A World Without Pain
In an immersive virtual reality environment called “Snow World,” burn patients distract themselves from their pain by tossing snow balls, building snowmen and interacting with penguins. Credit: Ari Hollander and Howard Rose, copyright Hunter Hoffman, UW, www.vrpain.com .
You glide across an icy canyon where you meet smiling snowmen, waddling penguins and a glistening river that winds forever. You toss snowballs, hear them smash against igloos, then watch them explode in vibrant colors.
Back in the real world, a dentist digs around your mouth to remove an impacted tooth, a procedure that really, really hurts. Could exp...
Source: Biomedical Beat Blog - National Institute of General Medical Sciences - July 26, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Chris Palmer Tags: Cool Images Physical Trauma and Sepsis Behavioral Research Burns Pain Source Type: blogs
Free Speech and the University of Cape Town
< p > < a href="http://www.cato.org/people/flemming-rose" > Cato adjunct scholar Flemming Rose < /a > who recently < a href="http://www.cato.org/multimedia/cato-video/flemming-rose-receives-2016-milton-friedman-prize-advancing-liberty" > won the 2016 Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty < /a > has been disinvited from speaking at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The academic freedom committee of the university had asked Rose to give the annual TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture. The Vice Chancellor of the university rescinded the invitation. He argued that Rose ’s lecture might divide the campus leading to p...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 25, 2016 Category: American Health Authors: John Samples Source Type: blogs
Opioid Prescriptions Drop for Three Years in a Row
For the first time in decades, the number of opioid prescriptions in the United States is starting to fall, according to a recent report by the New York Times based on data from IMS Health For each of the past three years – 2013, 2014, and 2015 – prescriptions for opioids have declined. This marks the first sustained drop since OxyContin hit the market in 1996.
Some experts believe that the drop is an early signal that the long-running and often-discussed opioid epidemic may have reached its peak and that doctors and prescribers have begun to heed the warnings about the highly addictive nature of the drugs. It's also...
Source: Policy and Medicine - June 28, 2016 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Brain Bank focuses on military personnel
C. Dirk Keene, MD PhDThe Seattle Times recently reported that a new brain bank, designated the Pacific Northwest Brain Donor Network, has been launched at the University of Washington. “We are going to study these brains to the full extent that we are capable,” said Dr. C. Dirk Keene, who leads the neuropathology core at UW Medicine. “They are so rare, so valuable and just so precious, and can give us so much information about what these exposures mean.”Since the program started in March, researchers have acquired three brains. They include donations from one military veteran, a middle-aged man who had not bee...
Source: neuropathology blog - June 2, 2016 Category: Radiology Tags: trauma Source Type: blogs
The Coolest Medical Robots in Sci-fi Movies
Here are my top 9 movies with medical robots.
As a science fiction fanatic, movies that speculate about the future and depict how robots will be used fascinate me. Some of them describe robots as dumb mechanical machines while others merge them with artificial intelligence. All of their ideas may still become reality.
1) Ender’s Game
One of the iconic sci-fi books meant to be on the big screen, Ender’s Game features a surgical robot performing brain surgery on one of the lead characters. The robot was actually designed by Blake Hannaford and his biorobotics team at the University of Washington, which means it was as...
Source: The Medical Futurist - May 31, 2016 Category: Information Technology Authors: berci.mesko Tags: Medical Robotics Medical Science Fiction GC1 Source Type: blogs
Hastening Death by Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking – 2 Day Conference
I am looking forward to this conference on VSED.
As recent op-eds suggest, this is an under-discussed means of hastening death.
Hastening Death by Voluntarily Stopping Eating and
Drinking: Clinical, Legal, Ethical,
Religious and Family PerspectivesVoluntarily
stopping eating and drinking (VSED) is one way to assuredly hasten death.
Though generally regarded as legal, VSED has not gained nearly as much public
or scholarly attention as the physician-assisted dying that is legal in
only five states. This interdisciplinary conference will address
ethical, lega...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - May 24, 2016 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD Tags: Health Care medical futility blog syndicated Source Type: blogs
Health Affairs Founding Editor John Iglehart Receives William B. Graham Health Services Research Prize
Health Affairs congratulates our founding editor, John K. Iglehart, on being named the 2016 recipient of the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research. The Prize, awarded by The Baxter International Foundation and the Association of University Programs in Health Administration (AUPHA), will be presented on Thursday, June 23, 2016, during the AUPHA Annual Meeting in Kansas City, Missouri.
Since 1986, the award has recognized “the contributions of health services researchers who have had a significant impact on the health of the public in one of three primary focus areas: health services management, health polic...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - May 20, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Chris Fleming Tags: Elsewhere@ Health Affairs health services research William B. Graham Prize Source Type: blogs
Post-doctoral position in sensorimotor learning and control of speech production -- UW, Ludo Max Lab
The Laboratory for Speech Physiology and Motor Control (PI Ludo Max, Ph.D.) at the University of Washington (Seattle) announces an open post-doctoral position in the areas of sensorimotor integration and sensorimotor learning for speech production. The position will involve experimental work on both typical speech and stuttering. The lab is located in the University of Washington's Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences and has additional affiliations with the Graduate Program in Neuroscience and the Department of Bioengineering. See http://faculty.washington.edu/ludomax/lab/ for more information. The successful ca...
