchers suggest red wine. Make of it what you will.
Clicking on the links I found Scientists are high on the idea that marijuana reduces memory impairment
The more research they do, the more evidence Ohio State University scientists find that specific elements of marijuana can be good for the aging brain by reducing inflammation there and possibly even stimulating the formation of new brain cells.
The research suggests that the development of a legal drug that contains certain properties similar to those in marijuana might help prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Though the exact cause of Alzheimer’s remains unknown, chronic inflammation in the brain is believed to contribute to memory impairment.
Any new drug’s properties would resemble those of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, but would not share its high-producing effects. THC joins nicotine, alcohol and caffeine as agents that, in moderation, have shown some protection against inflammation in the brain that might translate to better memory late in life.
And Red, red wine: How it fights Alzheimer's
Reporting in the Nov. 21 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, David Teplow, a UCLA professor of neurology, and colleagues show how naturally occurring compounds in red wine called polyphenols block the formation of proteins that build the toxic plaques thought to destroy brain cells, and further, how they reduce the toxicity of existing plaques, thus reducing cognitive deterioration.
I've wondered about this all my life. Why do we yawn?
Now, the Discovery channels claims to answer that question. It Cools Your Brain
If your head is overheated, there's a good chance you'll yawn soon, according to a new study that found the primary purpose of yawning is to control brain temperature.
The finding solves several mysteries about yawning, such as why it's most commonly done just before and after sleeping, why certain diseases lead to excessive yawning, and why breathing through the nose and cooling off the forehead often stop yawning.
The key yawn instigator appears to be brain temperature.
--
The new findings also explain why tired individuals often yawn, since both exhaustion and sleep deprivation have been shown to increase deep brain temperatures, again prompting a yawn-driven cool down. Yawning additionally appears to facilitate transitional states of the brain, such as going from sleep to waking periods.
--
"Bouts of excessive yawning often precede the onset of seizures in epileptic patients, and predict the onset of headaches in people who suffer from migraines," he added.
Now I recall when I used to suffer from migraines, I yawned a lot.
But Discovery solved the puzzle of why yawning is so contagious.
photomontage by Zachary Scott
Some contend it's the capacity for empathy, but why do we yawn just thinking about it?
Steve Platek, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University is the go-to expert.
Platek says he thinks it has to do with empathy. The way he sees it, the more empathetic you are, the more likely it is that you'll identify with a yawner and experience a yawn yourself. In a recent study, Platek looked at contagious yawning in people with "high empathy," "low empathy" and everything in between. He found that higher empathy meant more yawn-susceptible and lower empathy meant more yawn-immune.
But that wasn't proof enough. So Platek put volunteers in M.R.I. machines and made them yawn again and again to pinpoint the areas of the brain involved. When their brains lighted up in the exact regions of the brain involved in empathy, Platek remembers thinking, "Wow, this is so cool!"
Some yawning researchers - of which there are few - have identified many types of yawns. There's the contagious yawn, the I'm-tired yawn and the I-just-woke-up yawn. There's the threat yawn, which is the my-teeth-are-bigger-than-yours yawn that's so popular with primates. ("People do it, too," says Platek, "but unfortunately, we don't have scary teeth anymore.") There's also the sexual yawn. (One scientist claims that yawns are used in seduction.)
At some point, you have to wonder: why study yawning? It's quirky, interesting, but not important, right? Wrong, says Platek. Nearly every species on the planet yawns: insects, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals. "Yawning is such a primitive neurological function," Platek says, "it's a window into what happened during the evolution of the brain."
The good thing about yawning is that it's not boring. "Scientists like me usually go to conferences and give talks about technical mumbo jumbo," Platek says. "The audience always yawns, and we're up there thinking, Oh, man, they're so bored! But when I give a talk about yawning and they yawn, I think: Sweet! They're paying attention!"
Cutting out the carbs may help you lose weight - but it can also help you lose your memory.
A study has found that dieters who avoid starchy foods do worse in mental tests than those who are allowed some pasta, bread and potatoes.
Carbohydrates are such an important source of energy for the brain that mental performance drops after just a week on an Atkins-style diet, the scientists found.
Women who cut out carbohydrates 'could lose their memory.'
The new study, carried out by scientists at Tufts University in Boston, America, looked at the impact of low-carb diets on the brain power of 19 women aged 22 to 55. The volunteers were put on either a low-calorie balanced diet or a low-carb diet.
Within a week, the ten women taking the low-carbohydrate diet were far worse at mental tests than those on the conventional low-calorie diet.
The tests looked at attention, long-term and short-term memory, visual attention and spatial memory.
The low-carb dieters showed a gradual decline in memory tasks compared with the low-calorie dieters.
Well this surprised me.
Cold sore virus could be the clue to the cause of 60 per cent of Alzheimer's cases
The virus that causes cold sores may be one of the main causes of Alzheimer's disease, according to research that suggests that existing drugs could be used to treat the most common form of dementia.
Scientists at the University of Manchester have found new evidence that the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1) could be in up to 60 per cent of Alzheimer's cases.
The research, which was published in the Journal of Pathology, is in preliminary stages, but should the HSV1 role be confirmed, it could transform the way in which the debilitating disease is understood and treated.
The news is particularly exciting as products to treat the HSV1 virus are already widely available. Drugs including acyclovir and Zovirax have been on the market for many years, and are available over the counter.
'One thing that is exciting about our research is that we already have drugs that have been used for a relatively long time against HSV1, which are cheap and well tolerated. If we are right, there is a good chance we could make progress quite quickly,' said Professor Ruth Itzhaki, who led the research.
Aging brings mental changes - including a slowdown of mere milliseconds - that drives us to distraction, Surveying the Brain for Origins of the Senior Moment in Science Journal by Robert Lee Holtz.
Ms. Puccinelli, 69 years old, said. "There is a lack of concentration. Because you're getting older, you get more concerned about it."
By recording the electrical activity of her mind at work, neurologist Adam Gazzaley at the University of California at San Francisco was using her healthy brain as a road map of mental changes that age brings to us all. In particular, Dr. Gazzaley and his colleagues were trying to understand why aging drives us all to distraction.
--
Among the brain circuits that focus attention and memory, his research suggests, aging is a matter of milliseconds. In experiments testing how well people of different ages could recall faces and landscapes, Dr. Gazzaley and scientists at UC Berkeley found that among older people, the brain was slightly slower -- 200 milliseconds or so -- to ignore irrelevant test information. That instant of interference was enough to disrupt a memory in the making, they found.
We don't ignore distractions as easily as we once did. Of course, diet and exercise play a role, but so does education.
"With the right kind of training, we can take an older mind and make it younger," Dr. Gazzaley says. "The potential exists."
A good social life also helps.
An active social life also appears to slow the rate at which memory fails, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health reported this past July in the American Journal of Public Health.
Despite its distractions, a healthy brain may also mellow with age. The roller-coaster rush of dopamine, a biochemical associated with heady feelings of reward, doesn't affect older people as strongly as it does the young, Dr. Berman reported this fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Is this evidence that, among older neurons and synapses, life can lose its savor? "I would suggest it shows that older people are appreciating life in a different way," says Dr. Berman.
In other words, the dopamine drop may be a biochemical marker of something else: the wisdom to accept with grace what we cannot change.
I don't know how much faith I'd put in this, but it's another reason to avoid fast food unless you're on the road, pressed for time and really hungry.
Research on mice links fast food to Alzheimer's
"On examining the brains of these mice, we found a chemical change not unlike that found in the Alzheimer brain," Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, who led the study, said in a statement.
"We now suspect that a high intake of fat and cholesterol in combination with genetic factors ... can adversely affect several brain substances, which can be a contributory factor in the development of Alzheimer's."
US teen lives 118 days without a heart
An American teen-ager survived for nearly four months without a heart, kept alive by a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device, until she was able to have a heart transplant, doctors in Miami said on Wednesday.
The patient, D'Zhana Simmons of South Carolina, said the experience of living for so long with a machine pumping her blood was "scary."
"You never knew when it would malfunction...It was like I was a fake person, like I didn't really exist. I was just here," she said of living without a heart.
---
"She essentially lived for 118 days without a heart, with her circulation supported only by the two blood pumps," said Dr. Marco Ricci, the hospital's director of pediatric cardiac surgery. During that time, Simmons was mobile but remained hospitalized.
--
For now, D'Zhana said she is glad she can now walk without the machine. She is looking forward to celebrating her 15th birthday on Saturday riding a boat off Miami's coast, and is grateful she will be able to see her five siblings and friends again soon at her home in Clinton, S.C.
The scientific evidence mounts:
Attending Religious Services Sharply Cuts Risk Of Death, Study Suggests
A study published by researchers at Yeshiva University and its medical school, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, strongly suggests that regular attendance at religious services reduces the risk of death by approximately 20 percent.
--
“Interestingly, the protection against mortality provided by religion cannot be entirely explained by expected factors that include enhanced social support of friends or family, lifestyle choices and reduced smoking and alcohol consumption,” said Dr. Schnall, who was lead author of the study. “There is something here that we don’t quite understand. It is always possible that some unknown or unmeasured factors confounded these results,” he added.
Others:
Weekly Religious Attendance Nearly as Effective as Statins and Exercise in Extending Life
Improvements in life expectancy of those who attend religious services on a weekly basis to be comparable to those who participate in regular physical exercise and to those who take statin-type medications
Go to Church and Breathe Easier
religious activity may protect and maintain pulmonary health in the elderly.
Religious Attendance Linked to Lower Mortality in Elderly
The current findings build on a series of earlier studies at Duke and elsewhere showing that religious people have lower blood pressure, less depression and anxiety, stronger immune systems and cost the health care system less than people who are less religiously involved.
Research Shows Religion Plays a Major Role in Health, Longevity
For the first time, that extra lifespan has been quantified. While there are differences between genders and races, in general those who go to church once or more each week can look forward to about seven more years than those who never attended.
Miseries of Allergies Just May Help Prevent Some Cancers
Sneezing, coughing, tearing and itching just may help prevent cancer -- particularly colon, skin, bladder, mouth, throat, uterus and cervix, lung and gastrointestinal tract cancer, according to a new Cornell study.
Paul Sherman, Cornell professor of neurobiology and behavior led the team that analyzed 646 studies on allergies and cancers published over the past 50 years.
Sherman believes that allergy symptoms may help protect against cancer by shedding foreign particles from the body. Some of those particles, he said, might be carcinogenic or carry carcinogens.
--
.
So should people routinely suppress all allergy symptoms with medications? Sherman said the jury is still out. However, allergies are not merely disorders of the immune system, but rather are the evolved front line of defense against certain parasites and cancers. In sum, allergic reactions may be like fevers and morning sickness: uncomfortable responses that survived natural selection because they provided direct benefits.
Most philanthropists are happy to their names embossed on a plaque on a hospital wing. Not Donna Karan, the fashion designer, who is bringing yoga teachers onto the cancer ward.
In One Section of Beth Israel Hospital, Some Patients Are Saying 'Om', not 'Ah'
While other hospitals in New York and across the country have dabbled in yoga, the new Beth Israel project is broader, better financed and more integrated into the medical protocol, and because of Ms. Karan’s concern that it might be dismissed as touchy-feely nonsense, it includes a research component. Ms. Karan hopes to prove that the Urban Zen regime can reduce classic symptoms of cancer and its treatment, like pain, nausea and anxiety (thereby cutting hospital stays and costs) and serve as a model for replication elsewhere.
Not news, but important to remember. Don't go to the hospital alone if you can possibly avoid it.
Bedside Manner: Advocating for a Relative in the Hospital
Having someone with you in a hospital who is alert and asking questions can help stave off all kinds of potential problems, from mistaken identity to medication mixups to MRSA infections. An estimated 100,000 hospital patients die every year in the U.S. because of preventable errors. Many hospitals are under financial pressures to keep nursing staffs lean. A personal advocate can be a valuable resource. It doesn't have to be a relative -- and it can be more than one person -- as long as they know you and are willing to speak up.
"If we could make only one change in health care, it should be to change the notion that families are visitors. Families are allies and partners for safety and quality," says Beverly Johnson, president of the nonprofit Institute for Family-Centered Care, which is leading a movement to involve families more.
A growing number of hospitals are doing just that -- including unlimited visiting hours, letting family members accompany patients to procedures and even stay during emergencies. "We're drawing on the strength of the family. They're not out in the waiting room, wondering what's going on," says Pat Sodomka, senior vice president for Patient and Family-Centered Care at MCG Health Inc., which runs a 630-bed hospital in Augusta, Ga.
Is the medical approach to addiction fundamentally flawed?
Mindful Hack reviews Theodore Dalrymple's book Romancing Opiates.
... to conceive of opiate addiction as a disease seems, after my experience with thousands of drug addicts, to me to miss the fundamental point about it: that it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment, so called.
This is a very literate way of explaining a situation often explained - as Dalrymple says - by recovered addicts in a much simpler way: "I just didn't want to live that way any more." In my view, that is a form of spiritual experience - to discover that one need not live "that way" any more.
Dalrymple worked for 14 years as a doctor in a larger general hospital and prison in a poor area of Britain. Here he writes Heroin addiction isn't an illness --and we should stop spending millions 'treating it'.
I had briefly run a drug-addiction clinic in a famous university town, at a time when I accepted what I now know to be myths about heroin addiction.
But as more addicts came to my attention - I see up to 20 new cases a day in prison - I began to think about it more. The medical perspective, that these people were ill and in need of treatment, seemed less and less convincing.
I discovered that most addicted prisoners stopped taking heroin in jail, even when it was available. They came into the prison starving and miserable, and went out relatively healthy.
--
There is a strenuous, almost outraged, rejection of the idea that addiction is, at bottom, a moral problem, or even that it raises any moral questions at all.
---
To conceive of heroin addiction as such seems to me to miss the fundamental point: it is a moral or spiritual condition that will never yield to medical treatment.
--
Having started with a vague supposition that the medical approach to addiction must be right, I came to a different conclusion: that such an approach, having started no doubt as an honest attempt to help addicts, now represented a combination of moral cowardice, displacement activity and employment opportunity.
The therapeutic juggernaut rolls on. It is easier, after all, to give people a dose of medicine than a reason for living. That is something the patient must minister to himself.
In coming to these conclusions, I felt I was living in a world in which the plainest of truths could neither be said out loud nor acknowledged.
Carefully selected music can significantly increase a person's physical endurance and improve the 'feeling' state of exercisers, helping them enjoy working at high intensity.
Music Increases Exercise Endurance
Sure helped on the chain gang.
By inserting two genes from a snapdragon into a tomato, British researchers breed purple tomatoes to fight cancer.
The snapdragon genes caused the fruit to produce high levels of anthocyanins, plant chemicals that give blackberries and blueberries their deep purple colour.
