The Value of the Generalist -or- Why I Am Still An OT
I graduated from a rural state university. I had looked at a couple of other OT schools, but they weren't the right fit for me. I've touched a few times on how I finally decided on majoring in OT. During a college tour, I explained the debate between architecture and OT to a professor who encouraged me to look into home modifications. That was my first area of OT that I found particularly exciting, and it stayed that way for the first years of OT school, right up until my Level II fieldwork approached in said field. That fieldwork let me know that I could not continue with that specialty, and I haven't done any w...
Source: Occupational Therapy Notes - April 20, 2015 Category: Occupational Health Tags: practice issues Source Type: blogs
LITFL Review 178
Welcome to the 178th LITFL Review. Your regular and reliable source for the highest highlights, sneakiest sneak peeks and loudest shout-outs from the webbed world of emergency medicine and critical care. Each week the LITFL team casts the spotlight on the blogosphere’s best and brightest and deliver a bite-sized chuck of FOAM.The Most Fair Dinkum Ripper Beauts of the WeekThis week, the EMCrit podcast features part 2 of “Who Needs an Acute PCI” with Dr Steve Smith. This, along with part 1, is a must listen for all providers. [MG] The Best of #FOAMed Emergency MedicineDoes CAP therapy need to included coverage...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - April 19, 2015 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Marjorie Lazoff, MD Tags: Education LITFL review Source Type: blogs
A History of General Refrigeration
Ancient societies figured out that hypothermia was useful for hemorrhage control, but it was Hippocrates who realized that body heat could be a diagnostic tool. He caked his patients in mud, deducing that warmer areas dried first.
Typhoid fever, the plague of Athens in 400 BC and the demise of the Jamestown Colony in the early 1600s, led Robert Boyle to attempt to cure it around 1650 by dunking patients in ice-cold brine. This is likely the first application of therapeutic hypothermia, but it failed to lower the 30 to 40 percent mortality rate. One hundred years later, James Currie tried to treat fevers by applying hot,...
Source: Spontaneous Circulation - March 31, 2015 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
A History of General Refrigeration
Ancient societies figured out that hypothermia was useful for hemorrhage control, but it was Hippocrates who realized that body heat could be a diagnostic tool. He caked his patients in mud, deducing that warmer areas dried first.
Typhoid fever, the plague of Athens in 400 BC and the demise of the Jamestown Colony in the early 1600s, led Robert Boyle to attempt to cure it around 1650 by dunking patients in ice-cold brine. This is likely the first application of therapeutic hypothermia, but it failed to lower the 30 to 40 percent mortality rate. One hundred years later, James Currie tried to treat fevers by applying ho...
Source: Spontaneous Circulation - March 31, 2015 Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs
More on Molecular Tweezers to Treat Amyloid Accumulation
Amyloids are misfolded proteins that gather to form solid aggregates in tissues. Their presence grows with age and some types of amyloid are known to contribute to the pathology of specific age-related conditions: amyloid-β in Alzheimer's disease and misfolded transthyretin in senile systemic amyloidosis for example. Any potential rejuvenation toolkit must include a reliable technology platform for clearance of the various forms of amyloid. Of late researchers have been working on the use of what they call molecular tweezers for this purpose, and seem to be making meaningful progress:
An international team of more than ...
Source: Fight Aging! - March 31, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Physician Specialty Silos Can Cause Friendly Fire Casualties
It’s no secret that medicine has become a highly specialized business. While generalists used to be in charge of most patient care 50 years ago, we have now splintered into extraordinarily granular specialties. Each organ system has its own specialty (e.g. gastroenterology, cardiology), and now parts of systems have their own experts (hepatologists, cardiac electrophysiologists) Even ophthalmologists have subspecialized into groups based on the part of the eye that they treat (retina specialists, neuro-ophthalmologists)!
This all comes as a response to the exponential increase in information and technology, making ...
Source: Better Health - January 13, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Dr. Val Jones Tags: Health Policy Opinion Cardiology CMS Eric Topol Inpatient Rehabilitation NPR Patient Care Silos Smartphones Technology Thought Leaders Source Type: blogs
People who looked at this article, also looked at...
In my previous post Ok, I admit it, I'm stuck (a title people seem to really like) I highlighted the difficulty in finding meaning in our clickstream data (the data generated by users interacting with the site). One thing that I had thought about and a couple of people have subsequently raised is an Amazon style 'People who looked at this article, also looked at this one..', a feature I find really interesting and frequently useful.So, taking some earlier work on mapping UTI data I started doing further analysis but it was based on this graph.I I started with an article that looked in an interesting place and p...
Source: Liberating the literature - January 8, 2015 Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs
Neuroprosthetics
is a relatively new discipline at the boundaries of neuroscience and biomedical engineering, which aims at developing implantable devices to restore neural function. The most popular and clinically successfull neuroprosthesis to date is the cochlear implant, a device that can restore hearing by stimulating directly the human auditory nerve, by bypassing damaged hair cells in the cochlea. Visual prostheses, on the other hand, are still in a preliminary phase of development, although substantial progress has been made in the last few years. This kind of implantable devices are designed to micro-electrically stimulate nerves...
