Experts Say the U.S. Pays Too Much to Fight Cancer
Ellen Gibson writes on Bloomberg News via the Columbus Dispatch:
The rising cost of cancer research and care, which helped reduce death rates by 16 percent over 40 years, is straining the U.S. health system and needs to be restrained, commentators said in a special edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Cancer research has cost the U.S. government $100 billion since 1971 and the price of care, accounting for inflation, has more than doubled to $90 billion since 1990, according to six journal reports that raise key questions about the past and future success of the U.S. “War on Cancer,” announced by then-President Richard Nixon in 1971.
The reduced death rates result from anti-smoking campaigns, early disease detection and new drugs, which can cost individual patients as much as $100,000…
Dutch Nurses Union: Care Does Not Include Sex
From Reuters:
A union representing Dutch nurses will launch a national campaign Friday against demands for sexual services by patients who claim it should be part of their standard care.
The union, NU’91, is calling the campaign “I Draw The Line Here,” with an advert that features a young woman covering her face with crossed hands.
The union said in a statement Thursday that the campaign follows a complaint it had received in the last week from a 24-year-old woman who said a 42-year-old disabled man asked her to provide sexual services as part of his care at home.
Have You Ever Been Billed $1,000 For a Toothbrush in a Hospital?
From CNN, a medical billing advocate shows Elizabeth Cohen some of the wasteful charges she’s seen in bills:
Norway Conquers Infections By Cutting Use of Antibiotics
Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason report on the AP via the Miami Herald:
OSLO, Norway — Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner.
Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia last year, soaring virtually unchecked.
The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.
Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an…
Could Scorpion Venom Make a Safe Alternative to Morphine?
I’m starting an urban scorpion farm, just to get in on the the action:
by Clay Dillow for popsci.com
Scorpion venom and intense pain generally go hand in hand, but a group of researchers at Tel Aviv University are rethinking that relationship, using a better understanding of the peptide toxins found in scorpions’ pain-inducing payloads to create a breed of non-addictive, side effect-free painkillers.
Pain is communicated to the brain via a certain type of sodium channel embedded in our nervous and muscular systems. Understanding the way these sodium channels convey the sensation of pain from certain parts of the body to the brain is key to manipulating these signals to reduce or eliminate feelings of pain. Figure out how to manipulate those mechanisms, and we could be on the way to a much less painful future.
Luckily for us, scorpions — friendly little critters that they are — have spent the past few million years evolving sophisticated toxins that can really turn up the level of excruciation. By modifying those same molecules, researchers believe they can customize compounds that are highly effective at numbing specific kinds of pain in specific parts of the body. What’s more, because these compounds are natural and tailor-tweaked, they can be engineered to perform without side effects like addiction or the state of lovely but intoxicating loopiness induced by other painkilling compounds like morphine.
Therein lies the benefit, of course; anyone who’s had wisdom teeth pulled or dealt with a serious ligament tear knows that a bottle of conventional pain meds can get the job done, but the side effects can be mentally impairing and even dangerous should one become chemically dependent. With bio-mimicking pain compounds, doctors could treat chronic discomfort without fearing that patients might end up in the streets trying to score that next hit of scorpion.
Man Appears Free of HIV After Stem Cell Transplant
Jacquelyne Froeber writes on CNN:
A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.”
The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal. Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany,…
Women Being Conned About Breast Cancer Screening
Ethan A. Huff for Natural News:
Western medicine relies heavily on convincing people that they need some sort of drug or surgery to remedy their ills and gain health. Studies often contain manipulated facts and skewed statistics that paint a favorable picture of some new procedure or treatment while shrouding the truth about the risks involved. The alleged benefits of breast cancer screenings are no exception as women are continually tricked into believing that mammograms will greatly benefit them when the facts show that they are largely ineffective.
Using an approach called mismatched framing, cancer studies will present side effects in absolute terms while exaggerating benefits in relative terms. When two different metric systems are used to present one set of findings, the results are deceptive albeit technically true.
One statistic says…
Despite Obama Admin’s Promise, DEA Continues Raids On Medical Marijuana Growers
From Raw Story:
On Thursday, a Denver news station interviewed Chris Bartkowicz about his medical-marijuana operation in the basement of his home. Bartkowicz, confident of his compliance with state laws, boasted of its size and profitability.
“I’m definitely living the dream now,” he told 9News.
The following day, the dream was over.
Drug-enforcement agents raided his home, placed him under arrest, and carried off dozens of black bags of marijuana plants and growing lights…
[continues at Raw Story]
Famed Medical Journal Retracts ‘Utterly False’ Vaccination-Scare Paper
Sarah Boseley writes in the Guardian:
The Lancet today finally retracted the paper that sparked a crisis in MMR vaccination across the UK, following the General Medical Council’s decision that its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had been dishonest.
The medical journal’s editor, Richard Horton, told the Guardian today that he realised as soon as he read the GMC findings that the paper, published in February 1998, had to be retracted. “It was utterly clear, without any ambiguity at all, that the statements in the paper were utterly false,” he said. “I feel I was deceived.”
Many in the scientific and medical community have been pressing for the paper, linking the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) jab to bowel disease and autism, to be quashed. But Horton said he did not have the evidence to do…
Homeopathy: Overdosing On Nothing
By Martin Robbins for New Scientist:
AT 10.23 am on 30 January, more than 300 activists in the UK, Canada, Australia and the US will take part in a mass homeopathic “overdose”. Sceptics will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic pills to demonstrate to the public that homeopathic remedies, the product of a scientifically unfounded 18th-century ritual, are simply sugar pills.
