June 2nd, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in News, Research
Tags: Death, Images, Internal Medicine, Motivating Quit Attempts, Package Labeling, Primary Care, Pulmonology, Quitting, Skull And Cross Bones, smoking, smoking cessation, WHO
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The World Health Organization (WHO) says graphic health warnings on tobacco packages are a powerful “best buy” in decreasing tobacco use and its many health consequences.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlined the research in the MMWR.
The World Health Organization (WHO) created a treaty for tobacco product labels that many countries have ratified. Among other requirements, these warnings are expected to appear on at least 30%, and ideally 50% or more, of the package’s principal display areas, and preferably use pictures.
To assess how cigarette package labels impact quitting smoking, researchers used data from the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) in 14 countries from 2008 to 2010 that had ratified WHO’s tobacco control treaty. Current smokers of manufactured cigarettes were asked whether they had noticed health warnings on a cigarette package in the previous 30 days, and whether the label led them to think about quitting smoking.
Among men in 12 of the countries and women in seven countries, more than 90% of smokers reported noticing a package warning in the previous 30 days. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
June 1st, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Research
Tags: face, Facial Transplantation, Nerve Graft, Neurology, Peripheral Nerves, Plastic Surgery, Sensation, Sensory Nerves, Transplantation
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Have you ever lost your sense of smell or taste? Recall how it feels when your face/mouth don’t work properly until the nerve blocks wear off after a dental procedure.
Those are all things (and more) a facial transplant patient has to deal with. The article discussing recovery of sensation after facial transplantation in the May issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery discusses this topic (first reference below).
In addition to reviewing their own face transplant patients (n=4), Dr. Maria Siemionow and colleagues did a literature review (English literature for peer-reviewed articles published between 1940 and 2010) of sensory recovery after various standard nerve repair techniques.
These other nerve repair techniques included repair of the peripheral branches of the trigeminal nerve; sensory return after free tissue transfer (ie noninnervated flaps, including radial forearm, lateral thigh, anterolateral thigh, latissimus dorsi, trapezius, et al and innervated free flaps, including radial forearm, anterolateral thigh, and rectus abdominis musculocutaneous flaps); and sensory recovery following replantation of scalp and forehead. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
June 1st, 2011 by Paul Auerbach, M.D. in Health Tips, Research
Tags: Bag-Valve Mask, Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, CPR, Emergency Medicine, EMT, Masks, Mouth-to-Mouth, Rescue Breathing, wilderness medicine
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When a person performs cardiopulmonary (heart and lung) resuscitation (CPR), it is sometimes recommended to provide rescue breathing. This is certainly the case when the primary cause of the victim’s difficulty relates to failure to breathe adequately, such as with a drowning episode. When CPR first arrived on the landscape, laypersons were trained to perform mouth-to-mouth breathing (for adults) or mouth-to-mouth and nose breathing (for infants and small children).
Following growing concern about transmission of diseases from blood and body fluids, laypersons were introduced to using masks or something similar to allow them to provide breathing assistance (“artificial respiration,” “artificial ventilation,” “rescue breathing,” etc.) to non-breathing persons. Masks have been used for decades by professional rescuers for ventilating patients, often in conjunction with the use of bags in a “bag-valve-mask” configuration. The valve between the mask and bag provides for one-way flow and prevents the backwash of vomitus, blood, liquid from the lungs, or other fluids that might diminish the effectiveness of the technique.
A number of excellent masks and face shields are available on the market for rescuers to be able to (relatively) safely blow air into a victim’s lungs. One example is Read more »
This post, CPR: Mouth-to-Mouth Breathing May Have Some Advantages Over Mask-Assisted Breathing, was originally published on
Healthine.com by Paul Auerbach, M.D..
May 31st, 2011 by ErikDavis in Health Tips, Research
Tags: African Plum, Alternative Medicine, Cochrane, Evidence, Feverfew, Health, Herbal Remedies That Work, Horse Chestnut, Medicine, Red Yeast Rice, Saint John's Wort, Science
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Here at Skeptic North, we’ve often been a sharp critic of those herbal remedies that are unable to withstand the scrutiny of science. Yet nature does indeed house many pharmacologically active compounds, and it stands to reason that some of them will have medicinal value. So today, we’re going to turn the tables and look at 5 herbal remedies that have held up well in repeated studies and are generally regarded as effective.
1) St. John’s Wort for Depression
If there’s one herbal medicine that consistently gets high marks for effectiveness, it’s St. John’s Wort as a treatment for mild depression. A 2008 Cochrane Review looked at 29 trials totaling over 5000 patients, including 18 comparisons with placebo and 17 comparisons with synthetic standard antidepressants, and found significant effects in both cases. The Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database indicates that St. John’s Wort is likely as effective as both first generation antidepressants (low-dose tricyclics) and the current generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Skeptic North » Erik Davis*
May 31st, 2011 by admin in Health Tips, Research
Tags: Fat, Friends Make You Fat, Health, Healthy Eating, Internal Medicine, Monkey Do, Monkey See, Obesity, Peer Pressure, Psychology, Relationships, Social Norms, Weight Gain, Weight Loss
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One of the big health news stories of 2007 was a study showing that your friends influence the size of your waist (and the rest of your body). Like any study, it raised as many questions as it answered, including why this happens. A new study from Arizona State University looked into that question by testing three pathways by which friends might influence one another’s body size:
- Collaboration. Over time, you might start to share the ideas of the people close to you after talking with them about what the proper body size is. Then you might choose your food and exercise habits in order to reach that body size, whether that means eating more food to look like your plus-sized friends, or less food to look like your thin ones.
- Peer pressure. You feel bullied into trying to look like your friends and family members. They make you feel bad about your body, so you go about eating and exercising to look like them.
- Monkey see, monkey do. You change your habits to mirror those of your friends without necessarily thinking or talking about an ideal body weight. Alexandra Brewis Slade, PhD, one of the Arizona State researchers, gave an example of this pathway that most of us can relate to: You’re at a restaurant with friends and the waiter brings over the dessert menu. Everyone else decides not to order anything, so you pass, too, even though you were dying for a piece of chocolate mousse cake.
All three of these pathways are based on the idea that loved ones share social norms, the implicit cultural beliefs that make some things okay, others not. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlined the research in the MMWR.
