Lyme Disease: The Great Imitator
Spring is my favorite season. Warmer weather, budding flowers and lots of greenery in yards, gardens and parks encourages outside activities and fills me with energy. The spring season also brings out lots of crawling and flying critters like bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds, as well as some of the more unpleasant pests like ticks and mosquitos. If you enjoy spending time outside like I do, hiking, gardening or walking the dog, be aware that ticks and their bites can be not only annoying, but dangerous.
Jana’s Experience
Jana Braden found out how dangerous tick bites can be the hard way. She enjoyed the outdoors a...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - May 13, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Chronic Conditions Source Type: blogs
The battle for bowel flora
3d render illustration of colorful bacteriaThere is no longer any debate: the composition of bowel flora in the human gastrointestinal tract is a critical aspect of human health, both bowel health and overall health.
The status of bowel flora can spell the difference between having an autoimmune condition and not having an autoimmune condition, being diabetic or not being diabetic, being emotionally happy or not being happy, and developing colon cancer or not developing colon cancer. The composition of bowel flora and their ability to metabolize prebiotic fibers/resistant starches to butyrate and other fatty acids play im...
Source: Wheat Belly Blog - April 25, 2015 Category: Cardiology Authors: Dr. Davis Tags: Wheat Belly Lifestyle antibiotics bowel flora grains herbicides microbiota pesticides Source Type: blogs
Are Shortages Going Down Or Not? Interpreting Data From The FDA And The University Of Utah Drug Information Service
Drug shortages are a significant public health issue that have affected many critically important drugs including chemotherapy treatments, nutritional support preparations, and antibiotics. Drug shortages can result in delaying or denying needed care to patients and may cause practitioners to prescribe an alternative therapy that poses greater risk or that may be less effective for the patient. Drug shortages have interfered with clinical trials, in some cases delaying research on important new therapies.
The year 2011 was a critical one in this public health crisis. After several years of steady increases in new shortage ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - April 8, 2015 Category: Health Management Authors: Marta Wosinska, Erin Fox, and Valerie Jensen Tags: Access All Categories Consumers Health Care Delivery Health Law Pharma Policy Public Health Research Source Type: blogs
8 tips to save money on generic drugs
80 percent of prescriptions in the U.S. are for generic medications. Generics are supposed to be less expensive alternatives to brand name drugs. However, prices for certain generics are rapidly increasing. 50 percent of generic medications increased in price in the last year and 10 percent more than doubled in cost during the same time period. Among them are thyroid replacement hormone, doxycycline, digoxin and other heart medications, tetracycline, albuterol (pill form), and certain medications for blood pressure and high cholesterol.
Continue reading ...
Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage you...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 6, 2014 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Martine Ehrenclou, MA Tags: Meds Medications Patients Source Type: blogs
Research and Reviews in the Fastlane 045
Welcome to the 45th edition of Research and Reviews in the Fastlane. R&R in the Fastlane is a free resource that harnesses the power of social media to allow some of the best and brightest emergency medicine and critical care clinicians from all over the world tell us what they think is worth reading from the published literature.
This edition contains 10 recommended reads. The R&R Editorial Team includes Jeremy Fried, Nudrat Rashid, Soren Rudolph, Anand Swaminathan and, of course, Chris Nickson. Find more R&R in the Fastlane reviews in the R&R Archive, read more about the R&R project or check out the f...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - August 25, 2014 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Anand Swaminathan Tags: Clinical Research Emergency Medicine Intensive Care R&R in the FASTLANE critical care Education literature recommendations Research and Review Source Type: blogs
Fwd: Secondary causes of pseudotumor cerebri syndrome
From: Djacobs272@aol.comTo: dhj1.neurology@blogger.comSent: 5/13/2014 2:29:28 P.M. Eastern Daylight TimeSubj: Secondary causes of pseudotumore cerebri syndrome (from Neurology, 2013; 81:1159-1165 cerebrovenous abnormalities:cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT)bilateral jugular thrombosis or surgical ligationmiddle ear or mastoid infectionincreased right heart pressuresuperior vena cava syndromeAV fistulashypercoagulable statesMedications and exposures:Antibiotics: tetracycline, minocycline, doxycycline, nalidixic acid, sulfa drugsVitamin A and retinoidshypervitaminosis A, isotretinoin, all trans retinoic acid...
Source: neurologyminutiae - May 14, 2014 Category: Neurologists Source Type: blogs
Gouging contd. - How to make a $300 drug cost $30,000 by Jane M. Orient
As though double-digit increases in insurance premiums weren’t enough, how about triple-digit cost inflation for drugs? It is really simple to do, and the U.S. Senate is about to do it.
If you’re a drug manufacturer, and you’d like to make 100 times more than a person would otherwise have to pay for a drug, get Congress to expand the tremendous power of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), perhaps already the most powerful anti-competitive force on the planet.
The proposed bill is S. 959, the Pharmaceutical Compounding Quality and Accountability Act, also known as the “FDA&nbs...
Source: PharmaGossip - July 7, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Drug Shortages Remain in 2013
While Congress and federal health agencies have been constantly busy enacting new healthcare and drug legislation and implementing various regulations, one key issue has remained at the forefront—drug shortages. For example, the University of Utah Drug Information Service counted 300 "active" -- or ongoing -- drug shortages at the end of April, just about the same as it did at the end of December 2012 (299 shortages) and September 2012 (282 shortages), as reported by Medpage Today.
On the brighter side, the number of new shortages is well off its pace from years past, with 54 so far this year, Erin Fox, PharmD, dir...
Source: Policy and Medicine - June 28, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Thomas Sullivan Source Type: blogs
Gouging 101 spotted by Dr Judy Stone
Summer is Lyme Disease Season. The Price Of The Drug To Treat It Just Exploded. By Maryn McKenna If you’ve been reading for a while, you might remember someposts about nationwide shortages of drugs. The Food and Drug Administration was concerned, and so were very senior physicians working in infectious disease, cancer, everyday emergency medicine and even veterinary care.The crisis faded from view, as they do. So it wasn’t much noticed that back in March, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned of an FDA alert over an apparent shortage of doxycycline, an old and inexpensive drug that is used mostly for...
Source: PharmaGossip - June 2, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Lessons Learned from a Medical Mission
Nurses can serve as excellent physician extenders.My mentors in austere medicine warned me that with an interpreter I would be lucky to see 30 patients per day. That concerned me because the local missionaries indicated at our first organizational meeting in the Dominican Republic that we were expecting to see 100 patients per day. On top of that, 100 cards were being handed out at each of the four locations we would be visiting.
As the single physician in the group of 19 team members (seven nurses), these seemed like very high expectations. Working in a setting that uses physician extenders and emergency medicine resid...
Source: M2E Too! Mellick's Multimedia EduBlog - May 2, 2013 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
Lyme Disease
Pathophysiology of Lyme Disease
Lyme disease is an
1) infection with Borrelia burgdorferi via tick bite
2) previous thinking held tick vector was Ixodes but transmission is now thought by some experts to be possible with additional tick species
3) occurs in stage I and stage II days to weeks after infection and in stage III months to years after infection (usually with preceding latency period
Signs and Symptoms
Stage I
1) characteristic expanding annular rash with central clearing (“bull’s eye or “target” rash) that occurs in only 40% of infections
Stage II
2) multiple secondary annular skin lesio...
Source: Inside Surgery - March 19, 2013 Category: Surgeons Authors: Editor Tags: Infectious Disease babesia bulls eye rash coinfections deer tick erythema migrans hyperbaric ixodes target rash Source Type: blogs
