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"Hop up on the table, Honey." mThat's how an x-ray technician addressed my 89-year-old mother-in-law in 2001, when we took her for knee x-rays. Mom, who had advanced osteoporosis and arthritis as well as confusion and heart problems, had long since given up hopping. When it became obvious that she needed assistance, the technician grabbed her arm -- as if pulling on another sore appendage would magically raise the rest of her onto the table. It didn't. This incident has become our personal mantra for expressing what is wrong with America's health care system. Having helped our four parents during their final years and having both had cancer ourselves as well as other medical problems, we have had experiences with five nursing homes, two personal care facilities and a half dozen hospitals. We've lost count of the doctors, drugstores and health insurance plans. All of us have had health insurance, though some policies were better than others. Nonetheless, we have experienced incident after incident demonstrating the waste, ignorance and apathy which is rampant in the system. Unable to list them all, I have been heretofore reluctant to write about a handful of them lest the reader be persuaded that the problem is with only that hospital, only that nursing home or only that doctor. There is, however, an increasing crisis of confusion, mismanagement and ill-preparedness which is at the core of our healthcare system. We are all familiar at least with the trend line if not the specifics for healthcare costs. According to WhiteHouse.gov, "The United States spends over $2.2 trillion on health care each year-almost $8,000 per person." That's sixteen percent of the economy. Healthcare costs are projected to increase to almost twenty percent ($4 trillion a year) by 2017. Meanwhile forty-six million Americans are without health insurance (14,000 more each day), premiums and co-pays are rising and more reasons are used to refuse coverage both to those willing to pay and thos

"Hop up on the table, Honey." mThat's how an x-ray technician addressed my 89-year-old mother-in-law in 2001, when we took her for knee x-rays. Mom, who had advanced osteoporosis and arthritis as well as confusion and heart problems, had long since given up hopping. When it became obvious that she needed assistance, the technician grabbed her arm -- as if pulling on another sore appendage would magically raise the rest of her onto the table. It didn't. This incident has become our personal mantra for expressing what is wrong with America's health care system. Having helped our four parents during their final years and having both had cancer ourselves as well as other medical problems, we have had experiences with five nursing homes, two personal care facilities and a half dozen hospitals. We've lost count of the doctors, drugstores and health insurance plans. All of us have had health insurance, though some policies were better than others. Nonetheless, we have experienced incident after incident demonstrating the waste, ignorance and apathy which is rampant in the system. Unable to list them all, I have been heretofore reluctant to write about a handful of them lest the reader be persuaded that the problem is with only that hospital, only that nursing home or only that doctor. There is, however, an increasing crisis of confusion, mismanagement and ill-preparedness which is at the core of our healthcare system. We are all familiar at least with the trend line if not the specifics for healthcare costs. According to WhiteHouse.gov, "The United States spends over $2.2 trillion on health care each year-almost $8,000 per person." That's sixteen percent of the economy. Healthcare costs are projected to increase to almost twenty percent ($4 trillion a year) by 2017. Meanwhile forty-six million Americans are without health insurance (14,000 more each day), premiums and co-pays are rising and more reasons are used to refuse coverage both to those willing to pay and thos

Professor Fuchs from the Clinical Neurobiology Laboratory, German Primate Center in Goettingen, will present the latest findings on how brain cells can be adversely affected by stress and depression. He will explain how the adult brain is generating new cells and which impact these findings will have on the development of novel antidepressant drugs. Contact: Sonja Mak s.mak@update.europe.at 43-140-55734 European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Source:Eurekalert (2008)

"Lancet 2010: There is a U-shaped relationship between glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) levels and mortality in people with diabetes, say researchers, meaning that intensive glucose-lowering therapy could be as harmful as uncontrolled hyperglycemia.\n\nWriting in The Lancet, Craig Currie and team (Cardiff University, UK) conclude that if their findings are confirmed, then diabetes guidelines may need to be revised to include a lower as well as an upper HbA1c threshold.\n\nCurrie's team used the UK General Practice Research Database from November 1986 to November 2008 to obtain data on two cohorts of patients aged 50 years and older with Type 2 diabetes.\n\nThe patients comprised 27,965 individuals whose treatment had been intensified from oral monotherapy to combination therapy with oral blood-glucose lowering agents, and 20,005 who had changed to insulin-containing regimens."

