3 common misconceptions about doctors

Dr. Evans makes some excellent points here...
Uvealblues
In the current climate of health care reform, it is important to understand doctors and the work they do. I have found 3 common misconceptions, held even by doctors themselves, concerning the job of being a doctor
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Brian Greene: Why is our universe fine-tuned for life?

Starving in India: A Scribe Tries to Save a Life

Last fall, I conducted field research on starvation in India along with my colleague Ankita Aggarwal from the New Delhi-based Centre for Equity Studies, a think tank. As we traveled across several states, hearing tale after tale of families battling chronic hunger to stay alive, it became clear to us that the media play a critical role in holding public officials accountable. A powerful news report can generate a wave of public outrage over starvation – and can result in government action.
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Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued long ago that independent India had successfully managed to prevent famine because of its democratic political structures. He was referring not just to electoral processes, but also the independent media that shines a light on government wrongdoing and galvanizes the public’s attention when starvation deaths happen.
“The government cannot afford to fail to take prompt action when large-scale starvation threatens. Newspapers play an important part in this, in making the facts known and forcing the challenge to be faced,” Mr. Sen wrote in a 1984 article in the journal Food and Nutrition.
Indeed, the catalyst for the “right to food” public interest litigation the Supreme Court has been hearing since 2001 was evidence of starvation deaths reported by several media outlets.

Saving Lives in a Time of Cholera

Cholera is on the rise around the world. Last year, according to Unicef, West and Central Africa had “one of the worst ever” cholera outbreaks. An outbreak in Haiti sickened 1 in 20 Haitians and killed more than 7,000 people. The World Health Organization estimates that there are between three million and five million cases of cholera each year, and between 100,000 and 120,000 deaths. New and more virulent strains are emerging in Asia and Africa, and the W.H.O. says that global warming creates even more hospitable conditions for the disease.
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With cholera, speed matters. It can kill very quickly — in a few hours if victims are already malnourished. And since the incubation period for the cholera bacteria can be as short as two hours, it spreads fast.
Until now, early action has been nearly impossible. Governments, fearing stigma and a loss of tourism, often cover up cholera, and international organizations sometimes go along with the fiction. Even when governments  do call cholera by its name and start inviting international help and expertise, the W.H.O. and Unicef are bureaucracies — and such invitations can come weeks after a widespread epidemic is under way.
A new partnership between two organizations that battle cholera will make it possible to get supplies and knowledge to cholera-stricken areas much faster.
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Their most important message is the importance of early and massive hydration — if a patient is too weak to drink, then IV solution is necessary. “The biggest mistake is that patients do not get enough hydration fast enough,” Mr. Pietroni said. “You have to give huge amounts of IV fluid in the first three hours — seven or eight liters. In Dhaka at the end of April you see people with IVs in each arm and leg. But as soon as the patient can drink, you switch them to oral rehydration.”
Flooding patients produces Lazarus-like effects.

How Exercise Can Prime the Brain for Addiction

Statistically, people who exercise are much less likely than inactive people to abuse drugs or alcohol. But can exercise help curb addictions? Some research shows that exercise may stimulate reward centers in the brain, helping to ease cravings for drugs or other substances. But according to an eye-opening new study of cocaine-addicted mice, dedicated exercise may in some cases make it even harder to break an addiction.
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New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind.
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Scientists are finding that the same changes to chromosomes that happen as people age can also be found in people experiencing major stress and depression.

The phenomenon, known as "accelerated aging," is beginning to reshape the field's understanding of stress and depression not merely as psychological conditions but as body-wide illnesses in which mood may be just the most obvious symptom.

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Scientists say more work needs to be done to figure out exactly how severe a psychological experience must be to affect telomere length. Some research suggests that as few as two episodes of major depression may be sufficient to affect cell structure. Other studies indicate that the more bouts of depression a person experiences, the more impact there is on telomere length.

The "holy grail" of this area of work is to try to find the molecular mechanisms by which depression or stress take their toll on the body, says P. Murali Doraiswamy, head of the division of biological psychiatry at Duke University, who isn't involved in telomere work. Such information could help provide clues about how much of age-related disease is due to genetics versus life experience, and whether it can be reversed, he says.

