The A word once again
I ' ve written about abortion here before, and now I ' m pretty much just going to repeat myself, but it ' s time to do so.Point one -- and this is important -- conservative evangelicals had absolutely no problem with abortion until the mid-1970s.Historian Randall Balmer tells the story here, and it is absolutely incontrovertible, as this excerpt makes clear:Both before and for several years afterRoe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society andChristianity Today, the flagshi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 7, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wearable Sweat Sensor Warns of Impending Cytokine Storm
Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas, in collaboration with a company called EnLiSense, developed a wearable electrochemical sweat sensor that can detect chemokines in sweat, alerting the wearer and clinicians to a viral or bacterial infection. The device also warns of an impending cytokine storm, where high levels of inflammatory molecules are released by the body all at once, often proving fatal. The wearable could be particularly useful in cases of severe COVID-19, in which a cytokine storm is a significant risk.
Sweat sensors are developing apace, and this latest offering has an interesting application ...
Source: Medgadget - May 5, 2022 Category: Medical Devices Authors: Conn Hastings Tags: Critical Care Diagnostics Emergency Medicine Source Type: blogs
Coping with Dementia Care Burnout
Photo credit Tuva Mathilde Loland
You watch your once mentally sharp loved one decline before your eyes. Their uncontrollable behaviors, mood swings, outbursts, confusion, and memory loss are heartbreaking. The worry that a single lapse in supervision may result in your loved one wandering off, falling down or having some other accident is overwhelming. Caring for a senior with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or another type of dementia involves significant physical, mental, emotional, and financial investments. Family caregivers often struggle to balance dementia care while working, nurturing relationships with their immediate...
Source: Minding Our Elders - May 4, 2022 Category: Geriatrics Authors: Carol Bradley Bursack Source Type: blogs
Learning from This War
BY KIM BELLARD
There’s an old military adage that generals are always fighting the last war. It’s not that they haven’t learned any lessons, it’s more than they learned the wrong lessons. I fear we’re doing that with the COVID pandemic.
The next big health crisis may not come from another COVID variant; it may not be caused by coronavirus at all. Even if we learn lessons from this pandemic, those may not be lessons that will apply to the next big health crisis.
What started me thinking about this is a C4ISRNET interview with Mike Brown, the Director of the Defense Innovati...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 3, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Policy Public Health C4ISRNET health crisis Pandemic Source Type: blogs
Healthcare Suffers from Patient Bias
By KIM BELLARD
If you went to business school, or perhaps did graduate work in statistics, you may have heard of survivor bias (AKA, survivorship bias or survival bias). To grossly simplify, we know about the things that we know about, the things that survived long enough for us to learn from. Failures tend to be ignored — if we are even aware of them.
This, of course, makes me think of healthcare. Not so much about the patients who survive versus those who do not, but about the people who come to the healthcare system to be patients versus those who don’t. It has a “patient bias.”
Survivo...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 2, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy Kim Bellard Patient Bias Survivor Bias Source Type: blogs
45 Never Force Anyone to Talk To You Quotes
You can’t really force someone to do something.
Sure, you may wish that you could sometimes. But trying to do that only tends to drive them away and push you further from what you want.
So in this post I’d like to reinforce that and mention more helpful and healthy alternatives by sharing the best 45 never force anyone to talk to you quotes.
I hope this post will help you see how futile it is to try to force something and what you can do instead. And, perhaps even more importantly, what you can do when someone else is trying to force something – words, actions, thoughts – upon you.
And if you want even mor...
Source: Practical Happiness and Awesomeness Advice That Works | The Positivity Blog - April 28, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Henrik Edberg Tags: Inspirational Quotes Personal Development Source Type: blogs
How To Spot If Your Remote Care Physician Is An A.I.?
I know, this sounds far-fetched, something like a science fiction movie dilemma. But what if it’s not? It is a fact that millions of healthcare workers are missing around the globe. Whether we miss 10 million or 18 million depends on who you ask. We also know that the number of patients in need of healthcare is only growing. And it also seems pretty obvious that with the current medical training models (and healthcare financing) we will never be able to fill this gap. Thus, expecting that A.I. will step in and take over some of the tasks from human practitioners seems only logical. And necessary.
Logical, necessary, b...
Source: The Medical Futurist - April 28, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: Andrea Koncz Tags: TMF Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Bioethics Cyborgization Future of Medicine Science Fiction digital health A.I. doctor Source Type: blogs
Why use that database?
