MONITOR GLAUCOMA WITH AN EYE IMPLANT AND A PHONE

Lowering a patient’s internal eye pressure is currently the only way to treat glaucoma. A tiny eye implant paired with a smart phone could help doctors measure and lower eye pressure.

For the 2.2 million Americans battling glaucoma, the main course of action for staving off blindness involves weekly visits to eye specialists who monitor—and control—increasing pressure within the eye.

Now, a tiny eye implant could enable patients to take more frequent readings from the comfort of home. Daily or hourly measurements of eye pressure could help doctors tailor more effective treatment plans.

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Burial Boys of Ebola

God Bless these courageous men and healthcare workers ...some of whom have contracted ebola and died: Link
Another link about these health workers: Link

Seeing-Eye Robot Assists Visually Impaired, No Clean-Up Required

Two familiar items not usually paired: a robot and a cane. At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Cang Ye and his engineering lab team have prototyped a robotic walking stick for the blind. This robot-cane combines the basic physics of a walking stick and the technological efficiencies of a computer system.
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WE JUDGE TRUSTWORTHY FACES IN A SNAP

Our brains are able to judge the trustworthiness of a face even when we cannot consciously see it.

“The results are consistent with an extensive body of research suggesting that we form spontaneous judgments of other people that can be largely outside awareness,” explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in New York University’s psychology department.

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One study estimated that on average, prior authorization requests consumed about 20 hours a week per medical practice

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I’m all for controlling medical costs and trying to apply rational rules to our use of expensive medications and procedures. But in the current system, everything seems to be in service of the corporate side of medicine, not the patient. The clinical rationale and the actual patient — not to mention the doctors and nurses involved in the care — are at best secondary concerns.

In the end, we were able to keep Mr. V.’s blood pressure under control. My blood pressure, however, was a different story.

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Wireless Eye Implant Continuously Measures Intraocular Pressure (VIDEO)

Measuring a person’s intraocular pressure (IOP) can help diagnose and monitor glaucoma, but just like blood pressure it varies and can be subject to the “white coat effect.” Continuous monitoring of IOP to detect spikes is practically impossible when using a traditional tonometer, but a new eye implant from Germany’s Implandata Ophthalmic Products that makes this possible has been implanted in a first patient as part of a European clinical trial.
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Three Myths About the Brain

Good article not only about the brain but also about how scientific misinformation abounds in pop culture..

Uveal Blues

IN the early 19th century, a French neurophysiologist named Pierre Flourens conducted a series of innovative experiments. He successively removed larger and larger portions of brain tissue from a range of animals, including pigeons, chickens and frogs, and observed how their behavior was affected.

His findings were clear and reasonably consistent. “One can remove,” he wrote in 1824, “from the front, or the back, or the top or the side, a certain portion of the cerebral lobes, without destroying their function.” For mental faculties to work properly, it seemed, just a “small part of the lobe” sufficed.

Thus the foundation was laid for a popular myth: that we use only a small portion — 10 percent is the figure most often cited — of our brain. 

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Sitting around an outdoor table at the Red Crab, a restaurant on the tropical island of Grenada festooned with palm trees and fiery bougainvillea, a dozen aspiring doctors bashfully conceded that they had been, at best, near misses when it came to getting into medical school in the United States.
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There are more than 70 medical schools across the Caribbean, about half of them catering to Americans. A handful — including St. George’s, Saba University, Ross University in Dominica and American University of the Caribbean in St. Maarten, all of which are for-profit — have qualified for federal financial aid programs by demonstrating that their standards are comparable to those in the United States. And they report that high numbers of their test-takers — 95 percent or more — pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam Step 1, a basic science test.

But quality is all over the map in the Caribbean.

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