Teen Invents Device To Protect His Grandfather From Alzheimer’s-Related Wandering

http://goo.gl/O8yO6n

In 2012, Kenneth started developing a device that would prevent his grandfather from getting out of bed at night unsupervised. He ended up creating a pressure sensor that attaches to the foot. When his grandfather put his feet on the floor to get out of bed, the pressure sensor wirelessly delivered an alert to his aunt’s phone via Bluetooth. During six months of testing, the device caught all of his grandfather’s attempts to get out of bed, with no false positives reported.


Getting the skinny on skin conditions

Interesting concept....

http://goo.gl/mLf34i

I usually get nervous when something seems too good to be true, but every now and then the spark of human goodness comes through. Unless I am missing something, here's an example, sent to me on Twitter by Dr. Howard Green, @DermHag, a dermatologist in West Palm Beach.

He wrote:

Here's a first look at Skinstamatic a ground breaking mobile collective sourced medical search app. http://youtu.be/W3Nfatzy9ZM.

He explained:

We built Skinstamatic on top of our gamified Dermgrandrounds and wikiSkinAtlas apps. See http://Skinphototextmatch.com 

I found this video:

Higher earning clinicians make more money by ordering more procedures per patient rather than by seeing more patients

Duh! of the week......
http://goo.gl/i3ZMzc

"Medicare spending is the biggest factor crowding out investment in all other social priorities," Bergman said. "With clinicians making more not by seeing more unique patients, but by providing more services per person, additional research needs to be done to determine if these additional services are contributing to improved quality of care. These findings suggest that the current health care reimbursement model - fee-for-service - may not be creating the correct incentives for clinicians to keep their patients healthy. Fee-for-service may not be the most reasonable way to reimburse physicians."

The research letter appears in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Bergman believes this review of the Medicare data is important because of its potential impact on public policy.

"Our findings suggest a weakness in fee-for-service medicine," he said. "Perhaps it would make more sense to reimburse clinicians for providing high quality care, or for treating more patients. There probably shouldn't be such wide variation in services for patients being treated for the same conditions."

Half of Listed Medicaid Doctors Are Unavailable

http://goo.gl/BqY525

About half of Medicaid doctors in managed-care networks can’t offer appointments to patients because they don’t have availability or their status with the health plan isn’t accurate, according to a report released Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General.

In cold calls with doctors listed in the directories of privately managed Medicaid plans, 35 percent weren’t practicing at their listed location, 8 percent were no longer participating in the plan and 8 percent weren’t seeing new patients, according to the report. The report also found that 28 percent of doctors have wait times of more than a month, and 10 percent had wait times longer than two months.


The intestinal immune system controls the body weight: surprising interaction with intestinal bacteria

http://goo.gl/1Ddn2e

All the research work put together leads thus to the recommendation that during consumption of fat nutrition, the intestine immunity system plays an important role in the fat storage regulation in the body and is literally capable to modify the composition of intestinal bacteria (including some which are still unidentified).

The discovery of the UCL-researchers, published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, confirms the involvement of intestinal bacteria in the development of obesity, but even more important, it provides new therapeutic possibilities, being a protein of the intestine immunity system for treatment of obesity and diabetes type 2.


Seriously "Sensitive" to Pollution-Environmental Health: Living With MCS/ES

A boatload of resources on this Canadian wordpress blog.....

http://lindasepp.wordpress.com/

Do you know that you have hundreds of toxic chemicals in your body right now?

Do you know that our bodies weren’t designed to deal with 24/7 exposure to the kinds of substances we are breathing, ingesting, and absorbing all the time now?

If you have MCS/ES, then yes, you know. If you are involved with the environmental health movement, then yes, you know. If you watched theinterview with Bruce Lourie that I shared earlier this year, about his book ToxIn ToxOut, then yes, you know. If you or someone you know has a health condition that has been linked to chemical exposures and pollution, then maybe you know… Otherwise, probably not…

Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome

There are other studies that show placebos to work when the subject knows.....

http://goo.gl/F9s4C

Placebo treatment can significantly influence subjective symptoms. However, it is widely believed that response to placebo requires concealment or deception. We tested whether open-label placebo (non-deceptive and non-concealed administration) is superior to a no-treatment control with matched patient-provider interactions in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Placebos administered without deception may be an effective treatment for IBS. Further research is warranted in IBS, and perhaps other conditions, to elucidate whether physicians can benefit patients using placebos consistent with informed consent.

Do concussions have lingering cognitive, physical, and emotional effects?

http://goo.gl/LEf0gy

John T. Povlishock, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Neurotrauma and Professor, Medical College of Virginia Campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, notes that "This study by Spira and colleagues represents an important contribution to our understanding of the negative impact of multiple concussions in a relatively large military population sustaining both deployment and non-deployment related trauma. The consistent observation that multiple concussive injuries are associated with worse emotional and post-concussive symptoms is an extremely important finding that must guide our evaluation of individuals, in both the military and civilian settings, who have sustained multiple concussive injuries. While the authors acknowledge some limitations of the current work and the need for future research to follow a similar cohort in terms of the time course and causality of the symptoms associated with concussion, overall this well done study adds significantly to our increased understanding of the adverse consequences of repetitive concussive/mildtraumatic brain injury."


'Off switch' for pain discovered: Activating the adenosine A3 receptor subtype is key to powerful pain relief

http://goo.gl/kcR7CB

The scientific efforts led by Salvemini, who is professor of pharmacological and physiological sciences at SLU, demonstrated that turning on a receptor in the brain and spinal cord counteracts chronic nerve pain in male and female rodents. Activating the A3 receptor -- either by its native chemical stimulator, the small molecule adenosine, or by powerful synthetic small molecule drugs invented at the NIH -- prevents or reverses pain that develops slowly from nerve damage without causing analgesic tolerance or intrinsic reward (unlike opioids).