Research suggests that the compounds protect against certain cancers, as well as heart disease and age-related degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's.
They may also combat inflammation, improve vision and hinder obesity and diabetes.
Both the skins and the flesh of the tomatoes are an intense deep purple colour.
It worked on mice, trials with human volunteers are next. Purple tomatoes could be on sale within three years but not in Britain or the EU which has far more rigorous safety tests for genetically modified food.
Half of U.S. doctors say they use placebo treatments.
About half of American doctors in a new survey say they regularly give patients placebo treatments – usually drugs or vitamins that won't really help their condition.
And many of these doctors are not honest with their patients about what they are doing, the survey found.
That contradicts advice from the American Medical Association, which recommends doctors use treatments with the full knowledge of their patients.
“It's a disturbing finding,” said Franklin G. Miller, director of the research ethics program at the U.S. National Institutes Health and one of the study authors. “There is an element of deception here which is contrary to the principle of informed consent.”
--
Most doctors used actual medicines as a placebo treatment: 41 per cent used painkillers, 38 per cent used vitamins, 13 per cent used antibiotics, 13 per cent used sedatives, 3 per cent used saline injections, and 2 per cent used sugar pills.
Placebo from the Latin I will please. A doctor pleases the patient by prescribing a placebo, a treatment that the doctor knows is ineffectual but the patient is led to believe is effective.
A placebo won't work if the patient knows it's a placebo. So what to do about the ethical challenges?
Well to start, doctors shouldn't be prescribing antibiotics or sedatives.
Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, one of the study’s authors, said doctors should not prescribe antibiotics or sedatives as placebos, given those drugs’ risks. Use of less active placebos is understandable, he said, since risks are low.
“Everyone comes out happy: the doctor is happy, the patient is happy,” said Dr. Emanuel, chairman of the bioethics department at the health institutes. “But ethical challenges remain.”
Mindful Hack writes about placebos and nocebos.
Doctors use the placebo effect automatically in their work. For example, they behave confidently and reassuringly even when completely stumped by the patient's symptoms or faced suddenly with a life-threatening disorder. They are right to behave this way. A doctor's anxiety would trigger the placebo effect's evil twin, the nocebo effect. "Nocebo" means "I will harm," and nocebos really do harm. Patients may be ill for longer periods and suffer worse symptoms if nocebo effects convince them that they are doomed.
Some consider the placebo effect a mystery. In March 2005, British science magazine New Scientist listed thirteen "Things That Don't Make Sense", and the placebo effect was number one on their list. Of course, the placebo effect doesn't "make sense" if you assume, as they do, that the mind either does not exist or is powerless. The traditional Christian view is that the mind is grounded in the brain so long as we live in this world. Therefore, what the patient's mind perceives expresses itself in the brain and body. Both the placebo and nocebo effects are strong support for the traditional view.
The Bee Gees song Stayin' Alive has almost the perfect rhythm to help jump-start a stopped heart.
The Seventies disco anthem contains 103 beats per minute, just three beats more than the 100 chest compressions per minute recommdended by the American Heart Association.
Keeping time with the song helped a small group of doctors at the University of Illinois medical school maintained close to the ideal number of chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
“It’s a song everyone seems to know, whether they want to or not,” said Dr. David Matlock, the resident and researcher who led the study. He hopes further research will confirm its use in lay people trained in CPR as well.
What surprised me most in watching the great beginning to the movie Saturday Night Fever was that no one wore sports or running shoes. No Nike or Reeboks to be seen. John Travolta wears leather shoes to work in the paint store.
Revealed. The 20 'functional foods' you should be eating for a long and active life.
Gary Williamson, professor at Leeds University calls them 'lifespanessential 'since they all contain polyphenols known for their anti-oxidant properties, helping to prevent cancer and heart disease.
Mainly fruits and vegetables, but chocolate, tea and coffee made the list
People who are obese enjoy eating less than lean people do. That's the problem according to one group of researchers.
New Evidence of the Brain's Role in Obesity
In order to compensate for the missing pleasure, obese people eat more high-calorie food. In turn, overeating further dulls the enjoyment and begins a vicious cycle.
--
“The research reveals obese people may have fewer dopamine receptors, so they overeat to compensate for this reward deficit,” said Dr. Stice, who has studied eating disorders and obesity for almost twenty years.
Good news for middle-aged and older people. Internet use 'good for brain'.
A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulates centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.
The researchers say this might even help to counter-act the age-related physiological changes that cause the brain to slow down.
The study features in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
Searching on the web stimulates more areas of the brain than reading a book. and may keep it active and healthy.
Well I certainly plan to be a 'silver surfer'.
Scientists are beginning to show that faith and belief in God can relieve pain.
Researchers at the Oxford Centre For Science Of The Mind, in Oxford University, in a study published in the journal Pain, conducted an experiment with electric shocks on 12 Roman Catholics and 12 atheists as they studied a painting of the Virgin Mary.
The Catholics in the experiment seemed to be able to block out much of the pain as they were able to activate part of the brain associated with conditioning the experience of pain, reported the Mail on Sunday. The study also found that participants who had strong religious belief could moderate their pain by thinking about it more positively.
--
The researchers found that the Catholics felt "safe," "taken care of" and "calmed down and peaceful," said that looking at the painting of the Virgin Mary.
Matthew Archbold adds his own personal testimony about one of the longest nights in his life in Prayer Might Work Better than Aspirin
Michael Gerson on the biological basis for spirituality, Faith Beyond the Frontal Lobes says
..the brain is more like a muscle than a computer. The spiritual facility can be developed -- and it changes over our lifetimes, as our brains age. In this narrow sense, prayer and meditation work in the same way that aerobic training works on the heart muscle.
Cherry juice hailed as superfood
Drinking a glass of cherry juice a day offers the same health benefits as eating 23 portions of fruit and vegetables, research reveals.
It found 250ml of the juice contained more antioxidants than five portions of peas, tomatoes, water melon, carrots and banana.
Previous research has shown that antioxidants - which target harmful molecules in the body called free radicals - can help prevent cancer, heart disease, stroke and ageing.
From the New Scientist In pain? Take one masterpiece, three times a day
THE power of art to heal emotional wounds is well known, but could contemplating a beautiful painting have the same effect on physical pain?
To investigate, Marina de Tommaso and a team from the University of Bari in Italy asked 12 men and women to pick the 20 paintings they considered most ugly and most beautiful from a selection of 300 works by artists such as da Vinci and Botticelli.
--
The subjects rated the pain as being a third less intense while they were viewing the beautiful paintings, compared with contemplating the ugly paintings or the blank panel. Electrodes measuring the brain's electrical activity suggested a reduced response to the pain when the subject looked at beautiful paintings
We know that listening to music can ease stress, but now
scientists are discovering it has a powerful effect on pain, immunity and even recovery from heart attacks.
South African researchers have successfully used Bach's Magnificat to benefit mood, boost the immune system and lower stress hormones in people undergoing physiotherapy for infectious lung disease.
"Bach: Magnificat, BWV. 243; Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen" (Philips)
Robert Novak on his Brain Tumor
The first sign that I was in trouble came on Wednesday, July 23, when my 2004 black Corvette struck a pedestrian on 18th Street in downtown Washington while I was on my way to my office.
--
I promptly suffered another seizure in the ambulance, the second of three seizures that day. I gained admittance to the high-quality Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, which has an excellent oncology staff. A biopsy was performed, which showed a large, grade IV tumor. In answer to my question, the oncologist estimated that I had six months to a year to live.
Being read your death sentence is like being a character in one of the old Bette Davis movies.
I believe I was able to withstand this shock because of my Catholic faith, to which I converted in 1998.
--
My dear friend, the Democratic political operative Bob Shrum, asked Sen. Kennedy's wife, Vicki, to call me about Dr. Friedman. I barely know Mrs. Kennedy, but I have found her to be a warm and gracious person. I have had few good things to say about Teddy Kennedy since I first met him at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, but he and his wife have treated me like a close friend. She was enthusiastic about Dr. Friedman and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke, which I did.
The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone's life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington. My long conversation with Vicki Kennedy filled me with hope.
--
There are mad bloggers who profess to take delight in my distress, but there's no need to pay them attention in the face of such an outpouring of good will for me. I had thought 51 years of rough-and-tumble journalism in Washington made me more enemies than friends, but my recent experience suggests the opposite may be the case.
Regular gym visits 'can wear out your hips in middle age'
Ten years ago it was unusual to do hip replacements on anyone under the age of 55 but now it is commonplace in people in their forties and fifties.
'We are seeing a lot of people in early middle age with significant arthritis and worn-out joints and in many cases it is down to the gym craze.
'People are crippling themselves with impact exercise. It is particularly problematic for overweight people who go to the gym.'
--
The best exercise is a 30-minute brisk walk three times a week, but walking doesn't make gyms any money.
'Exercise is being taken in a very forced, unnatural way.'
He added: As your body ages, you should be taking brisk walks, playing a gentle game of tennis or doing some gardening, not be being thrashed in a gym.'
A drug to cure cancer. Another to halt aging. In the not-so-distant future, these six drugs—already in the works—will change how we live, and even how we die
This Pill Will Change Your Life via Instapundit
Here are the six Pop Sci zeroes in on
cancer vaccine
male birth control pill
anti-addiction pill
exercise pill
anti-aging pill
smart pill
If a mother does not have enough vitamin, neither will the baby she breastfeeds.
Please check, no more babies with rickets.
Vitamin D Deficiency May Lurk in Babies
“I thought I was doing the best thing for her,” said Stephanie Remy-Marquez, of Hyde Park, Mass., after blood tests showed her daughter had no detectable vitamin D. X-ray images of the baby’s wrists and knees showed the edges of the bones and growth plates as blurry and fraying instead of crisp and sharp.
“Breast milk is supposed to be an entire meal, dessert and drinks included,” Ms. Remy-Marquez said. “I thought it was the ultimate cocktail.”
--
Physicians have known for more than a century that exclusive breast-feeding may be associated with vitamin D deficiency and rickets, and that the condition is easily prevented and treated with inexpensive vitamin drops or cod liver oil. But doctors are reluctant to say anything that might discourage breast-feeding.
Now some researchers are also linking vitamin D deficiency with other chronic diseases like diabetes, autoimmune disorders and even cancer, and there have been calls to include blood tests of vitamin D levels in routine checkups.
Science Day reports on a growing body of research that suggests 'Hope" Therapy Fights Depression.
We’re finding that hope is consistently associated with fewer symptoms of depression. And the good news is that hope is something that can be taught, and can be developed in many of the people who need it,” said Jennifer Cheavens, assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
--
“If you feel you know how to get what you want out of life, and you have that desire to make that happen, then you have hope,” Cheavens said.
Hope is different from optimism, which is a generalized expectancy that good things will happen, she said. Hope involves having goals, along with the desire and plan to achieve them.
Oral Contraceptives Disrupt Ability to Choose Genetically Favorable Mate
A recent study by the University of Liverpool found that the contraceptive pill may adversely affect a woman's natural ability to choose a genetically favorable mate.
According to Craig Roberts, a Lecturer in Evolutionary Psychology and one of the researchers in this study, women taking the pill began to prefer men with more genetically similar odors. Addressing the implications of such a disruption, he states: "Not only could [gene] similarity in couples lead to fertility problems, but it could ultimately lead to the breakdown of relationships when women stop using the contraceptive pill, as odour perception plays a significant role in maintaining attraction to partners."
These claims are not the first to question the pill's impact on hormone activity and sexuality. Dr. David Brownstein, commenting on a study linking oral contraceptives to increased arterial plaque, emphasized the precarious balance of hormones needed for good health, a balance disrupted de facto in pill users:
Increased Risk of cerebrovascular disease and cervical cancer
"Oral contraceptives totally disrupt the normal hormonal cascade. When the hormonal system is disrupted, cardiovascular disease, cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and other serious illnesses will increase. My clinical experience has clearly shown that it is impossible to adequately treat these illnesses if there is an imbalanced hormonal system/
Increased risks of taking the pill
A woman taking the pill is 1.9 times more likely to die from cerebrovascular disease, it reports, and 2.5 times more likely to die from cervical cancer. The 25 year follow-up study with 46,000 British women also notes that the enhanced risk of death lasts for 10 years after women have stopped taking the pill.
American Life League President Judie Brown expressed great concern over the results of the study and the political agenda that pushes the use of the pill. "I can't imagine any other drug with these documented lethal effects that would be applauded as a positive thing," she said. "The truth is women are dying because they are using or have used birth control pills. We're not talking about increasing the risk of disease here. We're talking about death. Women are dying from the pill and no one seems to care.
Why some people are rushing into marriage.
Health Benefits Inspire Rush to Marry or to Divorce
Stephen L. J. Hoffman, an officiant at a wedding chapel in Covington, Ky., said he was no longer shocked that one of 10 couples cite health insurance as the reason they stand before him.
“They come in and say, ‘We were going to get married anyway, but right now we really need the insurance,’ ” said Mr. Hoffman. “There may be an unplanned pregnancy, or there is an illness, or they’ve lost their job and can’t get insurance.”
Though money and matrimony have been linked since Genesis, marrying for health coverage is a more modern convention. For today’s couples, “in sickness and in health” may seem less a lover’s troth than an actuarial contract. They marry for better or worse, for richer or poorer, for co-pays and deductibles.
The York Times sorts out Coffee's Contradictions.
Coffee does not dehydrate, doesn't hurt your heart and in fact cuts cardiovascular risk if you drink no more than three cups a day, is unlikely to increase your blood pressure, cause cancer or lead to bone loss.
The health benefits of drinking coffee are considerable.
Probably the most important effects of caffeine are its ability to enhance mood and mental and physical performance. At consumption levels up to 200 milligrams (the amount in about 16 ounces of ordinary brewed coffee), consumers report an improved sense of well-being, happiness, energy, alertness and sociability, Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine reported, although higher amounts sometimes cause anxiety and stomach upset.
Millions of sleep-deprived Americans depend on caffeine to help them make it through their day and drive safely. The drug improves alertness and reaction time. In the sleep-deprived, it improves memory and the ability to perform complex tasks.
For the active, caffeine enhances endurance in aerobic activities and performance in anaerobic ones, perhaps because it blunts the perception of pain and aids the ability to burn fat for fuel instead of its carbohydrates.
Recent disease-related findings can only add to coffee’s popularity. A review of 13 studies found that people who drank caffeinated coffee, but not decaf, had a 30 percent lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.
Another review found that compared with noncoffee drinkers, people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day, with or without caffeine, had a 28 percent lower risk of Type 2 diabetes. This benefit probably comes from coffee’s antioxidants and chlorogenic acid.
Daily pill that halts Alzheimer's is hailed as 'biggest breakthrough against disease for 100 years'
A new drug halts the devastating progress of Alzheimer’s disease, say British scientists.
