Pets in the hospital: I’m keeping an open mind
I’m not an animal lover, so it’s difficult for me to relate to the idea that a pet is a real part of the family. But I’ve met enough people who genuinely feel this way, and read the statistics, so I accept it. I have also heard about therapy animals visiting sick children and adults.
Therefore it wasn’t a huge surprise to see a USA Today story about hospitals that are beginning to allow patients’ own pets to visit them in the hospital. There are some health, safety and noise concerns, but at least some places, like the pediatric hospital in Jacksonville are letting it happen. The kids, many su...
Source: Health Business Blog - July 16, 2013 Category: Health Managers Authors: dewe67 Tags: Hospitals Patients health medicine nature research Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 100: Getting Old
This week, FFFF is getting old – with its hundredth edition. The jokes are starting to sag, the factual reliability gave way long ago, but there is still a glimmer in its ancient roving eye. And this week the funtabulously frivolous focus is on… old things.
Question 1.
What is the world’s oldest surviving medical text?
Reveal the funtabulous answer!
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Even in 1900BC, legal disclaimers were amazingly convoluted.
The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus.
The Kahun Papyri were discovered near El-Lahun, Egypt in 1889 B...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - June 5, 2013 Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Jo Deverill Tags: Arcanum Veritas Education Featured Frivolous Friday Five Health Medical Humor FFFF old Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 100: Getting Old
This week, FFFF is getting old – with its hundredth edition. The jokes are starting to sag, the factual reliability gave way long ago, but there is still a glimmer in its ancient roving eye. And this week the funtabulously frivolous focus is on… old things.
Question 1.
What is the world’s oldest surviving medical text?
Reveal the funtabulous answer!
expand(document.getElementById('ddet626372142'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink626372142'))
Even in 1900BC, legal disclaimers were amazingly convoluted.
The Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus.
The Kahun Papyri were discovered near El-Lahun, Egypt in 1889 By ...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - June 5, 2013 Category: Emergency Medicine Doctors Authors: Jo Deverill Tags: Arcanum Veritas Education Featured Frivolous Friday Five Health Medical Humor FFFF old 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
Why Having A Pet Tends to Improve Your Heart Health
There is a correlation between having a pet such as a dog or cat and an improved health status. Exactly how this works was the subject of a recent article (See: American Heart Association: Pets, especially dogs, are good for the heart). Below is an excerpt from it:
An animal companion may not just warm your heart, but also help you maintain a healthy heart....Pet ownership, particularly dog ownership, is probably associated with a decreased risk of heart disease," [said the] director of the cardiac care unit at Baylor College of Medicine....[T]here are 78.2 million owned dogs and 86.4 million owned cats in...
Source: Lab Soft News - May 20, 2013 Category: Pathologists Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Healthcare Delivery Medical Consumerism Source Type: blogs
Q-fever in Spain
The following background data on Q-fever in Spain are abstracted from Gideon www.GideonOnline.com and the Gideon e-book series. [1,2]
Time and Place:
The first cases of Q-fever in Spain were reported in 1950. Q-fever rates are highest in the Basque region (accounting for 60% of community-acquired pneumonias) and Navarre. Pneumonia is the predominant clinical presentation in the north, and hepatitis in the south. Ten outbreaks were registered during 1981 to 1985. 130 cases of Q-fever were reported in the Basque Country during 1981 to 1984; and 1,261 cases in Gipuzkoa (Basque Country) during 1984 to 2004.
Rates of Q-fever ...
Source: GIDEON blog - May 4, 2013 Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Dr. Stephen Berger Tags: Ebooks Epidemiology Graphs ProMED Q-fever Spain Source Type: blogs
UPenn Medical School Establishes Biomedical Informatics Institute
Medical schools are getting much more interested in developing more expertise in the field of bioinformatics. Here's an excerpt from an article about the development of a new bioinformatics center at the UPenn School of Medicine (see: Big data gets a home at University of Pennsylvania’s medical school):
University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia has established a dedicated center for biomedical informatics, underscoring the expansion of big data from drug development to population health. The Institute for Biomedical Informatics will focus on improving patient care and the resear...
Source: Lab Soft News - May 3, 2013 Category: Pathologists Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Clinical Lab Industry News Clinical Lab Testing Healthcare Information Technology Hospitals and Healthcare Delivery Lab Information Products Laboratory Industry Trends LIS Definitions and Strategy Medical Research Source Type: blogs
Trying to sort out all the STEM and STEM related departments, graduate programs , at #UCDavis
Well, I was in a meeting yesterday for the UC Davis ADVANCE program. This program is an NSF funded project to improve presence of women and underrepresented minorities on the faculty in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). So I decided to see - how many departments at UC Davis might participate in such an initiative. And, well, wow. I knew there were a lot of STEM or STEM-related departments at UC Davis but I did not know there were this many.
