Futura Genetics Analyzed my Genome – Genetic Test Review
Through the rise of personalized medicine, carrying out genome tests at home became feasible. With a PhD in genomics, I’m always curious and excited to try out novelties in my field. This time, Futura Genetics offered me a genetic test, and I was happy to give it a try.
Genome Testing is Sexy
Genome tests have been in the spotlight for years. Patients have been able to order such tests online with 23andme, Navigenics or Pathway Genomics since 2005, 2006 and 2007. The basic assumption is that anyone can order a test from home and learn about their risks for certain medical conditions, and what lifestyle choices they sho...
Source: The Medical Futurist - September 20, 2016 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Genomics Futura Genetics future gc3 Genetic testing Genome Innovation Source Type: blogs
Death is not the enemy. More physicians need to realize that.
I knew it was bad when she couldn’t tell me her name. I watched her face fill with frustration as a word she had uttered countless times over eight decades somehow got lost between her brain and her lips.
It was 2 a.m. and I was on call as the surgical resident. I had been told that a patient with bladder cancer was being transferred from another hospital, and, as these things tend to happen, she finally arrived in the middle of the night.
I peeked at her and saw she was doing OK, so I let the nurses get her settled in as I looked over her medical chart.
Continue reading ...
Your patients are rating you online: How to r...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 20, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: < a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/nancy-wang" rel="tag" > Nancy Wang, MD, MPH < /a > Tags: Physician Palliative care Patients Source Type: blogs
Worse than death?...Dependence
This study out of Philadelphia surveyed 180 hospitalized patients with serious illness on their views of various health states, and how severe or unacceptable they considered them. What was fascinating was that the scale used was based on death as the benchmark on their Likert scale—“wors e than death, neither better nor worse than death, a little better than death, somewhat better than death, or much better than death.”The study revealed that in this group of patients with advanced cancers, heart failure, and COPD, health states with significant dependence on machines and on care from other people were frequently de...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - August 13, 2016 Category: Palliative Care Tags: albert cancer death/dying heart failure pulmonary/copd research Source Type: blogs
The dilemmas faced by the chronically ill
After more than fifteen years of being mostly housebound by chronic illness (which includes chronic pain), here are a few of the dilemmas I’ve faced over and over. I’m confident that I’m not alone in my “should I/shouldn’t I?” world.
Do I accept an invitation from a friend to get together or do I refuse it?
If I refuse the invitation, depending on who issued it, it may be the last one I’ll receive from this person. In addition, if I refuse, I’ll feel even more isolated from in-person contact than I already do.
If I accept the invitation, I might be too sick to visit when the day arrives. I don’t want to d...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - August 8, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: < a href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/post-author/toni-bernhard" rel="tag" > Toni Bernhard, JD < /a > Tags: Patient Pain management Patients Source Type: blogs
The Spectacular Incompetence of 3rd Party Payers
By SAURABH JHA, MD
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all competence is alike, but every incompetence is incompetence in its own way. Every time I think I’ve seen the horizon of incompetence, I’m dealt a surprise. The sun never sets on incompetence. In healthcare, incompetence can be found in odd places, such as three recent examples I encountered with third party payers.
Case 1: Downgrading Caviar to Boiled Salmon
A patient was referred for a CT angiogram run off – which is a CT scan of the arteries of the belly, pelvis, both legs and feet – a very detailed and costly study. The cardiologist suspected a pseudoaneurysm of the ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - July 31, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 1st 2016
Fight Aging! provides a weekly digest of news and commentary for thousands of subscribers interested in the latest longevity science: progress towards the medical control of aging in order to prevent age-related frailty, suffering, and disease, as well as improvements in the present understanding of what works and what doesn't work when it comes to extending healthy life. Expect to see summaries of recent advances in medical research, news from the scientific community, advocacy and fundraising initiatives to help speed work on the repair and reversal of aging, links to online resources, and much more.
This content is...
Source: Fight Aging! - July 31, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Changing Stressors
As life goes on, my stressors have changed. Or maybe just the list gets rearranged. When I first started blogging, breast cancer was my primary concern. But then my health started to fall apart and things have changed.At my breast cancer diagnosis, I quickly prepared myself to cope with breast cancer and I came up with a plan - support groups, etc. And I dealt with it. Then I got gall stones and had my gall bladder out. Then I found out I should be seeing an endocrinologist about my thyroid cancer which made it harder for me to ignore it. When I went to one she sent me for an ultrasound which found some thing on the t...