It is said to be more than twice as effective as current treatments.
A daily capsule of rember, as the drug is known, stops Alzheimer’s disease progressing by as much as 81 per cent, according to trial results.
Patients with the brain disorder had no significant decline in their mental function over a 19-month period.
‘We appear to be bringing the worst affected parts of the brain functionally back to life,’ said Dr Claude Wischik, who led the research.
It is the first time medication has been developed to target the ‘tangles’ in the brain that destroy nerve cells, leading to deteriorating memory.
The drug helps to disrupt this process, preventing the formation of new tangles and loosening those already created.
Last night the findings were hailed as the biggest breakthrough in the battle against Alzheimer’s since 1907.
For those caring for a parent with Alzheimer's or dementia, Oliver James, one of Britain's leading clinical psychologists has a new book that explains a revolutionary way to care for them, Using the Past to Sense of the Present
He observed the work of his mother-in-law, Penny Garner.
"The SPECAL method works, irrespective of the cause," says Garner. "It provides the key to communicating with the person and managing care in a way that vastly improves the quality of life."
As life expectancy increases, more people will develop dementia during their last years. The defining feature is generally described as short-term memory loss, but not by Garner. "The key factor for me is that people are no longer able to store new facts about what has just happened, while continuing to store new feelings. I use the analogy of a photograph album. What SPECAL does is to make a present out of the past."
--
Dorothy died in 1984, when Garner was busy raising her three daughters. In 1990, however, Garner began working at Burford Hospital, Oxfordshire, with a group of day patients. Talking to them and their carers she refined her methods so that now, in the course of a two-hour interview, she can show the family how to keep the person contented. This involves identifying a familiar theme from the relative's past which gives them a link to established routines and a sense of independence.
SPECAL also teaches carers to avoid asking questions, because that means the person with dementia has to search their recent memories - and that can distress them. Carers are taught to supply reassuring information if the person with dementia asks questions. What the carer says is less important than the feelings their remark generates. The third rule is never to contradict, because that will also cause upset.
The book 24 hour Wraparound Care for Lifelong Well-being is available in England, but not yet in the United States.
Gregg Easterbrook reports on the study that TV Really Might Cause Autism.
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3.
--
The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. "We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we're saying we have found a critical piece of evidence," Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me.
--
If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.
Different parts of your body age at different times.
lungs start aging at 20
bladder starts aging at 65
eyes starts aging at 40
hair starts aging at 30
For all the other parts and what it means, best read When your body really starts going downhill.
John Cornwell writes about those trapped inside their bodies, apparently switched off to the world, 40% of whom are misdiagnosed in The Undead.
here’s at least one mordantly amusing and true story told to me by a psychologist at Putney’s Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability. “Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing Onward, Christian Soldiers by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: “For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!” That’s about as funny as it gets on a brain-injury ward, but there’s a serious take-home message. Even minimally aware patients can retain emotions, personality, a capacity to suffer – and, as the young biker showed, attitude.
--
Cornwell writes about a small group of colleagues, Owen, the Prof, Pickard Menon and Coleman who are collaborating on innovative techniques for brain-damaged patients, the Impaired Consciousness Group.
The biggest, most tragic clinical myth about brain injury today is that PVS can be reliably diagnosed by bedside observation alone. It has in fact been known for at least a decade, ever since a key survey of brain-injured patients, that misdiagnosis of the condition runs at more than 40%, a statistic originally calculated by Professor Keith Andrews, former head of the Putney hospital, and confirmed by recent surveys in Europe and North America.
It's essential that we do the necessary imaging and brain-scanning to get the true information about patients before pulling the plug. The demand for fresh organs for transplant is too great.
According to Steven Laureys, professor of neurology at Liège University, there is constant pressure in many parts of the developed world to withdraw sustenance from vegetative patients in order to allow them to die so that their body parts can be harvested. In a recent study, Laureys reports, “slightly less than half of surveyed US neurologists and nursing-home directors believed that patients in a vegetative state could be declared dead”. His remarks should be set against the background of widespread shortages of organs and body parts for transplantation.
Birth control and sex education does no good for teen-age girls who want to get pregnant.
Girls know how to get pregnant. Why do they choose to do so is the question.
In Planned Teen Parenthood, Daniel Moloney quotes research of sociologists who spent five years living in the same neighborhoods with poor unwed mothers.
While the poor women we interviewed saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve, they judged children to be a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.
Moloney points out that providing contraception to teenagers without their parental consent or notification not only is common practice at high schools but totally counter-productive.
These girls need more parental involvement, not less. These young girls know how to have babies, so further sex ed isn’t needed. They want to have babies, so contraception is beside the point. The problem is that they think that they are ready to have babies, and they aren’t.
That’s where the parents should be stepping in, helping the girls to realize that they aren’t ready to be mothers...
Studies show that teens are less likely to have sex if they think their parents disapprove. But parents are often kept in the dark, thanks to misbegotten health care policies which view them as a threat to their daughter’s best interests.
__
Our nation’s “experts” are spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with teenage girls who want to be mothers. Indeed, laws designed to make contraceptives available to teenagers often make the problem worse.
Accidental fungus leads to promising cancer drug
A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.
The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy -- starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.
Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman's team has been working to perfect for 20 years. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, his colleagues say they developed a formulation that works as a pill, without side-effects.
An analysis of 22 clinical studies of patients with varied chronic pain and fatigue syndromes found almost all patients lacked vitamin D, U.S. researchers said.
Stewart B. Leavitt, editor of Pain Treatment Topics and author of the report, said when sufficient vitamin D supplementation was provided, the aches, pains, weakness and related problems in most of the patients either vanished or were at least helped to a significant extent.
Vitamin D helps with chronic pain, fatigue
Atul Gawande's essays in The New Yorker are always a must-read for me.
But I warn you, when you read The Itch, you will feel that "diabolical and peculiar sensation".
You will want to scratch, so scratch and enjoy it. So don't go so far as this poor woman.
For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
Itching it turns out is not pain, but something else utterly strange. Just why is it we can't tickle ourselves but we can make ourselves itchy just by thinking about it?
Turns out it's all in our heads. Direct visual input is only 20% of what we 'see'; 80% comes from memory.
The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.
Best cure so far for those who experience sensations in "phantom limbs" is believe it or not - a mirror.
The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.
Oxytocin, the natural hormone that assists childbirth bonding the mother to the infant, and dubbed the 'love drug' because it also bonds lovers together is now being considered for use in the U.K. to treat shyness.
Produced naturally in the brain during social interactions, it promotes romantic feelings, helps mothers bond with babies and makes people more sociable.
Oxytocin is released during orgasm and is also the key birthing hormone that enables the cervix to open and the contractions to work. Where labour has to be induced, it is often given to the mother intravenously to kick-start contractions.
Professor Zak said: 'We've seen that it makes you care about the other person. It also increases your generosity towards that person. That's why (the hormone) facilitates social interaction.'
--
Scientists find childbirth wonder drug that can 'cure' shyness
Autistic patients given oxytocin as part of a study in New York found their ability to recognise emotions such as happiness or anger in a person's tone of voice - something which usually proved difficult - also improved.
Experiments by Dr Eric Hollander at the city's Mount Sinai School of Medicine found a single intravenous infusion of the chemical triggered improvements that lasted for two weeks.
Previous research has revealed autistic children have lower than usual levels of oxytocin in their blood.
Professor Zak said: 'Oxytocin does not cure autism, but it does reduce the symptoms.'
My earlier post on oxytocin, A Wash of Love
Just in time for aging boomers like myself, new drugs to treat aging on the horizon.
The general public has no idea what's coming," said David Sinclair, a Harvard Medical School professor who has made headlines with research into the health benefits of a substance found in red wine called resveratrol.
--
Sinclair said treatments could be a few years or a decade away, but they're "really close. It's not something (from) science fiction and it's not something for the next generation."
--
He described how his research found that mice given large doses of resveratrol "live longer, they're almost immune to the effects of obesity. They don't get diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's as frequently. We delay the diseases of aging."
Sinclair showed video of mice on resveratrol running on a treadmill far more vigorously than those who didn't get the substance. He called them "our Lance Armstrong mice."
A large dose meant the equivalent of a human drinking about 1,000 bottles of red wine daily, he said.
The New York Times looks into it and finds New Hints That Red Wine May Slow Aging.
The secret appears to be protein agents that in people are called sirtuins.
And it seems Dr. Sinclair is co-founder of Sirtris, a start-up company seeking to develop drugs that activate sirtuins.
"The upside is so huge that if we are right, the company that dominates the sirtuin space could dominate the pharmaceutical industry and change medicine,” Dr. David Sinclair said.
--
the door has now been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging.
I wonder whether the recent change in Burgundy resulting in a surge of quality will have any effect .
The quality of Burgundy — red Burgundy in particular — has risen strikingly over the last two decades. From the smallest growers to the biggest houses, the standards of grape-growing and winemaking have surpassed anybody’s expectations. These days, Burgundy has very few bad vintages, and among good producers, surprisingly few bad wines.
--
“It’s not so much an improvement as a blooming,” said Becky Wasserman, an American wine broker who has lived in Burgundy since 1968. “It’s a realization of potential."
-
Most striking of all was the number of young producers making superb wines, whether they have taken charge of their family domains or started out new.
--
Few could have envisioned such a level of quality back in the early 1980s, a time when Claude Bourguignon, a French soil scientist who, with his wife, Lydia, works with numerous wine estates, famously said that the soil of the Sahara had more life in it than the soil of Burgundy.
-
Their first order of business was to wean the soil off two decades worth of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.
--
Over the next 20 years a great many producers turned to organic farming, and others adopted biodynamic viticulture, a particularly demanding system that takes a sort of homeopathic approach to farming. These days it’s the rare farmer who still uses chemical herbicides in the vineyard.
“The soils are alive again,” Mr. Bourguignon said by telephone last week. “They’ve really changed, and it’s one of the reasons the wine has changed.”
--
“We can now understand what our grandparents were doing,” said Jean-Marie Fourrier of Domaine Fourrier in Gevrey-Chambertin. “We’re rediscovering the logic of the past.”
Drink water from a glass not a bottle unless you want "smoker's lips", those lines and wrinkles around the lips that heavy smokers have.
D.C. dermatologist Dr. Marilyn Berzin says "When you're drinking from a water bottle, you're pretty much making the same face as you are when you're smoking a cigarette,"
Berzin said that over time that face creates permanent lines.
People who drink from water bottles with either sport or straw tops or nozzles, consistently, all day long, for about two years, will start to develop noticeable smokers lips, according to Berzin.
Drinking from a wide-mouthed glass allows the upper lip to stay relaxed.
Three important medical advances this week.
Enzyme drug could reverse the onset of Alzheimer's
The researchers from Dundee University, led by Dr Calum Sutherland, say the enzyme can partially reverse the process that causes the abnormal structures of a protein called CRMP2.
This protein has a key role in the development of the "tangles" seen in Alzheimer's disease.
Bone drug helped stave off breast cancer
A drug used to strengthen the bones of women with breast cancer helped cut the risk of the cancer returning by 36 percent, European researchers said on Saturday,
They said Zometa, sold by Swiss drug giant Novartis AG, helped women with early-stage breast cancer who were already taking hormone therapy to reduce their cancer risk.
The finding comes from the first large-scale study to show a drug in the class known as bisphosphonates can reduce the risk that cancer will come back.
"I'm convinced it's going to change the landscape," said Dr. Michael Gnant of the University of Vienna, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.
"In these patients, I would expect it is going to be pretty much the standard of care pretty soon," Gnant said in a telephone interview.
Nate, a 2-year-old boy with a rare and deadly genetic disease that prevented his skin from attaching to his body was cured when a bone marrow disorder from his healthy 3 year-old brother gave him the protein, collagen VII, he was born without.
Every now and then, you really feel like you've done something great," says John Wagner, a hematologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School
I don't see how Walmart, the world's largest retailer, makes money on its discounted prescription drug program but apparently it does because they are expanding the program to offer 90 day supplies for $10 and to include several drugs for women to treat breast cancer and hormone deficiency.
They will also lower the price of more than 1000 over-the-counter drugs.
Already Wal-Mart in less than 2 years has saved customers more than $1 billion.
This is only good.
Said CEO Bill Simon,
"We're in business to make money,"
Slow medicine encourages less aggressive and less costly care at the end of life reports the New York Times in For the elderly, being heard about life's end.
Grounded in research at the Dartmouth Medical School, slow medicine encourages physicians to put on the brakes when considering care that may have high risks and limited rewards for the elderly, and it educates patients and families how to push back against emergency room trips and hospitalizations designed for those with treatable illnesses, not the inevitable erosion of advanced age.
Slow medicine, which shares with hospice care the goal of comfort rather than cure, is increasingly available in nursing homes, but for those living at home or in assisted living, a medical scare usually prompts a call to 911, with little opportunity to choose otherwise.
--
The chief medical officer at U.C.L.A., Dr. Tom Rosenthal, said that aggressive treatment for the elderly at acute care hospitals can be “inhumane,” and that once a patient and family were drawn into that system, “it’s really hard to pull back from it.”
“The culture has a built-in bias that everything that can be done will be done,” Dr. Rosenthal said, adding that the pace of a hospital also discourages “real heart-to-heart discussions.”
Beginning that conversation earlier, as they do at Kendal, he said, “sounds like fundamentally the right way to practice.”
That means explaining that elderly people are rarely saved from cardiac arrest by CPR, or advising women with broken hips that they may never walk again, with or without surgery, unless they can stand physical therapy.
--
Some of those most in tune with slow medicine are the adult children who watch a parent’s daily decline. Suzanne Brian, for one, was grateful that her father, then 88 and debilitated by congestive heart failure, was able to stop medications to end his life.
“It wasn’t ‘Oh, you have to do this or do that,’ “ Ms. Brian said. “It was my father’s choice. He could have changed his mind at any time. They slowly weaned him from the meds and he was comfortable the whole time. All he wanted was honor and dignity, and that’s what he got.”
Apparently not if you listen to the scientists. Vitamin D could
prevent cancer, heart disease and tuberculosis, preserve bones, and thwart autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes.
--
Just this month, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a special supplement on Vitamin D highlighting widespread deficiencies "in various populations throughout the world, including 'healthy' people in developed countries where it was thought that Vitamin D deficiency was obsolete."
In March, Picciano chaired a session on Vitamin D at the Experimental Biology annual meeting, one of the largest gatherings of scientists in the world. Designed to pinpoint gaps in knowledge, the session was the second meeting on Vitamin D sponsored by the ODS in a year. In the wake of emerging positive results, the National Cancer Institute gathered scientists to review the nutrient's ability to reduce cancer risk, particularly of the breast, colon, prostate and lung. And last fall, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality issued an evidence-based review of Vitamin D that found it to be key for bone health at all ages, including in the prevention of falls in the elderly.
