Group items tagged

Journal of Skin CancerVolume 2011 (2011), Article ID 571734, 6 pagesdoi:10.1155/2011/571734 © 2011 Mary H. Lien and Vernon K. Sondak.

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. The Canadians had stories like the 1946 Toronto Globe and Mail report of a woman in labor who was refused help by three successive physicians, apparently because of her inability to pay. In Australia, a 1954 letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald sought help for a young woman who had lung disease. She couldn't afford to refill her oxygen tank, and had been forced to ration her intake "to a point where she is on the borderline of death." In Britain, George Bernard Shaw was at a London hospital visiting an eminent physician when an assistant came in to report that a sick man had arrived requesting treatment. "Is he worth it?" the physician asked. It was the normality of the question that shocked Shaw and prompted his scathing and influential 1906 play, "The Doctor's Dilemma." The British health system, he charged, was "a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering."

"According to a small German study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), researchers found that DHEA improved sexuality and well-being in 24 women diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency. The double-blind study found that women who took 50 mg of DHEA daily reported significant increases in how often they thought about sex, how interested they were in sexual activity, and their levels of both mental and physical sexual satisfaction. These women also reported improvement in mental health issues such as obsessive-compulsive traits, depression, anxiety, and other psychological conditions. The most significant improvements were seen four months after treatment began. "

Fewer than half of all clinical trials recently published in journals with high impact factors are adequately registered, and about a third of those that are registered properly show discrepancies between the registered primary outcome and the one that actually gets reported.

"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

Haven't read this report from Dr. Mercola yet. I assume it concerns nutritional medicine and preventive medicine, and that these things aren't breakthroughs but fairly standard advice.

DAFLON 500 mg can be combined with any therapeutic agent; in fact no drug interactions have been reported. This point is very important, considering that patients can suffer concomitant diseases and may require other therapies. Even more, on long-term treatment compared with placebo, no evidence was found of any statistically significant variation in laboratory parameters, such as red cell count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, liver function (SGPT, SGOT), or other blood parameters

The frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct is a matter of controversy... Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others...This metareview is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.

There is reasonable evidence that the use of imiquimod for small (<2 cm) superficial BCC that occur other than on the face provides outcomes only marginally less satisfactory than surgery. There would be a place for imiquimod in treating patients with frequent multiple primary lesions when access to surgery is difficult or where clinical judgment may be influenced by patient factors as reported in some of the studies, eg, where patients may have contraindications to surgery.  It was noted that if recurrences occurred in this study they mostly occurred during the first 9 months after the end of treatment. The initial response was therefore predictive of long-term outcome so these authors recommend and encourage continued monitoring of skin lesions.

The proportion of subjects who were clinically clear at the 2-year follow-up visit was estimated to be 82.0%. Imiquimod was tolerated when applied daily, with erythema reported for all subjects participating in the study. The recurrence rate observed suggests that once daily dosing and 5x/week dosing yield similar clearance rates, but daily dosing increases local skin reactions.

The proportion of subjects who were clinically clear at the 2-year follow-up visit was estimated to be 82.0%. Imiquimod was tolerated when applied daily, with erythema reported for all subjects participating in the study. The recurrence rate observed suggests that once daily dosing and 5×/week dosing yield similar clearance rates, but daily dosing increases local skin reactions.

Analysis & report regarding health spending in the current (2008-09) economic crisis. Health Update No. 7, produced by the International Coordination Group for Health (ICGH)

Clinical studies have reported that oral fish oil supplementation has beneficial effects in rheumatoid arthritis and among some patients with asthma, supporting the idea that the n-3 PUFA in fish oil are anti-inflammatory. There are indications that inclusion of n-3 PUFA in enteral and parenteral formulas might be beneficial to patients in intensive care or post-surgery.

This July 2009 report considers different populations in need of care coordination, summarizes current evidence of effectiveness, describes the various entities that can serve as focal points for coordinating care, and details the possible financing and payment options that can support these approaches.

Downloadable slideshows from this November 2007 conference. For report PDFs: (1) http://is.gd/3AoNu (2) http://is.gd/3AoXG

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]

Government portal for the CDC. Provides medical and health care information, research, policies, reports, agencies, experts, tools, resources, contacts, and news.