Many of the sceptics will swallow 84 pills of arsenicum album, a homeopathic remedy based on arsenic which is used to treat a range of symptoms, including food poisoning and insomnia.
The aim of the “10:23″ campaign, led by the Merseyside Skeptics Society, based in Liverpool, UK, is to raise public awareness of just exactly what homeopathy is, and to put pressure on the UK’s leading pharmacist, Boots, to remove the…
Antidepressants: The Emperor’s New Drugs?
By Irving Kirsch, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hull in the UK and author of The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, writing for the Huffington Post:
Antidepressants are supposed to be the magic bullet for curing depression. But are they? I used to think so. As a clinical psychologist, I used to refer depressed clients to psychiatric colleagues to have them prescribed. But over the past decade, researchers have uncovered mounting evidence that they are not. It seems that we have been misled. Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.
My awareness that the chemical cure of depression is a myth began in 1998, when Guy Sapirstein and I set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Instead of doing a brand new study, we decided to pool the results of previous studies in which placebos had been used to treat depression and analyze them together. What we did is called a meta-analysis, and it is a common technique for making sense of the data when a large number of studies have been done to answer a particular question…
Japanese Scientists Create Elastic Water
Kevin Parrish writes on tom’s guide:
Elastic Water could eventually replace plastic, or be used in an environmentally-safe plastic.
Bernama, a part of the Malaysian National News Agency, reports that Japanese scientists have created “elastic water.” Developed at the Tokyo University, the new material consists mostly of water — 95-percent — with an added two grams of clay and organic material. The resulting substance resembles jelly, but is extremely elastic and transparent.
The invention was originally revealed last week in the latest issue of the Nature scientific magazine. According to the article, the new material is quite safe for the environment and humans, and may be a “long-term” tool in medical technology, possibly to help wounded or surgically cut tissue to remain closed.
Under the Weather? Just Swallow A Doctor
Steve Connor writes in the Independent:
The day when patients can “swallow their doctor” has come a step closer with the development of a submicroscopic nanoparticle that acts as an intelligent pill to deliver drugs when and where they are needed in the body.
Each nanoparticle is built to target a specific part of the body and to release their drugs in a controlled manner over a given period of time. They are so small that millions of them could be injected into the bloodstream without harming healthy tissues.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge have designed the first nanoparticles designed to target the walls of the arteries around the heart. They bind specifically to the proteins that only stick out from the inner lining of the these blood…
California Supreme Court Upholds Medical Marijuana Laws
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a major victory for medical marijuana proponents with this ruling by California’s Supreme Court:
In a victory for medical marijuana users, the state Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a state law that protects them from arrest if they show police official identification cards. The court also overturned a law that limits how much pot patients can carry and how many plants they can grow.
The court unanimously ruled that the limits – 8 ounces of dried marijuana, six mature plants or 12 immature plants – conflicted with Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use.
Prop. 215 said a patient, with a doctor’s approval, could possess an amount of marijuana that was “reasonably related to the patient’s current medical…
247 Americans Die Every Day From Doctors Not Washing Their Hands
David Gutierrez for Natural News:
A study commissioned by the lead hospital accrediting agency in the United States found that doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands with alarming frequency, contributing to the 247 deaths caused each day by preventable hospital infections.
The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, nursing homes and other health care facilities, has joined with eight major hospitals to address low hand washing rates nationwide. The program began in the spring, when the hospitals conducted rigorous assessments of hand washing compliance among their staff. They found that doctors and nurses washed their hands only 30 to 70 percent of the time that they entered or exited a patient’s room, averaging 50 percent.
Hand washing upon entering and exiting a room is a key part of the Joint Commission accreditation…
ABC News Asks Jenny McCarthy for a Medical Opinion
Phil Plait writes on Bad Astronomy:
You may have heard the recent news that an expert panel of pediatricians reviewed the literature on gastrointestinal disorders and autism, and found no link between them. A key phrase in their findings was:
The existence of a gastrointestinal disturbance specific to persons with ASDs (eg, “autistic enterocolitis”) has not been established.
They also found that there was no evidence that special diets help autistic kids. Mind you, this was a panel of 28 experts, scientists who have devoted their careers and lives to investigating autism.
So if you were a reporter at ABC News, who would you turn to to get an opinion on this? If you said Jenny McCarthy, then give yourself a gold star, because that’s just what ABC News did. Go and watch that…
Shocking U.S. Senate Hearing Confirms Dangers of Cell Phones
Via Magda Havas, BSc., PhD’s website:
It begins as a lump or mass on the side of the face in front of the ear, at or above the jawbone. If the growth is slow and the lump is painless it is likely to be benign (80% of cases). If the area is painful or numb (nerve paralysis) it may be malignant (20% of cases) and the prognosis is poor with average survival of 2.7 years and a 10-year survival of 14–26%. It affects between 1 to 3 people per 100,000 each year in the Western world. What I am referring to is a parotid gland tumor (PGT), also known as salivary gland tumor (SGT).
Parotid tumors have not received much attention until recently.
Children Need More Dirt to be Healthy
E. Huff for Natural News:
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, have found that children who are too clean are at a higher risk of developing inflammation and disease. Normal skin bacteria that act to balance immune response protect the body from overreacting to cuts and other injuries. Excessive cleanliness is actually impairing children’s natural healing function and putting them at an increased risk for disease.
Published in the online edition of Nature Medicine, findings are confirming that germ exposure is beneficial to young children who need it in order to build immunity and prevent the onset of allergies. Being too clean is now implicated in causing increased allergies in developed countries around the world.
Staphylococci, the bacterial species studied by researchers, was found to play a vital role in blocking…