Source: Talking Brains - May 9, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Health Affairs May Issue: Prescription Drugs, Global Health & More
This study is an extension of Bai and Anderson’s 2015 Health Affairs study about hospitals with the highest markup over Medicare allowable costs.
States investing more in social services and public health had healthier residents
Policy makers are now placing more emphasis on the role of social determinants in influencing individual and population health. To date, though, little has been known about the correlation between state spending for social services and public health and the health of individuals. Elizabeth Bradley of Yale University and coauthors broke new ground by finding that people living in states that spen...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - May 2, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Lucy Larner Tags: Elsewhere@ Health Affairs Featured Health Affairs journal Source Type: blogs
Mindfulness Effective for Chronic Low Back Pain in Clinical Trial | Pain Research Forum
Government officials, physicians, and the public are increasingly aware of a need to move away from using opiate drugs to treat chronic pain. More and more, doctors are searching for ways to help patients manage pain with non-pharmacological interventions. In line with this trend, new findings now support the use of mindfulness to treat chronic low back pain.
In a clinical trial published March 22 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), subjects who underwent mindfulness training for eight weeks were more likely to report improvements in pain, lasting up to a year, compared to people who received whatev...
Source: Psychology of Pain - May 2, 2016 Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs
Fight Aging! Newsletter, May 2nd 2016
This study is the first CAR T-cell trial to infuse patients with an even mixture of two types of T cells (helper and killer cells, which work together to kill cancer). With the assurance that each patient gets the same mixture of cells, the researchers were able to come to conclusions about the effects of administering different doses of cells.
In 27 of 29 participants whose responses were evaluated a few weeks after the infusion, a high-sensitivity test could detect no trace of their cancer in their bone marrow. The CAR T cells eliminated cancers anywhere in the body they appeared. Of the two participants who did n...
Source: Fight Aging! - May 1, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs
Back to Paper After U.S. Coast Guard EHR Debacle: Proof of Hegel's Adage "We Learn From History That We Do Not Learn From History"?
I have become blue in the face writing about healthcare information technology mismanagement over the years. In fact, the original focus of my 1998 website on health IT (its descendant now at http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases) was on HIT project mismanagement.If this industry actually had learned anything from history, I would not be reading nor writing about brutally mismanaged HIT endeavors in 2016. Sadly, that is not the case.The Coast Guard, founded by Alexander Hamilton, has this as its motto and mission:http://www.gocoastguard.com/about-the-coast-guardSemper Paratus - Always Ready.The ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - April 29, 2016 Category: Health Management Tags: Coast Guard EPIC Healthcare IT failure Leidos Lockheed Martin Politico Source Type: blogs
Back to Paper After U.S. Coast Guard EHR Debacle: Proof of Hegel's Adage " We Learn From History That We Do Not Learn From History " ?
I have become blue in the face writing about healthcare information technology mismanagement over the years. & nbsp; In fact, the original focus of my 1998 website on health IT (its descendant now at < a href= " http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases " > http://cci.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/cases < /a > ) was on HIT project mismanagement. < br / > < br / > If this industry actually had learned anything from history, I would not be reading nor writing about brutally mismanaged HIT endeavors in 2016. & nbsp; Sadly, that is not the case. < br / > < br / > The Coast Guard, founded by Alexander Hamilton, has thi...
Source: Health Care Renewal - April 29, 2016 Category: Health Management Tags: Coast Guard EPIC Healthcare IT failure Leidos Lockheed Martin Politico Source Type: blogs
The Scientist on BioViva's Initial Test of Human Gene Therapies
The Scientist has published a measured piece on the first results from BioViva's initial test of human gene therapy, telomerase and follistatin overexpression, and the broader context in which this single person test took place. The results indicate that the telomerase gene therapy most likely worked in the sense of delivering telomerase to a significant number of cells, including the immune cells used to measure average telomere length. That is an important thing to validate up front, before thinking about any sort of other outcomes, or expanding to a trial of some sort. Historically, gene therapies have proven to be high...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 25, 2016 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs
UC Davis Storer Lecture series - since 1963 87% of speakers are male
I wrote this blog post a while ago but never published it partly out of fear for upsetting some of my colleagues. I try to be brave about such things, but I guess I just did not quite get up the poxy. Well, today something came up that stimulated me to write the post. I got an email announcement for a talk that seems potentially quite interesting. The problem is not the talk. The problem is with the endowed Lectureship that this talk is connected to. So here is the post I have worked on on and off over the last year or more.UC Davis has an endowed lecture series- the Storer Lectureship in the Life S...
Source: The Tree of Life - April 20, 2016 Category: Microbiology Authors: Jonathan Eisen Source Type: blogs