"There are a lot of benefits to Vitamin D that have surfaced in the last 20 years," notes Hector DeLuca, a University of Wisconsin biochemist who has been a pioneer in Vitamin D research.
Normally, we'd get our vitamin D from the sun, but now, given serious health and vanity concerns about damage to our skin, we take supplements.
Next time you go to the doctor, get your vitamin D level checked. You may be surprised to learn that you too are deficient as are most adults in the U.S.
You may think that your lip gloss offers a protective barrier against the sun, but experts say Lip gloss can invite skin cancer.
“These lip glosses can make more of the light rays penetrate directly through the skin instead of getting reflected off of the skin’s surface,” says Dr. Christine Brown, a dermatologist at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
--
It's the moisture in lip gloss that's to blame, says Dr. Bruce Robinson, a Manhattan dermatologist. Your lips are equipped with a protective outer layer, but the hydration of a lip gloss "kind of smooshes that down," Robinson says. Once that outer layer is effectively squashed, it's easier for UV rays to penetrate deeper into the skin.
"Instead of having to travel through that thicker layer, it's more condensed," Robinson says. "So the UV rays reach are reaching deeper layers of epidermis and dermis because you don't have this forcefield."
-
“Take a magnifying glass and put it over your lips,” Robinson says. When you apply lip gloss and go out in the sun, “that’s essentially what you’re doing.”
Just make sure your lip gloss or lip balm has SPF.
If this is true, it's astonishing.
Menstrual Blood: A Valuable Source of Multipotential Stem Cells
Researchers seeking new and more abundant sources of stem cells for use in regenerative medicine have identified a potentially unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source -- menstrual blood.
--
Stromal stem cells derived from menstrual blood exhibit stem cell properties, such as the capacity for self-renewal and multipotency," said Amit N. Patel, MD, MS, Director of Cardiac Cell Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine. "Uterine stromal cells have similar multipotent markers found in bone marrow stem cells and originate in part from bone marrow."
A day later, a Japanese study shows that cells from menstrual blood may be useful in repairing heart damage.
The success rate is 100 times higher than the 0.2 to 0.3 percent for stem cells taken from human bone marrow, researcher Shunichiro Miyoshi, a cardiologist at Keio University's school of medicine, told French news agency AFP.
There's even a company that's begun menstrual blood banking!
It wasn't so long ago that the public and scientific consensus was that stem cells could only be harvested from human embryos.
I'm not the only one who remembers the hysteria that surrounded President Bush's decision not to allow federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Charles Krauthammer does in Technology Vindicates Morality. So does the Anchoress who reminds us that embryonic stem cells have produced nightmarish results in the lab and never had a successful application.
So far there have been 73 successful treatments using adult stem cells and none for embryonic stem cells.
Doing good by doing no harm works.
When David Brooks wrote The Great Forgetting that in era of aging population, "memory is the new sex", he didn't know to add that blue is the new black. Blue as in blueberries that is. Or maybe he just forgot.
Getting Forgetful? Then Blueberries May Hold the Key
Blueberries are a major source of flavonoids, in particular anthocyanins and flavanols. Although the precise mechanisms by which these plant-derived molecules affect the brain are unknown, they have been shown to cross the blood brain barrier after dietary intake. It is believed that they exert their effects on learning and memory by enhancing existing neuronal (brain cell) connections, improving cellular communications and stimulating neuronal regeneration.
And that's not all Science Daily has to say about blueberries.
Blueberries may act to protect the body against damage from oxidative stress and help your balance and coordination. A compound made of blueberries may become as effective in lowering cholesterol as commercial drugs with far fewer side effects. After all, wild blueberries have been shown to relax arteries and reduce risks associated with cardiovascular disease. And the natural pigments that produce that rich deep blue color may help prevent obesity.
I can remember hearing that willpower is a muscle that must be exercised to grow strong.
Now it seems that studies prove that consistently doing one activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower.
Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.
After giving up candy and chocolate for Lent, I found easier to control my sweet tooth by eating more fruits and vegetables for snacks and that effect has persisted after Easter. Even though I now can eat all the chocolate I want, I 'm still cutting up cucumbers and celery for snacks.
Don't offer theories as to why they got sick, don't ask for their prognosis, don't give unsolicited advice, and don't insist that "everything is going to be just fine."
How to Support a Loved One Reeling from a Cancer Diagnosis
The advances in medical research are becoming astonishingly strange and small.
Man-made molecules reverse liver cirrhosis in rats.
Scientists in Japan have designed artificial molecules that when used with rats successfully reversed liver cirrhosis, a serious chronic disease in humans that until now can only be cured by transplants.
--
In the journal Nature Biotechnology, the researchers said they designed molecules that can block collagen production by liver "stellate cells", which are also known to absorb vitamin A.
The scientists then loaded the molecules into carriers that were coated with vitamin A, which tricked the stellate cells into absorbing the molecules.
"By packaging the (molecules) in carriers coated with vitamin A, they tricked the stellate cells into letting in the inhibitor, which shut down collagen secretion," the researchers wrote.
Drugs to reverse in humans may be available in just a few years.
With the big health news being that a big belly can greatly increase a person's chance for Alzheimer's, I went searching around to see what was being offered on the Internet to reduce belly fat.
Forget the chinese herbs, the costly special supplements, the diet pills, the biggest fat burners seem to be ...apples and other fruit.
You can't get away from the simple truth. Avoid fast foods, eat a variety of foods and plenty of fruits and vegetables and exercise. Do that and all the odds are, you'll be fine and healthy.
Even Samuel Johnson knew that, “I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.”
Those of us, like me, who have always enjoyed good health still read accounts of those who are and who have been ill as messages from another country we never want to go to much as we wish the inhabitants well.
Cardiologist Dr. Thomas Graboys writes what it's like to be trapped in your own body with Parkinson's disease and betrayed by your own mind with an Alzheimer's-like dementia at 62. My Daily Battle. proves to be much easier with the support of a loving wife.
A riveting account of a brain scientist who suffered a stroke offers far more reports Tara Parker-Pope.
After you watch Jill Bolte Taylor give her 18 minute address to the TED conference last month, you will never think of the right and left hemispheres of the brain in the same way. She calls it her Stroke of Insight. I call it a must-watch.
I have no idea what to make of this, but I'll pass it along anyway.
Insulin could hold the key to long life, say scientists.
Insulin may help us live longer and healthier lives, say scientists.
The drug used to treat diabetes slows the ageing process, according to their findings.
Researchers believe the insulin inhibits a gene which plays a part in ageing.
----
"The major implication is that we have found something new that affects lifespan and ageing," said researcher Dr Keith Blackwell at the Joslin Diabetes Centre in Boston, Massachusetts who later added
"The implications go far beyond diabetes."
One of my favorite says is "All blessings are mixed."
Now that we're living longer with fewer dying from heart disease and stroke, breast and prostate cancer than ever before, something else is going to kill us.
The Alzheimer's Association projects that 10 million baby boomers will suffer from Alzheimer's.
Alzheimer's to Hit 1 in 8 Boomers
One aspect of the report says that, if they live to age 55, women are nearly twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's as men. The report's authors say that's also age-related. When researchers measure the risk of developing Alzheimer's at any particular age, men and women show no real difference, Senay notes. But to the extent that they outlive men, women are considered more likely to develop the Alzheimer's.
The good news is that the BigPharma is racing to develop cures.
Type 1 diabetes usually starts during childhood or adolescence unlike Type 2 diabetes which is an adult-onset disease often linked to obesity.
Those children and adolescents afflicted with Type 1 diabetes suddenly have a much brighter future thanks to some terminally ill mice who were returned to health after injection of BCG vaccine.
Human trials to begin at MGH on 'diabetes cure'
The first step in the human study is to determine whether the same strategy using BCG vaccination can be used to modify the abnormal autoimmune cells present in type 1 diabetes, sometimes called “juvenile-onset” diabetes.
--
“One of the beauties of this is that BCG is a drug that has been tried and tested for 80 years, “ said Dr Faustman.
“There is no multi- million-dollar drug approval pipeline. It is a generic drug and will be cheap to administer if it works for humans.”
One of the biggest problems in caring for old people who live on their own is making sure they take their medicine. One in three adults fail to take their prescribed medication.
New technology may help where nothing else does. The Magnetrace.
Sensor necklace records when pill is swallowed and prompts patient when it is time to take another.
"Forgetfulness is a huge problem, especially among the elderly, but so is taking the medication at the wrong time, stopping too early or taking the wrong dose," said Maysam Ghovanloo, assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Studies show that drug noncompliance costs the country billions of dollars each year as a result of re-hospitalization, complications, disease progression and even death."
There's a lot more going on in our guts than we know.
Diabetes may be disorder of upper intestine: Surgery may correct it.
Dr. Rubino, who is a professor in the Department of Surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College and chief of gastrointestinal metabolic surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell.... "When we bypass the duodenum and jejunum, we are bypassing what may be the source of the problem,
Those gut feelings we have? Researchers at Leeds have reviewed the literature and say Go with Your Gut
intuition is the result of the way our brains store, process and retrieve information on a subconscious level and so is a real psychological phenomenon which needs further study to help us harness its potential.
Researchers have found a protein in embryonic stem cells that inhibits the growth and spread of malignant melanoma, the deadly skin cancer.
And Training in the Arts Makes People Smarter.
“A life-affirming dimension is opening up in neuroscience,” said Dr. Gazzaniga, “to discover how the performance and appreciation of the arts enlarge cognitive capacities will be a long step forward in learning how better to learn and more enjoyably and productively to live."
More expensive placebos bring more relief
In marketing as in medicine, perception can be everything. A higher price can create the impression of higher value, just as a placebo pill can reduce pain.
Now researchers have combined the two effects. A $2.50 placebo, they have found, works better one that costs 10 cents.
--
“It’s all about expectations,” said the lead researcher, Dan Ariely,....“When you’re expecting pain relief, you’re secreting your own opioids,” Dr. Ariely added. “And when you get it on discount, you doubt it, and your body doesn’t react as well.”
With colon cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, an increasing number of people, having reached age 50, are girding themselves for their first colonoscopy.
Anyone who's had one can tell you that the worst part is the preparation when you must drink what seems like gallons of a lime-flavored drink that operates as a harsh laxative. One in four people can't take it and don't drink it all.
Now we learn that flat or depressed lesions can't be seen if there is any waste left in the intestine. Yet, Easily Overlooked Lesions Tied to Colon Cancer.
The study also raises doubts about whether “virtual colonoscopy,” performed by a CT scanner, will ever be able to take the place of the colonoscope inserted into the rectum, as many patients had hoped. The problem is that CT scans use X-rays to reveal shapes, and find polyps because they stick out. Flat lesions are unlikely to show up in such scans.
Too many young people think that oral sex is safe. As Doctor Bernadine Healey points out in Clueless on STDs, Throat Cancer and Oral Sex.
People seem clueless that sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, gonorrhea, chlamydia, and human papillomavirus can take hold in parts of the oral cavity during sex with infected partners and that the oral contact can infect the genitals, too. HPV is a particularly scurrilous threat, since it incubates silently in the back of the mouth and is now linked to a dangerous form of throat cancer in both men and women similar to the one that arises in the cervix.
There's been an unexpected increase in oropharyngeal cancer, a cancer that develops at the base of the tongue, among young people.
It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this rise in oropharyngeal cancer is linked to changing sexual practices and, in particular, ones that involve bathing the throat with HPV-infected fluid. Increasingly, scientists are implicating HPV-16, and in some cases 18, the same ones that causes cervical cancer.
However good college kids are on using condoms for vaginal sex, very few use them for oral sex.
One in four people suffer from persistent fatigue that has nothing to do with any serious medical condition.
The Cure for Exhaustion? More Exercise.
Regular exercise can actually go a long way in increasing feelings of energy — particularly in sedentary individuals.”
Why exercise helps fatigue isn’t clear, but Dr. Puetz said his findings suggest exercise acts directly on the central nervous system to increase energy and reduce fatigue. Notably, the improvements in energy and fatigue were not related to increases in aerobic fitness.
“A lot of people are overworked and not sleeping enough,” said Patrick O’Connor, co-director of the university’s exercise psychology laboratory. “Exercise is a way for people to feel more energetic.
Think of it as priming the pump.
The Instant Test that can Spot Alzheimer's
The test uses a computer programme linked to an MRI brain scanner to look for the tell-tale signs of the disease in the brain.
In trials, it was able to accurately diagnose the condition in 96 per cent of patients.
Human experts get it right around 85 per cent of the time.
Its creators believe the test could be available in Britain in less than a year, ensuring patients are diagnosed earlier and more quickly.
It could also help to reassure the 'worried well' - those who are concerned that their memory lapses are more than just a normal sign of aging.
Another win for algorithms.
Anti-depressants 'no better than dummy pills'
Millions of Britons are taking anti-depressants for no reason, according to a study that found they made little difference to the condition.
Researchers discovered the drugs, which cost the taxpayer almost £300 million a year, generally work no better than dummy pills, and said exercise and therapy should first be prescribed instead.
---
The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science: Medicine, looked at the results of 35 clinical trials in the US involving 5,000 patients taking SSRIs, including Prozac, Efexor and Seroxat. Prof Kirsch said patients taking the drugs did improve, but so did those on a placebo - showing most of the effect was psychological.
Thank God for the placebo effect.
Says a GP
I see ever-increasing numbers of patients coming to my surgery because they feel psychologically out of sorts. In the main, a little sympathetic probing will get to the bottom of the problem: they are tired, stressed and finding it difficult to cope with the increasingly hectic pace of life. Generally drug therapy is not the solution.
But expectations of health and healthcare are changing and the public looks to medicine for an instant cure for any number of lifestyle troubles, even something to treat a general feeling of ennui.
Lacking time to talk and the reassuring community of a social network, we are increasingly prone to think that a bottle of pills might be just what the doctor ordered.
It isn't.
But it is Good news for therapists
"For many, medication is successful. But talking therapies can have dramatic effects. We have put a lot of emphasis on medication in the past and it is about time we redressed the balance and put more emphasis on talking treatments."
Maybe "compassion is an aphrodisiac." After watching In Treatment, I'm convinced of it.
Even if He Listens. He Cares. He Isn't Real.
Ovarian cancer has become known as the 'silent killer' because it is so hard to detect at its early stages when treatment could do some good. Three times as lethal as breast cancer, ovarian cancer is the cause of more than 15,000 deaths a year.
Because the symptoms of early ovarian cancer are non specific, women tend to ignore them, thinking they will go away. Signs and symptoms from the Mayo clinic.
• Abdominal pressure, fullness, swelling or bloating
• Urinary urgency
• Pelvic discomfort or pain
So this is particularly good news from researchers at the Yale School of Medicine, 99% Detection on Early Stage Ovarian Cancer.