A module done by some of our students in nursing and midwifery involves an assignment, in which students need to find a peer reviewed paper to critically appraise.One thing students have to do is choose a peer reviewed paper - see separate post " Is this peer reviewed? " for a discussion of that.Another thing is to explain and justify their choice of databases.Is " the librarian told me about it " or " we covered it in a library class " a good enough reason? In the spirit of evidence based practice, where expert opinion (and I flatter myself) is at the base of the pyramid, I think it is not.So, how to choo...
Source: Browsing - April 8, 2022 Category: Databases & Libraries Tags: EBP literature searching Source Type: blogs
MedPAC Got It Wrong (pt 3)
This report acknowledges the record levels of surpluses. Each of those surpluses represents MA costing less than standard Medicare because they come from the capitation and they are absolutely a better use of the Medicare dollar than fee-for-service Medicare gets from spending that same dollar.
Plans have created a record number of surpluses each year and they all come from spending fewer dollars per person than standard Medicare. Fee-for-service Medicare is a very poor purchaser of care — and that fee-for-service Medicare program now has its average member each spending more than $5000 in out of pocket costs each yea...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 5, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy The Business of Health Care George Halvorson Medicare Advantage MedPAC Source Type: blogs
Rehab Fails: What goes wrong in pain rehabilitation 3
I’m beginning to think this series could grow into a monster – so many #rehabfails to pick from!
Today’s post is about rehabilitation that doesn’t fit into the person’s life. Or that the person hasn’t been supported to fit the rehabilitation into their life. THEIR life, not ours!
You know what I mean: for six to twelve weeks, this person has been coming along to their treatment sessions, doing the things the therapist suggests. They make progress and it’s time to end the programme. “Good bye patient” the therapist says. And the patient skips off into the sunset, f...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - April 3, 2022 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: BronnieLennoxThompson Tags: Assessment Clinical reasoning Coping Skills Coping strategies Interdisciplinary teams Occupational therapy Pain conditions Physiotherapy Professional topics Psychology Research Resilience/Health Science in practice Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve Was Never Used Strategically
Alan ReynoldsPresident Biden plans to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) for a million barrels a day for six months, describing this as “awartime bridge to increase oil supply until production ramps up later this year. ”This is only the second time that the SPR has been used for the purpose Congress intended in 1975 – to counteract temporary spikes in the global price of oil due to cartel extortion or foreign wars. The first time was during the Gulf War, on January 16, 1991, when President George H.W. Bush announced the SPR would immediately begin selling up to 2.5 million barrels a day. On the following d...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 1, 2022 Category: American Health Authors: Alan Reynolds Source Type: blogs
A Warning Sign Of Vitamin B12 Deficiency
Around one-in-four people may have a vitamin B12 deficiency, according to research. (Source: PsyBlog | Psychology Blog)
Source: PsyBlog | Psychology Blog - April 1, 2022 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Jeremy Dean Tags: Nutrition Source Type: blogs
Trial By Error: Can Someone Please Slap a Warning Label on this Exercise-and-Rehab Long Covid Study?
By David Tuller, DrPH I’ve been writing for a while about the rush to treat long Covid patients with the outdated and debunked approach long applied to ME/CFS. A major effort to demonstrate that an exercise program can lead to “recovery” from long Covid, sponsored by the University of Warwick and funded with £1.200,000 from […] (Source: virology blog)
Source: virology blog - March 31, 2022 Category: Virology Authors: David Tuller Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
MedPAC Got It Wrong (pt 1)
By GEORGE HALVORSON
This is the first part of former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson’s critique of Medpac’s new analysis of Medicare Advantage. The rest will be published on THCB later this week. Eventually I’ll be doing a summary article about all the back and forth about what Medicare Advantage really costs!-Matthew Holt
MedPac just did their annual report on Medicare Advantage (MA) and they were extremely wrong on several key points.
The MedPac staff has a long tradition of being critical of MA, and they also, unfortunately, have a long tradition of being inaccurate, misleading, and...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 30, 2022 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: matthew holt Tags: Health Policy The Business of Health Care George Halvorson Medicare Advantage MedPAC Source Type: blogs
Weekly Overseas Health IT Links – 26th March, 2022.
Here are a few I came across last week.Note: Each link is followed by a title and few paragraphs. For the full article click on the link above title of the article. Note also that full access to some links may require site registration or subscription payment.-----https://mhealthintelligence.com/news/55-of-telehealth-providers-frustrated-with-overblown-patient-expectations55% of Telehealth Providers Frustrated With Overblown Patient ExpectationsProviders also cited their ability to provide quality care and technical difficulties as among their top frustrations with telehealth, a new survey shows.ByAnuja VaidyaMarch 18, 202...
Source: Australian Health Information Technology - March 26, 2022 Category: Information Technology Authors: Dr David G More MB PhD Source Type: blogs