Here is a list I compiled of UC Davis STEM or STEM-related Departments. I included medical departments here since many people in such...
Source: The Tree of Life - April 27, 2013 Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Jonathan Eisen Source Type: blogs
The Most Dangerous Greeting Your Child May Ever Receive
Conclusion
What appeared at first glance to be an act of charity on behalf of Hallmark Cards now appears to be something far more sinister. Hallmark Cards is doing more than making a tax-deductible donation to the government. In addition to recommending that parents keep up to date with their children’s vaccine schedules (because the corporate leaders will profit from increased vaccination rates), they are also heavily linked to the testing of vaccines on innocent animals and humans.
Once highly regarded as an organization of love and caring, Hallmark Cards now has tarnished its trademark crown with what can only be ...
Source: vactruth.com - April 15, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Christina England Tags: Christina England Top Stories David Hall Donald Hall For America's Babies Hallmark MenAfriVac MRIGlobal PATH Quinvaxem Unicef Source Type: blogs
International Trade in Online Medical Services
Simon Lester
The hard-working Cato interns pointed me to this article discussing a constitutional challenge to restrictions on the online provision of veterinary services:
A retired Texas veterinarian has filed a federal lawsuit challenging state regulations that bar him from evaluating animals and giving veterinary advice over the Internet.
Since 2002, Ronald Hines, 69, of Brownsville, Tex., has used his website to provide veterinary advice—sometimes for free and sometimes for a flat $58 fee. Sometimes his clients are overseas with limited access to veterinary services. He gets lots of questions from people who find w...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 12, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Simon Lester Source Type: blogs
Veterinary Applications of Real-time PCR for Detection and Diagnosis of Infectious Agents
from Alan McNally writing in Real-Time PCR: Advanced Technologies and Applications:The detection and diagnosis of veterinary infectious diseases is an area in which the potential of Real-time PCR has been best demonstrated. In particular Real-time PCR has been successfully applied as a front line tool in the diagnostic algorithm for notifiable veterinary viral pathogens such as Avian Influenza, foot-and-mouth disease, bluetongue virus, as well as rabies and Newcastle disease virus. The rapidly transmissible nature of these agents necessitates near real-time detection and diagnosis in suspected infected animals to allow imp...
Source: Microbiology Blog: The weblog for microbiologists. - April 11, 2013 Category: Microbiology Source Type: blogs
2013 UK Medicine applicants wanted...
by hcp20 (Posted Tue Mar 26, 2013 11:45 am)Hello Medics,I'm an educational researcher at the University of Kent conducting a research project into gender differences in clinical applications (i.e. for Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine) in the 2012-13 UCAS application round.If you've applied for UK Medicine this academic year, regardless of the status of your application(s), I'd be really grateful if you would complete this short (12 questions) survey about your course choices: [url="https://survey.kent.ac.uk/clinical13"]https://survey.kent.ac.uk/clinical13[/url]It's entirely anonymous - as it's a gender study, th...
Source: Med Student Guide - March 26, 2013 Category: Medical Students Source Type: forums
Celebrating my Father's Life
As I sit at my father's bedside, managing the increasing heaviness of his breathing, I'm doing my best to keep his lips moist, his extremities warm, and the dosing of his comfort care medications appropriate so there is no air hunger.People from my parents' past are calling and emailing me, telling me their stories and reveling in the impact my father had on their lives. They've told me:He inspired them to go into engineering (he's a patent lawyer trained as an engineer)He inspired them with his kindness and gentlenessHis tenacity living with multiple sclerosis for 23+ years inspired them to approach their own illnes...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - March 11, 2013 Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs
Nativis Returns
Well, since it's Friday, I thought I'd quickly revisit one of the favorite companies I've written about here: Nativis. You'll recall that this is the outfit that claimed "photonic signatures" of drugs were as effective as the physical molecules themselves. My comments (and those of the readership here) led to some public exchanges with the company's chief financial officer, but last I heard of them they had moved out of San Diego and back to Seattle. Readers mentioned that the company was developing some sort of cancer-treatment device based on their ideas.
A couple of alert readers have now sent along links to the latest...
Source: In the Pipeline - February 22, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Snake Oil Source Type: blogs
FDA offers new guidance on developing drugs for Alzheimer’s disease
The purpose of this guidance is to assist sponsors in the clinical development of drugs for the treatment of the various stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia.
Alzheimer's Reading Room
The diagnosis of AD for the purpose of clinical trial enrollment is generally based on consensus diagnostic criteria developed by the National Institute of Neurologic and Communicative Disorders and Stroke – Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Disorders Association (NINCDS-ADRDA) (now the Alzheimer’s Association) that were proposed in 1984.
These criteria are clinical in nature (with the exception of the diagnosis of defini...
Source: Alzheimer's Reading Room, The - February 9, 2013 Category: Dementia Authors: Bob DeMarco Source Type: blogs