“The ability to recognize almost 100 percent of new tumors will have a major impact on the high death rates of this cancer,” said lead author Gil Mor, M.D., associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at Yale. “We hope this test will become the standard of care for women having routine examinations.”
Hat tip FuturePundit.
Another disease that affects women almost exclusively is LAM (Lymphangioleiomyomatosis ), a progressive lung disease that affects women most often during their cild-bearing years. Smooth muscle cells grow uncontrollably invading the tissues of the lungs, the airways and blood and lymph vessels to form cell clusters and cysts that eventually create holes in the lungs, preventing the lungs from providing oxygen to the rest of the body. The LAM Foundation.
Yvonne DiVita tells the story of Alanna Nelson, a young mother recently diagnosed with LAM, who is fundraising with a bake sale this past weekend in Pennsylvania.
"It is a genetic lung disease, which destroys healthy lung tissue by causing bubble-like cysts that cannot transfer oxygen to the blood. This means that people with LAM will eventually need full-time oxygen, and finally must resort to lung transplantation to stay alive. There is currently NO CURE and LAM is ultimately fatal."
About 1500 women have been diagnosed with LAM but some scientists estimate that as many as 250,000 may be going undiagnosed or misdiagnosed because the symptoms are so similar to asthma, bronchitis or emphysema.
Many doctors think pregnancy accelerates the disease.
So far no cure, no treatment though clinical trials are underway.
Listening to music after suffering a stroke is a great idea because the act of listening probably helps the patient recover from brain damage.
Why music could be a tonic for stroke sufferers.
It is the first time such an effect has been shown in humans and scientists believe it could be a cheap, simple way to get stroke patients on the road to recovery.
Researcher Teppo Sarkamo of Helsinki University helped carry out the study.
He said newly diagnosed patients are often left on their own for large parts of the day, yet the first few months after a "brain attack" are ideal for rehabilitative training.
He said: "Our research shows for the first time that listening to music during this crucial period can enhance cognitive recovery and prevent negative mood, and it has the advantage that it is cheap and easy to organise.
"We suggest that everyday music listening during early stroke recovery offers a valuable addition to the patients' care."
--
It could be helping more general mechanisms of "brain plasticity" - the brain's ability to repair after damage.
This drug makes women stupid," Orli Etingin, vice chairman of medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital, declared at a recent luncheon discussion sponsored by Project A.L.S. to raise awareness of gender issues and the brain. Dr. Etingin, who is also founder and director of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center in New York, told of a typical patient in her 40s, unable to concentrate or recall words. Tests found nothing amiss, but when the woman stopped taking Lipitor, the symptoms vanished. When she resumed taking Lipitor, they returned.
"I've seen this in maybe two dozen patients," Dr. Etingin said later, adding that they did better on other statins. "This is just observational, of course. We really need more studies, particularly on cognitive effects and women."
Can a drug that helps hearts be harmful to the brain?
Cognitive side effects like memory loss and fuzzy thinking aren't listed on the patient information sheet for Lipitor, the popular cholesterol-lowering drug. But some doctors are voicing concerns that in a small portion of patients, statins like Lipitor may be helping hearts but hurting minds.
I take a small dose of a statin every day, but I have found that my thinking is not as clear. After this article, I'm going to go without for 2 months and see if I notice the difference.
"I have a population that, having survived this terrible illness, is now getting illnesses of old age 10 or 20 years sooner than normal," said Dr. Ardis Moe, a physician at UCLA's Center for Clinical AIDS Research and Education. "That's the bad news. The good news is that they're not dead."
--
With HIV, growing older, faster
Now more than a quarter of the estimated 1 million Americans living with HIV are, like Gibson and Golay, older than 50, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2015, half will be older than 50. At least two long-range studies of people aging with HIV are underway, by the National Institutes of Health and the Veterans Health Administration.
A 2006 study by the New York-based AIDS Community Research Initiative of America on the interaction of HIV and aging on mental health found depression to be almost 13 times higher in longtime survivors than in the general population. As do the very elderly, whose suicide rate is the highest of any age group, longtime HIV survivors often grow despondent over health disabilities and the deaths of friends.
"Everybody I knew died in the late '80s or early '90s," said Los Angeles resident and longtime survivor Thomas Woolsey, 59. "It sounds like I'm the lucky one, but I don't really think so. What good is a life without any friends?"
Most people lose a lot of their desire to live when they lose all their friends, particularly if they don't have close family.
It's always been obvious to me that smokers pay more taxes and die sooner and, in the end, consume less health care. Now there's a study to back up the notion that obese people and smokers are cheaper to treat.
In the long run, healthy people who live long lives are more expensive.
It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.
--
''Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don't survive very long,'' van Baal said. ''But if they are old enough to get Alzheimer's one day, they may survive longer and cost more.''
--
Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes.
--
Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
That's what some Swiss scientists are saying as they purport to unlock the mystery of sleep
Mehdi Tafti, head of the research project at Lausanne University's Centre for Integrative Genomics,... an expert in sleep disorders, has spent the past 20 years trying to work out why humans spend a third of their lives in bed.
His research team recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science journal, identifying a gene – Homer1a – that controls levels of calcium in neurons in the brain.
Mice, like humans, need calcium to function when awake, but the longer they are up and about, the more calcium builds up, and when the levels get too high, the neurons get over-stimulated.
Sleep, therefore, is nature's way of reducing these excessive calcium levels in the brain. And Homer1a plays a key role.
"This gene regulates the levels of calcium to protect against hyperactivity of the brain," explained Tafti. "The more you stay awake, the more
it is activated."
It rings an alarm bell in your head and tries to counterbalance the build-up, warning: "Be careful, calcium is trying to get in – you have to regulate it otherwise it's going to be toxic," he added.
"In animal models, sleep deprivation is lethal...It has never been tested in humans but long-term sleep deprivation would probably lead to death.
Health care is on the mind of a lot of Americans. Will they be able to afford heath care? What kind of country are we that we can't guarantee health care for everyone? Should it be a guaranteed right? Should we require every American to carry health care insurance? Should we have a single payer system, that is should the government pay for health care for everyone or should we continue with a mixed system of public and private systems.
For the time being, generally speaking, I'm not going to write about the various proposals out there. I'll just pass along some links I think you should see.
In Britain the financial strains of government provided health care are showing when doctors say Don't treat the old and unhealthy
Among the survey of 870 family and hospital doctors, almost 60 per cent said the NHS could not provide full healthcare to everyone and that some individuals should pay for services.
One in three said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. Half thought that smokers should be denied a heart bypass, while a quarter believed that the obese should be denied hip replacements.
--
Gordon Brown promised this month that a new NHS constitution would set out people's "responsibilities" as well as their rights, a move interpreted as meaning restric tions on patients who bring health problems on themselves. The only sanction threatened so far, however, is to send patients to the bottom of the waiting list if they miss appointments.
Is it a gimmick or a whole new way of being a doctor?
Jay Parkinson is an easily accessible mobile doctor who makes housecalls in the Brooklyn, Park Slope area of New York, offers same or next day appointments and follow up eVisits and he's a hunk.
He says, "The greatest predictor of health is giving a crap about yourself"
He knows amazing doctors, healthcare prices and will help prevent illness (a preventive medicine residency at John Hopkins, a masters in public health from there too, and an MD from Penn State University).
He specializes in children and young adults, 18-40 with and without traditional health insurance.
You can contact him by phone, email, IM, text or video chat, 8 to 5 Monday through Friday, 24/7 for emergencies.
He calls himself a "New Kind of Physician" and says,
When you need more than I provide, I ensure you wisely spend your money and pay the lowest price for the highest quality in order to optimize your health.
How does his practice work?
You enroll, he contacts you, you contact him, you get what you need.
Talk about a fresh, new approach, Jay has it. Wow.
hat tip Seth Godin
Raw garlic is a natural anti-viral and honey is a natural antibiotic, it makes some sort of weird sense that salt water cures colds better than anything else.
Salt water 'cures kids' colds'
A nasal spray made from Atlantic Ocean seawater eased wintertime cold symptoms faster and slowed cough and cold symptoms from returning among children ages 6 to 10, researchers in Europe reported on Monday.
It may be that the salt water has a simple mechanical effect of clearing mucus, or it could be that trace elements in the water play some more significant role, though the exact reason why such a solution works is not known, said Dr Ivo Slapak and colleagues at the Teaching Hospital of Brno in the Czech Republic.
I've written earlier about the amazing properties of salt water and the ameliorative effect it has on cystic fibrosis.
I sure hope this is true and pans out.;
Drug 'Can Reverse Alzheimer's Symptoms in Minutes
A drug used for arthritis can reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer's "in minutes".
It appears to tackle one of the main features of the disease - inflammation in the brain.
The drug, called Enbrel, is injected into the spine where it blocks a chemical responsible for damaging the brain and other organs.
A pilot study carried out by U.S. researchers found one patient had his symptoms reversed "in minutes".
Other patients have shown some improvements in symptoms such as forgetfulness and confusion after weekly injections over six months.
The study of 15 patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation by online publishers Biomed Central.
The experiment showed that Enbrel can deactivate TNF (tumour necrosis factor) - a chemical in the fluid surrounding the brain that is found in Alzheimer's sufferers.
I haven't been posting because I've been sick and tired with the flu. But I've earned something I want to pass on.
Apart from wicked tiredness, headaches and muscle aches, what bothered me most was an extremely sore throat and a severe cough.
Cough drops, cough syrups, aspergum - nothing seemed to work until I googled and found that raw garlic fights viruses.
Yucky as that sounds, raw garlic chopped very fine actually made me feel better, a lot better. Especially when followed by a honey chaser, another natural antibiotic, which was the most soothing thing I could do. That and iced water.
Honey and garlic. Garlic and Honey. You have both in your pantry or should. You don't need the other stuff.
So why keep lots of OTC medications in your medicine cabinet that millions of youth use to get high?
About 3.1 million people between the ages of 12 to 25 use cough and cold syrup say officials who liken the level of abuse to use of LSD, methamphetamine or ecstasy.
From Live Science, 7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe
1. We only use 10% of our brain.
2. You should drink at least 8 glasses of water a day.
3. Fingernails and hair grow after death
4. Shaved hair grows back faster, coarser and darker
5. Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
6. Eating turkey makes you drowsy
7. Mobile phones are dangerous in hospitals.
Click through for debunking.
One man has silicon implants to make the tattoo on his leg more impressive.
While stem cells help reshape the breasts of women who have had a lumpectomy.
Stem Cells Reshape Breasts After Cancer
Dec. 17, 2007 (San Antonio) -- In a medical first, researchers have used stem cells to help reshape the breasts of women who have undergone a lumpectomy to remove a breast tumor.
After a lumpectomy, breasts can be scarred or misshapened. Injections of fat tissue have been tried but the fat most often dies or is reabsorbed. Using fat and stem cell juice seems to work because the stem cells stimulate the breast tissue to make new blood vessels.
Another brilliant article by Atul Gawande called The Checklist in the New Yorker's Annals of Medicine.
Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be humanly mastered.
--
On any given day in the United States, some ninety thousand people are in intensive care. Over a year, an estimated five million Americans will be, and over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an I.C.U. from the inside.
Wide swaths of medicine now depend on the lifesupport systems that I.C.U.s provide: care for premature infants; victims of trauma, strokes, and heart attacks; patients who have had surgery on their brain, heart, lungs, or major blood vessels.
Critical care has become an increasingly large portion of what hospitals do. Fifty years ago, I.C.U.s barely existed. ...The average stay of an I.C.U. patient is four days, and the survival rate is eighty-six per cent. Going into an I.C.U., being put on a mechanical ventilator, having tubes and wires run into and out of you, is not a sentence of death. But the days will be the most precarious of your life.
They are precarious because the average patient requires 178 individual actions per day and every one involves risks. One of the biggest risks is that of a line infection, infections that are so common they are considered a routine complication. 80,000 people get line infections each year and of those between 5 and 28% die.
The I.C.U., with its spectacular successes and frequent failures, therefore poses a distinctive challenge: what do you do when expertise is not enough?
Intensive care is now too complex for clinicians to carry out reliably fro memory alone. Taking a page from the pilot checklists, designed to help pilots fly planes too complicated to fly from memory alone, Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at John Hopkins, designed a checklist to take care of the problem of line infections.
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.
Checklists help people with memory recall and make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.
As the tagline on the New Yorker article says, If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?
The reason why exercise alleviates depression is because of an exercise-related gene in the brain called VGF.
Now that scientists have isolated that gene in mice, look for powerful new anti-depressants that work right away.
Newly-identified Exercise Gene Could Help with Depression.
More than 80% of autistic children with a fever show some improvements in behavior and 40% had dramatic improvements.
Fever can unlock autism's grip
The change involved things like longer concentration spans, more talking, improved eye contact and better overall relations with adults and other children.
Zimmerman's team said the fever effect had been noted anecdotally in the past by parents and doctors.
Proteomics is a not a word you are familiar with, but you will be. Proteomics is a fast-growing filed that looks for telltale proteins in a person's blood to diagnose disease at a very early stage.
By the time a doctor diagnoses you with cancer or a neurodegenerative disease, you may have been living with it for years—a troubling fact, given that early detection is the most important factor in successful treatment. Now, Power3 Medical Products, a biotech firm in Houston, Texas, has developed simple, low-cost blood tests for breast cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's that will allow physicians to spot disease the moment it shows up in a patient's body—years earlier than today's most advanced technologies can catch it.
---
"There's tremendous promise in proteomics," says Lance Liotta, a proteomic scientist at George Mason University. "The early diagnosis and individualized therapy coming out of the science is going to change medicine."
We are designed to be sad when faced with a loss whether it be a romance, a parent, a job or a dog. Being sad is not a chemical disorder that needs treatment with powerful drugs.
But the wide availability of anti-depressant drugs and the easy access to them has confused the distinction between normal sadness and the major disorder of depression which is the breakdown of normal psychological functioning. Even people who just have a case of the"blahs" say they are "depressed."
So take with a grain of salt, reports that depression in the United States increased 300% from 1987 to 1997 or that 1 in 10 adults struggle with depression each year.
The alleged epidemic of depression simply doesn’t exist. Horwitz and Wakefield are right: Millions who have been diagnosed with major depression never had it in the first place, even if their lives were nonetheless improved by the drugs they were prescribed.
The body's ability to dispose of fat virtually shuts down when we're sitting down.
And most of us sit too much.
Scientists Say Just Standing Up May Be as Important as Exercise
Marc Hamilton, associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia leader of the research team that published its research this month in the peer-reviewed journal Diabetes.
The solution, Hamilton said, is to stand up and "putter."
Consider the latest news out of Chicago. Are we going through the Great Relearning**, Part 2?
