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.