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Resistance spread 'compromising' fight against malaria

Scientists have found new evidence that resistance to the front-line treatments for malaria is increasing.

They have confirmed that resistant strains of the malaria parasite on the border between Thailand and Burma, 500 miles (800km) away from previous sites.
Researchers say that the rise of resistance means the effort to eliminate malaria is "seriously compromised".
The details have been published in The Lancet medical journal.

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Rise of the Medical Expertocracy

Excellent article...

Uvealblues

Both Democrats and Republicans want to introduce the paternalism of 'best practices' into health care

Should everyone take vitamin D, and if so, how much? At what age and how often should a woman have a mammogram? Should a healthy man be screened for prostate cancer, and if cancer is diagnosed, how should he be treated?
As the health-care debate heats up again in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans will try to convince us that they have the experts to answer all our health questions. President Barack Obama and the Democrats propose panels of government experts to evaluate treatments and, in the president's words, "Figure out what works and what doesn't." Republicans claim that the free market (that is, insurance companies with their own experts) will pay for value and empower consumers. Both sides insist that no one will come between us and our doctors.

Democrats and Republicans share a fundamental misconception about medical care. Both assume that, as in mathematics, there is a single right answer for every health problem.

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Social media campaign aims at fighting food crisis in Africa's Sahel

Vast portions of west and central Africa have become so dry that they can't support crops, livestock and the millions of people who live there.

The Sahel - a belt of arid land that stretches across Africa below the Sahara Desert - is a zone prone to cycles of drought, and eight countries are seeing the worst of it this time.
The United Nations estimates that more than 10 million people are in danger of starving to death. Aid workers on the ground say it's getting worse quickly.
In response, UNICEF is launching a 24-hour social media campaign on Tuesday to raise awareness about the food crisis in Africa.
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'Island of the Blind' Riles a Greek Public Facing Cutbacks

The island of Zakynthos, long known for its Venetian ruins and turquoise waters, lately has new fame in Greece—as "the island of the blind."
The Greek health ministry is investigating on Zakynthos after local officials flagged records showing what they said is an implausibly high number of disability claims for blindness.
About 1.8% of the island's population of 39,000 claimed the benefit last year, according to the health ministry. That is around nine times the prevalence of blindness estimated for many European countries in a 2004 study published in a World Health Organization journal.
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Millions of germs fly when you enter the room

.YALE (US) — A person’s mere presence in a room can add 37 million bacteria to the air every hour, a new study finds

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From South Sudan to Yale

Paul Lorem epitomizes a blunt truth about the world: talent is universal, but opportunity is not.

Lorem, 21, is an orphan from a South Sudanese village with no electricity. His parents never went to school, and he grew up without adult supervision in a refugee camp. Now he’s a freshman at Yale University. 

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 As Lorem was growing up, the region was engulfed in civil war, and, at age 5, he nearly died of tuberculosis. In hope of saving his life, his parents dropped him off at the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya. They returned to their village and later died, and Lorem was raised in the camp by other refugee boys who were only a bit older. 

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His class sometimes consisted of 300 pupils meeting under a tree, and Lorem didn’t have his own notebooks or pencils or schoolbooks, but he practiced letters by writing in the dust. His friends died of war, disease and banditry, but he devoured the contents of a tiny refugee camp library set up by a Lutheran aid group.

Teachers took increasing pride in their brilliant student and arranged for Lorem to leave the refugee camp and transfer to a Kenyan school for seventh and eighth grades. That way he could compete in nationwide exams and perhaps get into high school.

Just one problem: those exams were partly in Swahili, a language that Lorem did not speak. But he poured himself into his schoolwork, and classmates helped him. Lorem ended up earning the second highest mark in that entire region of Kenya. 

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Surgery for Diabetes May Be Better Than Standard Treatment

For some people with diabetes, surgery may be the best medicine.