Rickets returns as kids' bones weaker.
Rickets is a softening of the bones in children potentially leading to fractures and deformity.
Usually a disease seen only in developing countries, in most cases it can be easily cured with milk, sunshine and exercise. In the absence of vitamin D, either from sunshine or from supplements, calcium can not be absorbed by the body.
But cases of full-blown rickets are just the red flag: Bone specialists say possibly millions of seemingly healthy children aren't building as much strong bone as they should, a gap that may leave them more vulnerable to bone-cracking osteoporosis later.
''This potentially is a time-bomb,'' says Dr. Laura Tosi of Children's National Medical Center in Washington.
That means parents have to insist that their kids drink their fortified milk, turn off the TV or computer and go outside and play.
Otherwise, they will grow up fat, with bowed legs, frequent fractures, deformed chests or curved spines, like this poor 2-year-old with rickets. 
***The Great Relearning comes from a brilliant essay by Tom Wolfe who observed that many social problems are the result of a large-scale rejection of well-established principles that were generally accepted by everyone until the 1960s.
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement. At the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? ... The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero... And now , in 1968, they were relearning... the laws of hygiene... by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
"So I just ran over it with my wheelchair until she apologized"
I am quite impressed with Disaboom which I happened upon yesterday, a site that delivers on the promise of the Internet.
For anyone who is living with a disability, this is the place to find others like you, to learn from their experiences and find resources available to help like a career center as well as the "largest collection of accessibility reviews on everything from restaurants to travel hot spots".
For those who have been paralyzed by an accident, the videos showing adaptive sky diving and may be especially inspiring.
Founder Dr. J. Glen House knows whereof he speaks because he specializes in physical medicine and rehabilitation and is also a quadriplegic. His mission
to create the first comprehensive, evolving source of information, insight, and personal engagement for the disability community.
Two of its core beliefs are close to my own.
Expertise comes in many forms. Often the best advice comes not just from medical experts but also from “peers” – others who’ve walked the path you’re on. That’s why in addition to providing solid medical expertise, we’ve also put together the largest online network of individuals to share their personal experiences with you, providing honest, practical answers to hard questions.
Knowledge is power – and so is community. Disaboom.com strives to provide you the tools and guidance you need to live active, engaged lives. But when it comes to sharing stories and personal insights, there’s nothing stronger than the power of community – which is why we’re connecting the millions touched by disability to both information and each other.
Or maybe creative people have a greater sense about what's in the air.
Justice O'Connor's husband forms romance with fellow Alzheimer's patient.
Last week I watched Away From Her, a movie starring Julie Christie as Fiona who, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, decides she would be better off in a retirement home than with her husband of fifty years whom she dearly loves, despite some troubled spots that they never discuss.
New patients at the retirement home are not allowed visitors for thirty days so they can adjust more quickly. When the husband finally is allowed to visit his wife he finds Fiona has fallen in love with a fellow patient.
The movie is a brilliant adaption by Sarah Polley of an Alice Munro short story, "The Bear Came Over the Mountain."
My mother used to counsel younger mothers nervous with a rambunctious child, 'Don't worry, they'll grow out of it."
Apparently that's the case with most kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
ADHD Kids Can Get Better.
researchers found that some areas in the ADHD brain — particularly those involved in thinking, attention and planning — matured an average of three years later than "healthy" brains, but otherwise followed normal patterns of development.
Who would have thought that most infections ensure our health instead of compromise it.
Humans have 10 times more bacterial cells in their bodies than human cells. Without bacteria, there would not be humans.
Human life depends on certain infections.
Mitochondria are bacteria-like components of cells that take fats and sugars and make adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. Every action that distinguishes a living human being from a dead human being is dependent on ATP.
"We need our bacteria," Callahan said.
Infections, Bacteria 'Critical for Healthy Living'
Other research shows that sheltering a child from bacterial infections increases his or her chances of developing asthma and allergies. In fact, recent studies show that the more educated parents are, the more likely their children are to develop asthma and allergies possibly because these parents are more likely to worry about bacterial infections.
Of course, parents want to protect children from infectious diseases. Callahan draws an analogy between how parents teach their children to recognize unsavory characters and how society must differentiate good from bad bacteria and infectious microorganisms.
Just so you know
A pint of beer is better for you after a workout than water, say scientists
If you can't have beer, chocolate milk is the best choice.
They diagnosed him with leukemia and told him he had nine months to live. John Kanzlus, weakened by his chemotherapy treatments, drew on his lifetime of working with radio waves to devise a machine that targets cancer cells.
The miracle: It works.
Kanzlus got his hands on come nanoparticles from another cancer patient, Nobel Prize winning chemist Richard Smalley.
"John asked, 'Is this what you expected?' For the first time in my life, I realized that a smile starts behind the eyes before it starts at the mouth, for Steve responded, 'This is much more than I expected.' I watched his smile engulf his entire face."
Marianne finally realized: "Could what John's working on be real?" Curley phoned Smalley to tell him the news.
He remembered Smalley's response: "Holy God."
----
At 63, Kanzius is still receiving treatment for his cancer, which has recurred. He knows the process he developed may not be ready in time to save his life, but the project was never about him. "I want to see the treatment work," he said. "That would be my thanks."
Too many people don't know how to go about Making the Most of Doctor Visits
Though medical information has never been more accessible to consumers, many patients still don't have the skills to talk to their doctors and cram all the questions they have about their health into a brief visit. They often ignore what they don't understand, or leave delicate but important issues to the end and then run out of time. So to help patients get answers, health-care officials are offering new discussion aids, providing sample questions patients can ask, and offering advice ranging from making a list of your drugs, to starting with the biggest questions first, to checking that a doctor has your lab results before going to an appointment.
Laura Landro who writes The Informed Patient column for The Wall Street Journal has put together some good practical tips.
1. Write down questions/issues for the doctor beforehand, in order of priority.
2. If it's a diagnostic visit, prepare a detailed list of symptoms
3. Bring a list of current medications and dosages.
4. Ask for decision-support aids, and print or reliable web-based information about condition and treatments.
5. Make sure before the visit that the doctor has received test results/reports from other labs or doctors.
6. If you're unsure whether you can effectively interact with the doctor, bring a family member or friend.
7. Take notes and/or ask the doctor if you can record the session for later review.
Karl Marx was a miserable old sod who hated bourgeois convention and advocated class war not because of his experience in a German factory, but because of a face full of painful boils.
So writes a professor of dermatology, An Exegesis of Marx's Facial Boils
"The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day," Marx told Friedrich Engels in a letter from 1867.
In the Scent of a Fuhrer, I learned that Adolf Hitler couldn't control his own flatulence. He gave up meat and took up vegetables but his private physician
Dr. Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that after Hitler downed a typical vegetable platter, “constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before."
He resorted to a quack doctor who gave him Dr. Kosters anti-gas pills that contained strychnine and Hitler took up to 16 a day
The sallow skin, glaucous eyes and attention lapses noted by observers later in the war are consistent with strychnine poisoning; another ingredient in the pills, antropine, causes mood wings from euphoria to violent anger. Even more peculiar were the injections of amphetamines that Morell administered every morning before breakfast from 1941, which may have exacerbated the erratic behavior, inflexibility, paranoia and indecision that Hitler began to display increasingly as the war ground on. And there was a barrage of other supplements -- vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose and opiates, all intended to combat the dictator’s real or imagined ailments. After the war, U.S. intelligence officers discovered that Morell was pumping Hitler with 28 different drugs, including eye-drops that contained 10 percent cocaine (up to 10 treatment a day), a concoction made from human placenta and “potency pills” made from ground bull’s testicles. But despite the barrage of medicines, Morell’s diaries (which were recovered from Germany and are kept in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.) make clear that the bouts of “agonizing flatulence” remained a regular occurrence.
IMPORTANT HEALTH NEWS. while the doldrums that follow lunch are still not completely understood, recent research strongly supports a brief nap to treat them.
Stressing about money and work keeps 48% of us up at night.
About 75% of us worry about money and work and the same percent say stress is making them sick.
The survey by the American Psychological Association says stress is getting worse and affecting every area of our lives.
While some of us drink too much or eat junk food to relieve stress, the majority of us read, listen to music or exercise instead. More than a third of us pray.
The stress may be getting worse, but we're handling it better it seems.
So what is sleep for? More and more, it looks like memory and learning. And naps have the same effect!
the new research underscores a vast transformation in the way scientists have come to understand the sleeping brain. Once seen as a blank screen, a metaphor for death, it has emerged as an active, purposeful machine, a secretive intelligence that comes out at night to play — and to work — during periods of dreaming and during the netherworld chasms known as deep sleep
An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play
Since then the study findings have come almost too fast to digest, and they suggest that the sleeping brain works on learned information the way a change sorter does on coins. It seems first to distill the day’s memories before separating them — vocabulary, historical facts and dimes here; cello scales, jump shots and quarters over there. It then bundles them into readable chunks, at different times of the night. In effect, the stages of sleep seem to be specialized to handle specific types of information, the studies suggest.
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
William Shakespeare
Only 5% of high school seniors sleep 8 hours a night. Half of adolescents get less than seven.
Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.
--
Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.
--
Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
It seems as though lack of sleep makes adolescents stupider, fatter and gloomier.
The best thing to keep normal, aging brains sharp is physical exercise which seems to help the brain as much as the body.
And you want a 'bushy' brain not a 'twiggy' one.
A healthy brain is a bushy one. Branch-like tentacles extend from the ends of the brain's cells, enabling them to communicate with each other. The more you learn, the more those connections form.
Doctors discuss theories on aging brains.
One small glass of wine a day is okay for pregnant women and safe for the fetus says the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the U.K.
Safer to avoid wine in the first three months of a pregnancy. That's when the brain and nervous system are developing.
Considering that women in the course of wearing lipstick can consume 4 lbs of lipstick over a lifetime, you might want to know whether your lipstick contains the neurotoxin lead.
Over one-third of lipsticks on the market do.
Pregnant women should be the most concerned, those with children next, but who among us wants to expose ourselves to the risk of subtle neurological problems.
Check your brand here at poisoned kisses.
Is the connection between fat and diet an example of a mistaken consensus?
An "informational cascade" as one person after assumes that the rest can't be all wrong.
Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better....Cascades are especially common in medicine as doctors take their cues from others, leading them to overdiagnose some faddish ailments (called bandwagon diseases) and overprescribe certain treatments (like the tonsillectomies once popular for children). Unable to keep up with the volume of research, doctors look for guidance from an expert — or at least someone who sounds confident.
John Tierney on Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus
when the theories were tested in clinical trials, the evidence kept turning up negative. As Mr. Taubes notes, the most rigorous meta-analysis of the clinical trials of low-fat diets, published in 2001 by the Cochrane Collaboration, concluded that they had no significant effect on mortality.
Mr. Taubes argues that the low-fat recommendations, besides being unjustified, may well have harmed Americans by encouraging them to switch to carbohydrates, which he believes cause obesity and disease. He acknowledges that that hypothesis is unproved, and that the low-carb diet fad could turn out to be another mistaken cascade. The problem, he says, is that the low-carb hypothesis hasn’t been seriously studied because it couldn’t be reconciled with the low-fat dogma.
UPDATE: Sissy Willis does much deeper analysis of both the Tierney piece and informational cascades in "There are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion."
Being conscientious apparently dramatically lowers your risk for Alzheimer's, showing again the power of the mind over the body, in this case the brain.
A surprising study of elderly people suggests that those who see themselves as self-disciplined, organized achievers have a lower risk for developing Alzheimer's disease than people who are less conscientious.
Astoundingly, the brains of some of the dutiful people in the study were examined after their deaths and were found to have lesions that would meet accepted criteria for Alzheimer's - even though these people had shown no signs of dementia.
"This adds to our knowledge that lifestyle, personality, how we think, feel and behave are very importantly tied up with risk for this terrible illness," Wilson said. "It may suggest new ideas for trying to delay the onset of this illness."
--
Renee Goodwin of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health was not involved in the new study but has done similar work that found a connection between conscientiousness and better health.
"It's having self-discipline and energy, doing the healthy things," Goodwin said.
----
The new findings, appearing in Monday's Archives of General Psychiatry, come from an analysis of personality tests and medical exams of 997 older Catholic priests, nuns and brothers who participated in the Religious Orders Study.
If you go out of your way to buy pomegranate or acai juice because they are packed with powerful anti-oxidants, here's two words for you from the Wall St Journal, New Respect for a Humble Juice.
Apple juice.
Even better, apple cider.
(The best - cold apple cider with warm apple cider donuts.)
Far from being just "sugar water" as some pediatricians have said, new research shows "thousands" of phyto-chemicals in apple juice, mainly in the peel, some of which retard tumor growth, most of which work together in a synergy on different parts of the body.
Studies at Cornell University's Department of Food Science have found that the unique combination of thousands of phytochemicals in apples -- mainly concentrated in the peel -- retard tumor growth in cell cultures and in animals. In particular, apples are high in triterpenoids, which have "very potent activity in tumor cell growth," says lead researcher Rui Hai Liu.
Because this week turns out to be an especially busy one for me, I've decided to do some easy blogging and point to what others have written that have changed my mind in a significant way on a current issue.
#1 How many people without health care insurance should I worry about.
The U.S. Census says that 46.6 million persons are uninsured.
9.5 million of those are not citizens, so we don't have a responsibility to see that they are insured. Only 37.1 million left.
The U.S. Census reports that 8.74 million of the uninsured make more that $75k a year. Another 8.3 million of the uninsured make between $50k and $75k. That's another 17 million I don't have to worry about since they can afford their own health insurance. Even when I haven't had any income, I paid for my own health insurance.
So that leaves about 20 million without health insurance but who are still able to get emergency room healthcare for free.
...If we believe the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a frequent source for the mainstream media, Americans who do not qualify for current government programs and who make less than $50,000 a year total somewhere between 13.9 million and 8.2 million, no more than 5 percent of the population. Furthermore, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 45 percent of uninsured people will be uninsured for less than four months.
Which brings us to the ultimate question: Does it make any sense to destroy a health care system that 5 out of 100 people do not have adequate access to?
Depression is more damaging to everyday health than chronic diseases like arthritis, asthma, diabetes and angina, researchers said based on a study using data from the World Health Organization.
Not a surprise to anyone who's suffered the 'black beast' of clinical depression and lost the joy of living.
Services Help Unsnarl Medical Bills, Wall St Journal (link for subscribers only)
If you have a lot of medical bills and can't make sense of the explanation of benefit statements, there are now web-based services and tools that can help unsnarl those medical bills, get you organized and give you a single summary of all your bills.
Many analysts recommend consumers create their own personal health records, essentially a record of an individual's important medical information. That's because the person who will truly be responsible for one's health care in the end is that person. If people change jobs frequently, their health-insurance companies and doctors will also change. Analysts also add that it's a good way to keep track of children's immunization records or early doctor's appointments for a newborn.