Source: Positive Technology Journal - December 16, 2014 Category: Technology Consultants Tags: Neurotechnology & neuroinformatics Source Type: blogs
The Future of Cord Blood Research
You may have heard that the stem cells in your baby’s umbilical-cord blood can save lives, but if you’re like most people, you have only a vague notion of how stem cells work — or which diseases they can treat. Right now, certain cancers, blood disorders, and immune disorders, among other conditions, are being successfully treated with cord-blood stem cells — and thanks to cord blood research, the list of conditions and diseases that may be treated by these stem cells is growing.
Why is it important to know about the cord blood research and what types of diseases it can treat? Knowing what cord blood can and...
Source: Cord Blood News - December 15, 2014 Category: Perinatology & Neonatology Authors: joyce at mazelabs.com Tags: babies blood disorder brain development Cord Blood medical research parents pregnancy stem cells affordable cord blood banking bone marrow breast feeding cerebral palsy cord blood banking fees cord blood banking information cor Source Type: blogs
Transforming Rural Health Care: High-Quality, Sustainable Access To Specialty Care
Editor’s note: This post is also authored by Kate Samuels, a project manager at Brookings. It is informed by a case study, the fourth in a series made possible through the Merkin Initiative on Physician Payment Reform and Clinical Leadership, a special project to develop clinician leadership in health care delivery and financing reform. The case study will be presented on Monday, December 8 using a “MEDTalk” format featuring live story-telling and knowledge-sharing from patients, providers, and policymakers.
Health care for patients in rural communities across the United States remains a unique challenge. Des...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - December 5, 2014 Category: Health Management Authors: Kavita Patel, Margaret Darling, and Mark McClellan Tags: All Categories Connected Health Disparities Health Care Delivery Health IT Payment Physicians Policy Primary Care Quality Workforce Source Type: blogs
The Devil is in the Details
This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write about some of the nuances of clinical research and statistical techniques. The introduction is long winded, but I think it’s useful to try and explain why I think this is so important.Our current approach to clinical research has fundamental flawsIn 2014 clinical research forms the backbone of our medical practice. Unfortunately there is an increasing feeling that our systems of research have not been serving us as well as we think. Amongst the many excellent talks that came out of smaccGOLD in 2014 were a number of speakers highlighting the limitations and confli...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - December 5, 2014 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: David Denman Tags: Education clinical trials david denman devil in the details Evidence Based Medicine research Source Type: blogs
A Look at the State of Neuroprosthetics Development
Interfacing with the central nervous system is an important part of replacing many structures in the body, whether with new tissues or artificial structures that accomplish at least some of the same functions. Much of the work in this direction is concerned with the development of more functional artificial limbs and powered exoskeletons, but there is a lot more than just that going on in the research community:
Neural control of a prosthetic device for medical applications is now becoming commonplace in labs around the world. In its simplest form, a neuroprosthetic is a device that supplants or supplements the input and/...
Source: Fight Aging! - November 6, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Using Olfactory Bulb Cells to Treat Spinal Injury
Here is recent news of an approach to spinal injury that has produced benefits in one patient. It is worth tempering optimism until larger trials are attempted, however, as nerve regeneration has proven to be highly variable between individuals. The published paper on the results is open access, but very slow to load at the moment.
A paralysed man has been able to walk again after a pioneering therapy that involved transplanting cells from his nasal cavity into his spinal cord. Darek Fidyka, who was paralysed from the chest down in a knife attack in 2010, can now walk using a frame. The treatment used olfactory ensheathin...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 21, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Stem Cell Tourism and Patient Education
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 19.0400009155273px;"><span style="line-height: 19.0400009155273px;">What is the role of public education and stem cell tourism? What type of education is available to patients, caregivers and the public? Can public education actually change people’s minds such that they won’t undergo an unproven stem cell-based intervention (SCBI)? These are the questions I will discuss here. But first, let’s just give a brief description of stem cell tourism and outline some of the proposals discussed to stop this industry.</span></p>...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - September 23, 2014 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Hayley Dittus-Doria Tags: Health Care Patient Education stem cell tourism syndicated Source Type: blogs
How Neural Stem Cells Help to Repair Damage
Researchers have identified a novel mechanism by which neural stem cells can help to repair and assist other brain cells:
Stem cells hold great promise as a means of repairing cells in conditions such as multiple sclerosis, stroke or injuries of the spinal cord because they have the ability to develop into almost any cell type. Now, new research shows that stem cell therapy can also work through a mechanism other than cell replacement. A team of researchers [has] shown that stem cells "communicate" with cells by transferring molecules via fluid filled bags called vesicles, helping other cells to modify the damaging immune...
Source: Fight Aging! - September 19, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