"More than three-quarters of healthcare executives believe their industry's most valuable asset is going to be information contained in electronic medical records...hundreds of billions of gigabytes of health and medical information will be industry's most valuable asset in 5 years. The value, however, must be unlocked by finding ways to overcome a lack of standards, privacy concerns, and technology limitations that could hinder use of the data." || NOTE: This data has already been used by private medical insurance companies to dig up "preexisting conditions" that allow them to drop coverage (rescission) on potentially unprofitable subscribers. ||

New findings in rodents and human brain shed light on the mechanisms of major depressive disorder (MDD), uncovering over-expression of MKP-1 (mitogen-activated protein kinase [MAPK] phosphatase-1)...and identifying a new therapeutic target. MKP-1, also known as dual-specificity phosphatase-1 (DUSP1), is a member of a family of proteins that dephosphorylate both threonine and tyrosine residues and thereby serves as a key negative regulator of the MAPK cascade4, a major signaling pathway involved in neuronal plasticity, function and survival This study identifies MKP-1 as a key factor in MDD pathophysiology, and as a new target for therapeutic interventions.f Here we use whole-genome expression profiling of postmortem tissue and show significantly increased expression of mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) phosphatase-1 (MKP-1, encoded by DUSP1, but hereafter called MKP-1) in the hippocampal subfields of subjects with MDD compared to matched controls. MKP-1, also known as dual-specificity phosphatase-1 (DUSP1), is a member of a family of proteins that dephosphorylate both threonine and tyrosine residues and thereby serves as a key negative regulator of the MAPK cascade4, a major signaling pathway involved in neuronal plasticity, function and survival. We tested the role of altered MKP-1 expression in rat and mouse models of depression and found that increased hippocampal MKP-1 expression, as a result of stress or viral-mediated gene transfer, causes depressive behaviors. Conversely, chronic antidepressant treatment normalizes stress-induced MKP-1 expression and behavior, and mice lacking MKP-1 are resilient to stress. These postmortem and preclinical studies identify MKP-1 as a key factor in MDD pathophysiology and as a new target for therapeutic interventions.

Why Paying for Health Care Reform Is Difficult and Essential - Numbers and Rules. In a short few paragraphs, Dr. Aaron elegantly simplifies and quantifies why finding the $1 trillion for universal coverage is so difficult. He concludes, realistically, soberly,

Can health care organizations and physicians be incented to deliver the highest quality, safest, most reliable, most patient-centric care at the lowest possible cost without Atul Gawande reading the findings of the Dartmouth Atlas into the Congressional Record? I think they can, if they have a strong hospitalist program.

Study "determines" that intake of vitamin D3 and calcium would prevent 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new cases of colorectal cancer annually in the U.S. and Canada. [FIND STUDY, VERIFY]

Study "determines" that intake of vitamin D3 and calcium would prevent 58,000 new cases of breast cancer and 49,000 new cases of colorectal cancer annually in the U.S. and Canada. [FIND STUDY, VERIFY]

Rhabdomyolysis is more frequent than reported in medical journals, by pharmaceutical companies, and other standard avenues of information on adverse side effects in drugs. Polyneuropathy is an increased risk in diabetics... [I must FIND STUDIES, ETC. to support this blogpost]

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Find supporting studies (if possible) to verify Dr. Mercola's claims re: Anti-Viral, Anti-Microbial Benefits of Olive Leaves 

I want to commend, and cry over, what WP wrote: "What I am seeing in needy areas are things/conditions I thought only existed in previous distant centuries. The patient populations have been well described by Charles Dickens and depicted graphically by Giordano in his opera set during the French revolution…a stream of ragged peasants limping across the stage, right here in the United States, in 2009." I can vouch for it here in Vermont…right next to Dartmouth's great Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, NH…where - at BEST - most Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Vermont clients CANNOT find a primary care physician (PCP) taking new patients… and where - at WORST - several women I know are choosing to die from their breast cancer because they cannot afford medical care and will not burden their kids or society. One woman has an MA in Counseling, and the other a PhD in Human Nutrition. These are not uneducated people… But they are most definitely poverty-stricken…and were poor before the 2008 global economic collapse.

A portal directed at consumers of medicine and health care, this website also has CMEs, references, and databases that any health care provider or medical professional would find useful.

This article elaborates the necessity to quit smoking with support from relevant data. While it also states the reason for which a person finds quitting to smoke so difficult, at the same time it also explains why Champix can help you to revive from the situation, effectively.

Erectile dysfunction, also known as impotence, is a condition in which a sexually active man finds trouble in getting or maintaining a long lasting and stable erection.One of the effective and popular oral prescription medications for treating impotence is Levitra.

Diosmin is a naturally occurring flavonoid glycoside that can be isolated from various plant sources or derived from the flavonoid hesperidin. # Diosmin is considered to be a vascular-protecting agent used to treat chronic venous insufficiency, hemorrhoids, lymphedema, and varicose veins. As a flavonoid, diosmin also exhibits anti-inflammatory, free-radical scavenging, and antimutagenic properties.