---
"For better or for worse, people are more and more on their own in health care," says Ron Klain, executive vice president of Revolution Health, based in Washington, D.C
Here's the chart the WSJ put together of useful sites. Click the image for full size and readability.
O.K. We know you don't like asking for directions, but is it too much to ask that you call 911 if you're having a heart attack?
Women, don't get so cocky, you're not much better.
When experiencing chest pain, sweating and shortness of breath, call 911.
The Wall Street Journal reports that only about half of the people in the throes of a heart attack decide to call 911, the others are risking their own survival and, if they do survive, the long-term health of their hearts.
The Call That Can Save Your Life in a Heart Attack (subscribers only)
Don't worry about "bothering" people, don't worry about the loss of control, don't worry about being embarrassed, think about saving your life, worry about sudden death.
An ambulance is much better than driving yourself or being driven to the emergency room.
First off, you're treated right away, you don't have to wait for hours.
If you are one of the 5% of people that go into cardiac arrest, if you're not revived within 2 minutes, you may be a goner. Ambulances have the equipment to spark your heart back into rhythm, cars don't.
You already know that you should check your credit score at least once a year so that you can correct mistakes.
What you probably didn't know is that your medical records could contain errors that should be corrected. Incorrect medical information can lead to ineffective or harmful treatment and affect your insurability
The Wall Street Journal, Patient Records Need Reviews (subscribers only)
Errors in medical records aren't uncommon. "They happen all the time," says Joy Pritts, research associate professor at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute.
Mistakes can arise from a mistyped diagnosis code or transcription error to an inaccurate diagnosis or a diagnosis that is out-of-date, say because a patient has gotten his or her cholesterol under control. And, if you have a common name, other peoples' records can end up in your file, says Ms. Pritts. Part of the problem is that the U.S. health-care system relies mainly on paper records, which make it harder to coordinate care and spot errors.
Many hospitals use electronic health records, but until the U.S. develops a comprehensive, consolidated system, the burden falls to individuals to keep tabs on their health histories.
I was in a rut. A few days away from the Internet and some ocean and sun in Maine and on Long Island and I feel much better.
I'm also very glad that I sat out the high impact aerobics fad in the 80s and never "went for the burn" now that at least one doctor is asking Did Jane Fonda's Videos Give People Arthritis?
Dr. Solomon says the repetitive nature of high impact aerobics has had an adverse affect on many of the once devoted Fonda fans like Wares.
"They have knee problems," she said. "They all have early arthritis, or have terrible arthritis where they can't go up and down stairs."
Today, Dr. Solomon said these high impact exercise techniques are basically defunct because we now know how to exercise smarter.
An expanding body of research is showing that exercise can create a stronger, faster brain reports the New York Times in Lobes of Steel.
scientists have been finding more evidence that the human brain is not only capable of renewing itself but that exercise speeds the process.
Other factors contributing to neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells: marijuana, moderate alcohol intake, sociability and chocolate while heavy alcohol consumption, stress and a diet high in saturated fats and sugar inhibit the production of new brain cells.
You would probably feel cheated if you were served a "standard size" drink in a restaurant or bar, given that a standard size is about a can of beer or a small glass of wine.
That's probably why people fool themselves into thinking they are drinking less than they are. If you drink more than 3 standard size drinks a day for women or more than 6 standard size drinks a day for men, you're on the way to injuring your brain.
Already, alcohol brain injury looms as a health crisis in Australia.
"Alcohol-related brain injury affects as many as one in eight Australians," Ms Berton said.
"It's slow, progressive and ultimately this damage affects a person's thinking, emotions, communication and ability to care for themselves." She said the damage was not confined to one demographic, affecting young and old, rich and poor, black and white, male and female.
"People need to understand that it's not a question of how much you have to drink to sustain an alcohol-related brain injury, but how little.
If you don't think genetic medicine is here to stay, consider this
Almost 90% of all newborns are now tested for a variety of rare but devastating genetic disorders so early treatment can begin
Not really, but if you want to be thin, have some thin friends whose behavior to influence you.
The question is why have people gotten so fat so fast ?
Dr. Christakis took the notion of an obesity epidemic seriously when he began researching why people have gotten so fat so fast. Using data collected by the Framingham Study to reconstruct social networks, he found that
friends affected each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.
“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said.
Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends
After a seven year experiment involving more than 3000 women, a government study found that a diet low in fat and high in fruits and vegetables (higher than the recommended 5 servings a day) did NOT prevent the return of breast cancer.
Earlier research on whether a healthy diet prevents breast cancer has shown mixed results. The new study was designed to be more rigorous. In this experiment, all the women had been successfully treated for early-stage breast cancer. Their average age was 53 when the study began.
Low-fat diet didn't halt breast cancer.
Says Maggie Chapman, now a widow, about her husband Nick, 51, who refused to see a doctor despite terrible stomach pains. He died of pancreatic cancer, which if discovered earlier may have been treatable.
Man who was killed keeping a stiff lip.
I say again, if you don't take care of your body where will you live?
I've always loved milk and I drink it often. I even get my milk delivered in glass bottles from a nearby dairy.
Now, I learn that milk is healthier than I thought
... the Welsh study has found that regular consumption of medium chain fatty acids found in full-fat milk and dairy products (cheese and yoghurt) can have a positive effect on metabolic syndrome, a condition associated with type 2 (non-insulin dependent) diabetes and obesity while reducing the risk of stroke and heart attack by two thirds.
Xanthe Clay waxes eloquent in the London Telegraph, Full fat takes the cream
But enough of the science. Clotted cream with jam and scones, farmhouse cheese, rich whole milk, unctuous yogurts and butter, surely the finest toast topper of all, are jewels of our country's gastronomic heritage. They are also life-enhancingly delicious to eat. Caring about what we eat and how it tastes is surely the first step to healthy eating.
We all need our advocates who understand us when we're sick and in the hospital. We also need people who love us. So this is good news.
ICUs' New Message: Welcome, Families (Wall St Journal, link for subscribers)
For decades, hospitals tried to keep visitors out of intensive-care units for more than a few minutes at a time. This year, Emory University Hospital here went the other way: It began inviting family members to move into the ward and take a hand in the patient's care.
---
A wave of recent studies shows that critically ill patients may benefit from having families present. There's even a case to be made, researchers say, for having loved ones present for resuscitation, brain-catheter insertions and other life-and-death procedures.
Earlier this year, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the largest international society representing intensive-care professionals, recommended that ICUs offer open visiting hours and increase family involvement. "Why would we presume that we can dictate how often or who is allowed to visit during the patient's most trying moments on earth?"
People with moles age more slowly than others. It's the telomeres.
A drug called varenicline in a single pill could curb smoking and drinking. Made by Pfizer, varenicline has already been proven safe for people. Because the drug works on the same receptors in the brain to block the release of dopamine that pleasurable sensation that reinforces addiction, what's been proven safe for nicotine addiction may well work for alcohol addiction.
A simple scratch and sniff test to detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest stages may be coming since a Poor Sense of Smell May be Alzheimer's
Too many jellyfish in Japan caused problems, even a blockage at a nuclear plant. Now those wily Japanese have found that jellyfish mucus is perfect for cosmetics
New ink for tattoos using advanced microcapsulation technology promises that it can be removed later on when the people tattooed come to their senses in only one laser session. 100% Freedom. Zero Regret.
You Breathe What You Eat. Asthma severity linked to diet poor in vitamins C and E and omega-3 fatty acids,
A daily glass of Wine can prevent tooth decay, gum disease and sore throats,
Until the Italian researchers published their study, little thought had been given to wine's antibacterial qualities though the ancient Romans knew.
Add the fact that red wine drunk in moderation reduces the risk of heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's and lowers cholesterol levels and blood pressure, wine can be considered a health food. Along with coffee, tea, beer and chocolate
Folks, that's good news.
Teen-agers feel invulnerable and often go too far to look good. I mean, who in the right mind, would use a tanning bed twice a day. That is apart from George Hamilton.
Zita started doing just that when she was 14, giving them up when she was 21. But already that was too late.
Last August she found a mole on her leg and was diagnosed with melanoma. Doctors who treated her said they believed the excessive use of sunbeds caused her cancer.
Nine months later she was dead, just three days before her daughter's first birthday.
Her partner Phil said that the sunbeds had destroyed the family's life.
Tanorexic young mother dies of skin cancer after seven years of sunbeds.
WebMD extols the benefits of drinking more than two cups of coffee a day
For most people, very little bad comes from drinking it, but a lot of good.
• a lowered risk of diabetes
• a lowered risk of cavities
* a lowered risk of Parkinson's disease
* a lowered risk of colon cancer
• a lowered risk of gallstones
• a lowered risk of liver cirrhosis
As for the caffeine, that's what reduces the risk of Parkinson's, treats asthma and stops headaches
"I know of no disease that is as common or as serious as stroke and where you basically have one therapy and it’s only used in 3 to 4 percent of patients. That’s like saying you only treat 3 to 4 percent of patients with bacterial pneumonia with antibiotics.”
Dr. Mark Alberts, neurology professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University calls the situation where people don't recognize they are having a stroke and most hospitals, uncertain about stroke diagnoses, don't provide tPA , the only effective drug against stroke, "a national embarrassment".
Lost Chances for Survival Before and After Stroke
Stroke kills 150,000 Americans each year, the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer, and leaves many more permanently disabled. With tPA (tissue plasminogen activator), one in three victims of stroke escaped serious injury. One problem is the clot-busting tPA must be administered within three hours of the stroke to be effective.
As I wrote before in Just a Minute, Save a Life, even lay people can diagnose a stroke in 60 seconds if they remember SRS, Smile, Raise, Speak.
• Ask the individual to SMILE
• Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS
• Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE
If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call 9-1-1 immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher. Researchers are urging the general public to learn to ask these three questions quickly, to someone they suspect of having a stroke. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of a stroke, and prevent permanent brain damage.
It may take 12-15 years before the screening in widely available for every patient, but a "trawling technique" that assesses 200,000 blocks of DNA simultaneously instead of one by one promises to identify the genes that cause cancer so preventative treatment can begin.
Breakthrough in Cancer Screening
From Medpundit, the Vitamin D Connection.
In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the "sunshine vitamin". First she quotes from a Globe and Mail story that costs $5 to read, so I'm going along with her excerpt.
A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large — twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking — it almost looks like a typographical error.
--
One of the researchers who made the discovery, professor of medicine Robert Heaney of Creighton University in Nebraska, says vitamin D deficiency is showing up in so many illnesses besides cancer that nearly all disease figures in Canada and the U.S. will need to be re-evaluated. "We don't really know what the status of chronic disease is in the North American population," he said, "until we normalize vitamin D status."
Medpundit says
We'll need to see the numbers to know how jaw dropping that 60 percent reduction is. However, here's some food thought. Cholesterol is the building block for Vitamin D. And what have we been preaching - and doing - to patients even more emphatically than sun avoidance? Lowering cholesterols to very low levels.
That's probably why my doctor insists I take vitamin D along with my 10 mg dose of Zocor.
More good news about honey.
Honey could save diabetics from amputation
Spreading honey on a diabetic ulcer could prevent the need to amputate an infected foot, researchers say.
Honey therapy involves squeezing a thick layer of honey onto a wound after all the dead skin and bacteria have been removed.
The honey kills bacteria because it is acidic and avoids the complication of bacterial resistance found with standard antibiotics, Jennifer Eddy, a professor at the University's School of Medicine and Public Health, told AFP.
"This is a tremendously important issue for world health," Eddy said.
She tried honey therapy as a last resort six years ago with a 79-year-old diabetic patient who had developed foot wounds resistant to standard treatments.
"I tried it only after everything else had failed and... we had essentially sent him home to die," she said. "All antibiotics were stopped when we started honey, and his wounds rapidly healed."
Last summer, I noted how honey heals wounds faster than antibiotics and recommended you tuck away jar of honey in your emergency supplies kit.
You might want to think twice about using artificial butter flavoring in your popcorn after you read this.
Since 2001, academic studies have shown links between the disease and a chemical used in artificial butter flavor called diacetyl. Flavoring manufacturers have paid out more than $100 million as a result of lawsuits by people sick with popcorn workers lung over the past five years. One death from the disease has been confirmed.
Ronni Bennett delivers unwelcome news and a whole lot of numbers from as well as a good exegesis of Atul Gawade's piece in The New Yorker on The Way We Age Now
There will not be enough doctors trained in geriatrics to deal with us aging boomers. There's not enough now.
Seems as if the number of geriatricians is declining while the number of plastic surgeons is rising. Doctors just don't want to deal with "Old Crocks" which is what we all will be given enough time.
Even if we stop obsessing on how well we look, and start focusing on how well we are, we're out of luck and on our own. When asked whether enough geriatricians could be trained to serve the booming elder population, Chad Boult, professor at John Hopkins said,
"Nothing, it's too late."
Read Ronni's post but don't miss the Gawade piece to get the full flavor of what we individually and as a society are avoiding, the certainty of our decrepitude and the words of a wonderful writer.
Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even the lungs pick up substantial deposits of calcium and turn stiff. Under a microscope, the vessels and soft tissues display the same form of calcium that you find in bone. When you reach inside an elderly patient during surgery, the aorta and other major vessels often feel crunchy under your fingers. A recent study has found that loss of bone density may be an even better predictor of death from atherosclerotic disease than cholesterol levels. As we age, it’s as if the calcium flows out of our skeletons and into our tissues.
---
Decline remains our fate; death wil come. But, until that last backup system inside each of us fails, decline can occur in two ways. One is early an precipitately, with an old age of enfeeblement and dependence, sustained primarily by nursing homes and hospitals. Th other way is more gradual, preserving, for as long as possible, your ability to control your own life
Is it hopeless? Are we all doomed? Not if Chad Boult can get geriatricians to train primary care doctors to treat the very old. But that's a tall order given that today, 97% of medical students take no course in geriatrics, 97%!
Frankly, I have a lot more hope in Gould's backup plan called "Guided Care" which calls for nurses to be given a highly compressed, three-week course in making geriatric care plans for individual patients and working with patients, families and doctors to implement the plans.
I count myself very lucky that my sister Colleen, a nurse, plans to become a certified nurse practitioner to work with us future "old crocks."
I would be remiss if I didn't note the hope for a sex-boost slimming pill that made news this week.
So far only monkeys and shrews have benefited from the hormone-reducing pill that promises to boost a woman's libido while reducing her appetite,
While it probably won't be on the market in less than 10 years, whatever drug company invests the millions to bring the pill to market not only stands to make many more, but will garner the appreciation of men around the world.
Sexual parity however will not be achieved until they make a pill for men that reduces beer bellies while increasing their desire to help around the house.