Source: Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog - July 7, 2016 Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: cancer bonds stress support Source Type: blogs
When it rains, it pours …
Stefano and I returned to Italy a couple of days ago. Those ten days we spent in the U.S.A. might well have been the worst days of my life thus far…worse even than when I received my cancer diagnosis…I mean, it was simply awful awful awful, every day, every minute of every day…
The “good” thing is that Stefano and I did get to Cape Cod in time to say goodbye to Mom, and in fact she is still alive. But I don’t think she will last very much longer. She is amazingly weak…The nurse practitioner, whom Stefano and I went to see shortly after we arrived, told us that “there is no...
Source: Margaret's Corner - May 19, 2016 Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Margaret Tags: Blogroll Source Type: blogs
When it rains, it pours…
Stefano and I returned to Italy a couple of days ago. Those ten days we spent in the U.S.A. might well have been the worst days of my life thus far…worse even than when I received my cancer diagnosis…I mean, it was simply awful awful awful, every day, every minute of every day…
The “good” thing is that Stefano and I did get to Cape Cod in time to say goodbye to Mom, and in fact she is still alive. But I don’t think she will last very much longer. She is amazingly weak…The nurse practitioner, whom Stefano and I went to see shortly after we arrived, told us that “there is no...
Source: Margaret's Corner - May 19, 2016 Category: Cancer & Oncology Authors: Margaret Tags: Blogroll Source Type: blogs
Visualize the abnormal prostate with Medcomic
In this Medcomic, we’ll visualize three common abnormalities of the prostate. Let’s meet our new friends. On the left is Burney and he could certainly benefit from a trial of antibiotics and an analgesic. The large fellow in the middle straining to urinate goes by the name of Turp. On the far right is Grampa Addy, currently dealing with the stresses of a slow-growing adenocarcinoma.
The normal prostate is a rounded structure with a median sulcus between two lateral lobes. It encircles the urethra just inferior to the bladder. The ducts of the seminal vesicles join that of the ductus deferens to form the ejaculatory d...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - April 3, 2016 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Jorge Muniz, PA-C Tags: Conditions Cancer Source Type: blogs
Peritoneal Taps for Removing Ascites Fluids
Paracentesis, or a peritoneal tap, is a procedure emergency physicians often perform to obtain ascitic fluid for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes. Catheter aspiration of fluid is performed to determine the etiology in new onset ascites, to look for infection or presence of cancer, or simply to relieve pressure from a painful, distended abdomen that sometimes can interfere with breathing. Contraindications to the procedure might include an acute abdomen, severe thrombocytopenia, or a coagulopathy. Relative contraindications include pregnancy, a distended urinary bladder, abdominal wall cellulitis, adhesions, or distended ...
Source: M2E Too! Mellick's Multimedia EduBlog - March 1, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
Cancer Surgery At Low-Volume Hospitals In California
More than 100 years ago, Boston Surgeon Dr. Ernest Amory Codman took note of data on surgeries at a small semi-private hospital and some other larger and more prestigious hospitals.
“They clearly showed,” he wrote, “that the semi-private hospital not only did more operations, but that the mortality was much lower, especially in some of the more difficult branches of surgery.”
Not quite 50 years ago, results from the National Halothane Study produced some of the first solid statistical evidence of a link between the volume of services and outcomes. Since then, the work of numerous investigators has solidified and ex...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - February 10, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Laurence Baker and Maryann O'Sullivan Tags: Featured Health Professionals Hospitals Organization and Delivery Quality California hospital volume Physicians surgery Source Type: blogs
Healthcare’s Deadly Data Problem
By LEONARD D’AVOLIO
I have read with interest the ongoing conversation about the ProPublica Surgeon Scorecard in THCB and beyond, not because I believe this latest effort at measuring quality will have a significant effect on patient care, but because behind the latest public metric debate – in fact behind all healthcare metric debates – is a major systemic problem. This problem somehow always seems to remain unseen. We acknowledge that measuring healthcare quality is difficult and that using medical data is challenging, but I’m not convinced that people completely understand why or how measurement and ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - October 27, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The fascinating journey of new immunotherapy drugs to treat cancer
Question: What do all these cancers have in common: melanoma, lung, kidney, bladder, ovarian, head and neck, Hodgkin lymphoma, stomach, breast (and others)?
Answer: They have all shown evidence of meaningful, durable responses when treated with one or more of the new immunotherapy drugs. And that is truly amazing, not to mention very unexpected, even by the experts who know this stuff.
That’s the message that is coming out of the 2015 annual scientific meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, where thousands of doctors, researchers and others from around the world make the annual trek to Chicago to shar...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - June 16, 2015 Category: Journals (General) Authors: J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, MD Tags: Conditions Cancer Source Type: blogs