Two studies have found that weight-loss operations worked much better than the standard therapies for Type 2 diabetes in obese and overweight people whose blood sugar was out of control. Those who had surgery, which stapled the stomach and rerouted the small intestine, were much more likely to have a complete remission of diabetes, or to need less medicine, than people who were given the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise.

The surgery also helped many to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol. 

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Better Than A Van Gogh: NASA Visualizes All The World’s Ocean Currents

Our planet is so beautiful in so many ways...

Uvealblues

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio assembled this remarkable animation of the surface currents of our oceans. It’s called Perpetual Ocean, and the full work is 20 minutes of HD video, assembled from a huge amount of satellite, on location and computational data generated by ECCOII (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II). ECCOII itself exists to better understand our oceans and their role in the changing global climate.

Link to a great video of the surface currents of the ocean with nice ambient music...

When Risk Is a Red-Meat Issue

The conflaguration of relative risk and absolute risk is a major issue when looking at any study. The "Numbers Guy" at the Wall Street Journal discusses this with regard to recent studies looking at the risk of death as a function of eating red meat...

Uvealblues

When it comes to evaluating risk, there's a big risk of choosing the wrong number.
Researchers typically measure the effects of, say, a risky health behavior or a controversial new law by comparing how two groups fare. There are two common ways to make the comparison, and the numbers produced can look very different—and be interpreted quite differently by the public. Each can be appropriate, depending on the situation and audience, but listing one without the other is a recipe for confusion, many statisticians say.
Two recent news stories demonstrate how two sets of numbers can describe the same situation. A study by public-health researchers, including several from Harvard University, found that eating one additional serving of processed red meat each day is associated with an increase in the risk of death each year by 20%. But that translated into only two more deaths per 1,000 people per year among those eating the extra meat, or a rise of 0.2 percentage points.
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"Relative risk is the ideal measure for statistical analysis, for addressing scientific questions," says Don Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. "But it is irrelevant for individual decision-making.

Chocolate 'may help keep people slim'

People who eat chocolate regularly tend to be thinner, new research suggests.

The findings come from a study of nearly 1,000 US people that looked at diet, calorie intake and body mass index (BMI) - a measure of obesity.
It found those who ate chocolate a few times a week were, on average, slimmer than those who ate it occasionally.
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Studies Link Daily Doses of Aspirin to Reduced Risk of Cancer

Taking aspirin every day may significantly reduce the risk of many cancers and prevent tumors from spreading, according to two new studies published on Tuesday.


The findings add to a body of evidence suggesting that cheap and widely available aspirin may be a powerful if overlooked weapon in the battle against cancer. But the research also poses difficult questions for doctors and public health officials, as regular doses of aspirin can causegastrointestinal bleeding and other side effects. Past studies have suggested that the drawbacks of daily use may outweigh the benefits, particularly in healthy patients.



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“What really jumps out at you in terms of prevention is the striking 75 percent reduction in esophageal cancer and a 40 to 50 percent reduction in colorectal cancer, which is the most common cancer right now,” Dr. Rothwell said. “In terms of prevention, anyone with a family history would be sensible to take aspirin,” he added.

Vaccines by skin may work better, study shows

Applying vaccines to the upper layers of the skin could stimulate a different and more powerful immune system response than the traditional approach of injecting a vaccine into muscle, according to a growing body of research by Boston scientists.
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Giant squid eyes are sperm whale defence

The world's biggest squid species have developed huge eyes to give early warning of approaching sperm whales.
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The models showed that in general, there is no benefit to be gained from developing eyes bigger than the swordfish's.
The exception is a really large moving object.
Here, large eyes enable better detection of a pattern of point sources of bioluminescence - light given off by tiny organisms - in low-contrast conditions.

This would give the squid warning of a sperm whale approaching at a distance of about 120m, the researchers calculate - potentially allowing it to take evasive action and avoid being eaten.

Invisible Children Responds To The Kony 2012 Viral Video Controversy

After a huge success comes the inevitable backlash. You probably watched the Joseph Kony movie yesterday. Now some critics are saying it’s not as good as it appears to be, but Invisible Children is fighting back.

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