NewScientist reports that Lost memories could be restored by 'rewiring brain'
At least it works in mice and could lead to new treatments for neuro-degenerative diseases in humans.
"If memories can be recovered then that suggests they were never erased and indicates that perceived memory loss is likely to be due to an inability to retrieve memories," Tsai says.
It's the 4th leading cause of death in the United States behind heart disease, cancer and stroke, yet you probably never heard of COPD.
COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, affects 24 million Americans, half of them undiagnosed.
Shining a Light on a Deadly Lung Disorder in the Wall St. Journal.
COPD is an umbrella term for lung diseases that inflame airways, obstruct breathing and trap bad air in the lungs, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It's hardly a new disease, but its prevalence has been rising steadily, while other major causes of death have been decreasing. The increase is due largely to the fact that people are living longer and developing the disease as they age. But it is also rising in younger people and women, who are experiencing the long-term ravages of smoking even years after they quit, as well as exposure to second-hand smoke and other pollutants.
A new campaign is underway to raise awareness of COPD by encouraging people over 45 who may be at risk to get a simple breathing test. The spirometry test determines your lung functioning by measuring the air a person can breathe out and the time it takes to do so.
National Health Lung and Blood Institute, COPD
Their public awareness campaign, Learn More Breathe Better
Are you drinking too much and don't even know it ?
The Accidental Binge Drinker: How Much We Really Pour
Chances are you're drinking far more alcohol than you think.
"Often my clients think they are just having one or two drinks, when really they're having more like three or four," says Lisa R. Young, a New York University nutritionist.
Try this experiment at home. Take your favorite wine or beer glass and use water to estimate drink size. Pour the contents into a measuring cup to see how close you come to the standard 5-ounce wine portion or 12-ounce beer portion.
I did this myself, and was stunned by the result. I filled my favorite wine glass just half full. But I still ended up with 300 milliliters or 10.14 ounces -- double the standard serving size.
--
Dr. Young says that a solution is for drinkers at restaurants to count each glass of wine, beer or spirits as two servings.
Yoga has now been shown to give an immune boost to breast cancer survivors even as it promotes psychological well-being and delivering the physical output equivalent to a moderate-intensity exercise.
Yoga gives immune boost to breast cancer survivors
I've been practicing yoga for over 15 years now, albeit only in classes. Apart from walking, yoga is my principal form of exercise. I'm lucky to have a teacher who understands middle-aged bodies so we're not endlessly doing upside down dog and sun salutations. Instead he aims to get us to a state of energized relaxation and often incorporates elements of qi gong.
For those who have never tried yoga or for beginners, here are some of the physiological and psychological health benefits of yoga. For the middle-aged, I believe yoga is better than most other forms of exercise because of the low risk of injury, the focus on the breath and the relaxed nature of the "asanas" or postures that build strength and balance.
According to medical scientists, yoga therapy is successful because of the balance created in the nervous and endocrine systems which directly influences all the other systems and organs of the body.
He brought you AOL back in the times when email was the latest thing and an email address with your name as part of it was really cool. After making AOL an online behemoth, Case merged it with the mass media giant Time-Warner in 2001, just in time for the dot-com recession. This merger of online and mass media never quite worked but not for lack of vision. Since resigning from the board in 2005, Case has been looking at health care
His new venture is Revolution Health. In a video on the site, he tells us his vision and why he started it.
From the Press Release "Manifesto"
- After three months in preview mode, Revolution Health today formally launched RevolutionHealth.com, a comprehensive health and medical information site, specially designed with the family's Chief Health Officer - busy moms and other caregivers - in mind. Revolution Health also announced the acquisition of TLContact, Inc., the company that provides CarePages, the leading Internet service for building online communities that support communication among family and friends when someone is receiving care.
There is a lot of great health information and tools on the Internet, but nobody has assembled them in a way that is compelling and useful for consumers who want to take more control of their family's health. We've scoured the landscape to find the very best health tools and content, and we've put them together all in one place - and made them all free. We will continue to work to build - in partnership with dozens of organizations and millions of people - the Internet's leading health site."
I've been impressed with CarePages, a service that helps keep family and friends updated and last year wrote a post about them. Today, more than 500 hospitals offer CarePages to their patients, though anyone can create one free of charge.
Case writes a blog on CarePages chronicling Revolution Health.
The website itself is quite good, with as much attention to healthy living as to getting good information and support if sick. You can know your risk, build your own health page in beta, find out what's bothering you with symptom-checker, find a doctor and rate yours, find drugs and treatment and rate yours, assess and track your health with 150 tools, even organize your health records.
With videos about common medical procedures and meditation, with expert medical bloggers and ratings by other people just like you, I'm betting that Revolution Health will help you get to a healthier place.
I suffered with migraines for years and years. They ended after a 5 day juice fast at a funky spa in Key West where I gave up smoking and the medications I was taking for the headaches. So I was pleased to read this.
Headaches may be good for your brain
Is it possible that suffering through years of migraine headaches actually might have a beneficial effect on the brain?
A provocative new study has raised that improbable prospect after finding that longtime, middle-aged migraine sufferers showed less cognitive decline and memory loss over a period of 12 years than a group of migraine-free adults.
Researchers can't explain what could be a silver lining in the agonizing cloud that is migraine, but it's possible that the physiological changes that accompany the headaches might protect brain cells over the long haul.
Beyond offering a modicum of solace to the 30 million migraine sufferers in the United States, the strange finding, if verified, could offer researchers new leads into ways to preserve memory in aging brains.
"This is really a surprise," said Bhupendra Khatri, director of the Center for Neurological Disorders at Aurora St. Luke's Medical Center. "This is going to stimulate a lot of research."
This just in.
Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds.
A fruity cocktail may not only be fun to drink but may count as health food, U.S. and Thai researchers said on Thursday.
Adding ethanol -- the type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits -- boosted the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found.
If you are menopausal, stop taking hormones.
Sharp drop in breast cancer victims tied to reduced hormone use.
"At first I didn't believe it — it was so astounding," said Donald Berry of the University of Texas, who led the analysis published in The New England Journal of Medicine. "But it really looks like it's a story that holds together."
--
"An awful lot of breast cancer was caused by doctors' prescriptions," said Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Researchers said the findings should encourage more women to discontinue hormone use or take them at the lowest dose for the shortest time necessary.
"These data add to the message that we really should be discouraging women from initiating menopausal hormones," said Marcia Stefanick of Stanford University. "We need to stop underplaying those risks. They are very real."
'Two to three months," the doctor said, almost reluctantly, when I finally posed the question. That's eight to twelve weeks. Sixty to 90 days. Or 2,160 hours, if you want to get right down to it.
--
Eventually - what a luxurious word.
A 39-year -old columnist, living with cancer, says Focusing on present matters most.
From the New Scientist, Do coffee and cigarettes protect against Parkinson's?
People with Parkinson's disease are less likely to be smokers and coffee drinkers than their healthy siblings, according to a study of family members. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that some substance in tobacco might protect the brain against this devastating neurological disorder and sheds new light on coffee's effects on the disease.
---
One possible mechanism involves a signalling chemical in the brain called dopamine. The death of dopamine-producing cells in the brain appears to drive the progression of Parkinson's disease, and both smoking and drinking coffee can raise levels of the chemical.
--
Scott emphasises that the results of his study should not give anyone an excuse to start smoking. He says that the well-established risks of smoking – such as developing lung cancer or having a heart attack – "absolutely" outweigh any potential protection it might offer against Parkinson's.
"And relative to lung disease and heart disease, Parkinson's disease is far less common," he adds.
Good bacteria and bad bacteria in An unexpected explanation for the rise of depression.
BACTERIA cause disease. The idea that they might also prevent disease is counterintuitive. Yet that is the hypothesis Chris Lowry, of Bristol University, and his colleagues are putting forward in Neuroscience. They think a particular sort of bacterium might alleviate clinical depression.
And it all began with a chance observation an oncologist had while using an experimental treatment for lung cancer.
To find out what was going on, Dr Lowry turned to mice. His hypothesis was that the immune response to M. vaccae induces the brain to produce serotonin. This molecule is a neurotransmitter (a chemical messenger between nerve cells) and one symptom of depression is low levels of it.
So we have a study "intriguing for two reasons."
1. the possibility of a vaccination against depression.
2. a new line of inquiry as to why depression is becoming more common.
One explanation for the rise of these two conditions is the hygiene hypothesis. This suggests a lack of childhood exposure to harmless bugs is leading to improperly primed immune systems, which then go on to look for trouble where none exists.
I wrote last year in Can We Be Too Clean? Apparently so. Clean living may make us sick and depressed.
Those of you who have never dieted or have given up dieting will take cheer in the new study that shows diets damage health
The analysis, published in the journal American Psychologist, concluded dieters may actually be damaging their health.
Research has shown the repeated rapid weight gain and loss associated with dieting can double the risk of death from heart disease, including heart attacks, and the risk of premature death in general.
Such yo-yo weight loss has also been linked to stroke and diabetes and shown to suppress the immune system, making the body more vulnerable to infection.
Dr Mann said: "We decided to dig up and analyse every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all.
"Their weight would have been pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.
"The benefits of dieting are simply too small and the potential harms of dieting are too large for it to be recommended as a safe and effective treatment for obesity."
People who want to lose weight just have to change into eating a healthy balanced diet and exercise.
A serious heart attack is as much of an emergency as being shot.
“We deal with it as if it is a gunshot wound to the heart,” Dr. Antman said.
Cardiologists call it the golden hour, that window of time when they have a chance to save most of the heart muscle when an artery is blocked.
Don't think of a clutching your heart pain like you see in the movies. Consider pressure, a feeling of heaviness, shortness of breath.
Most patients describe something like Mr. Orr’s symptoms — discomfort in the chest that may, or may not, radiate into the arms or neck, the back, the jaw, or the stomach. Many also have nausea or shortness of breath. Or they break out in a cold sweat, or have a feeling of anxiety or impending doom, or have blue lips or hands or feet, or feel a sudden exhaustion.
But symptoms often are less distinctive in elderly patients, especially women. Their only sign may be a sudden feeling of exhaustion just walking across a room. Some say they broke out in a sweat. Afterward, they may recall a feeling of pressure in their chest or pain radiating from their chest but at the time, they say, they paid little attention.
The time in getting to an emergency room in time for treatment hasn't changed in 10 years - it's still 110 minutes, one hour and 50 minutes.
People drive themselves to the ER or get a friend to do so. And then they wait to get triaged. They don't come in with sirens blazing, treatment already started, and jump to the head of the line.
They don't call 911 because of embarrassment. Said Dr. Skopp
“But it is better to be checked out and find out it’s not a problem than to have a problem and not have the therapy,” he said.
The ideal treatment you want is angioplasty, the ideal treatment.
Second best is a clot-dissolving drug like tPA even though it opens up only 60-70% of blocked arteries and kills 1 out of 200 patients with a stroke to the brain.
Dr. Antman has a message for patients: With a disease as serious as heart disease, those who take responsibility are often the ones who survive.
Having a heart attack, even if it turns out well, as his did, is a life-altering experience, Mr. Orr said.
The New York Times follows Keith Orr, 44, who thought he was doing great, what with his improved diet and exercise and all, so he stopped taking his medications. Luckily, he was in Boston. Lessons of Heart Disease, Learned and Ignored.
John Stossel calls the media, part of the Fear Industrial Complex, because they profit from scaring us to death.
Of course, they feature abducted children, shark attacks, nightmare scenarios about global warming because they are good stories and ratings soar. Reporters and writers were likely English majors, not math majors and they are clueless when it comes to statistics assessing risk.. He calls them "statistically illiterate."
We should Worry About the Right Things, Stossel says.
Ordinary flu kills 36,000 people a year in the USA
Bird flu has killed 0.
Swimming pools are more dangerous to children than guns.
A child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.
Cars are the most dangerous things around. About 36,500 were killed in car accidents last year, about 100/day.
So take our reporting with heavy skepticism. Ignore us when we hyperventilate about mad cow disease and the danger of asbestos hidden behind a wall.
Instead, worry about what's worth worrying about: driving, acting reckless, smoking cigarettes, drinking too much, and eating too much.
The New York Times reports on the Beverage Guidance System, drawn up by a panel of experts on nutrition and health, who looked at health problems - heart disease, thinning bones, stroke, diabetes, dementia, obesity and cancer - linked to beverages drunk or not drunk.
The best beverages to drink?
1. Water
2. Coffee and tea
3. Milk
When we learned that Tony Snow's cancer returned, those of us who liked him were saddened. None perhaps more than cancer survivors who took much inspiration from him.
G.M.Roper who announced he had cancer in 2006, published a note Tony had sent him which should be sent to everyone who's just learned about their cancer.
First, enlist as much love and support from friends as you can, and don't be shy. One of the great distinguishing characteristic of Americans is that they always want a chance to do something good. ... most will rally in wondrous and suprising ways. Give them a chance to help. They'll come through for you.
Second, talk to other cancer patients. They have street cred others don't.
--
Third, learn as much as you can -- ignorance is your enemy -- but don't get too hooked on internet sites. Many of them are idiotic...
---
Fourth, keep the fighting attitude...Once the game is on, you don't have any choice. You have to play. So play to win.
--
Fifth: Realize that fear is a complete waste of time, even though it will creep up on you from time to time.
---
Sixth, relish and embrace your faith...Prayer is an amazing thing, and the healing power of prayer -- something I always suspected before getting cancer -- is palpable and real.
With prayers and hopes for his second recovery
The breast cancer of Elizabeth Edwards has returned in an advanced form and has spread beyond the breast to the bone. While the doctors say it is incurable, it is treatable. Her husband John Edwards offered to pull out of the presidential race to stay by her side, but she insisted he stay in and he will.
My feelings are confused. I feel bad for them both and then heartened by their courage and puzzled by their decision. Who would put themselves through the rigors of a campaign when the days may be short?
But then again, who knows?
Dean Barnett, who had his own body blow of a sudden diagnosis 11 years ago has some understanding of what they are going through.
I think I have some understanding and I know I have some sympathy. They’re working through all of this. Their first instinct is not to surrender. That’s good, and it’s what you would have expected. People who seek the presidency aren’t the types who give up or even compromise easily.
THROUGH THE YEARS, I’VE COME TO VIEW SERIOUS and progressive illness as an ever constricting circle with oneself at the center. The interior of the circle represents the contents of one’s life. As the circle gets smaller, things that were inside get forced out. Some of these things are dearly missed; other items that were once thought precious get forced to the exterior and turn out to go surprisingly unlamented.
-
The Edwards have begun their own journey of that sort. Whether they still find presidential politics at the center of their lives a few months from now is an open question. Regardless, the journey is theirs, and one would have a heart of stone to wish them anything other than good luck and Godspeed.
He's right. Best wishes and good luck to them both.