December 16th, 2011 by KerriSparling in Opinion
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The flight from Boston to London took just over six hours. The time change was five hours ahead of Boston, so when we landed at 6 pm, I was only ready for lunch. The trek from London to Dubai was almost seven hours, pushing the clock ahead a full nine hours from Boston, making my head hurt because how was it Wednesday morning when I was still on Tuesday’s timetable?
(I wrote about the impact of changing time zones for an Animas column last month, but I seriously had no idea what I was in for when I decided to take the trip to Dubai.)
That first day there, the Wednesday, everyone gave me the same advice: “Don’t go to sleep.” (It felt like A Nightmare on Elm Street.) “Work through the exhaustion and just go to bed on Wednesday night on Dubai time, and you should be good the next day.”
For the first few hours after landing, Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Six Until Me.*
December 16th, 2011 by Nicholas Genes, M.D., Ph.D. in Opinion
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Yesterday’s ACEP Member Communication email (entitled Emergency Medicine Today, in affiliation with BulletinHealthcare) had this as its top story: Injuries Linked to Holiday Decorating on the Rise, from a website called HealthDay News. The reported cites a US Consumer Product Safety Commission press release, crafted with help from Underwriter Laboratories (the wire engineers). They claim:
In November and December 2010, more than 13,000 people were treated in U.S. emergency departments for injuries involving holiday decorations, up from 10,000 in 2007, and 12,000 in 2008 and 2009, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
“A well-watered tree, carefully placed candles, and carefully checked holiday light sets will help prevent the joy of the holidays from turning into a trip to the emergency room or the loss of your home,” said CPSC chairman Inez Tenenbaum in an agency news release.
Good advice. Though it’s been said many times, many ways. So when it came time for CPSC and UL to raise the topic, did we need the very questionable statistics to justify it? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Blogborygmi*
December 15th, 2011 by DeborahSchwarzRPA in News
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Yoshifumi Naka, MD, PhD
Total Artificial Heart Improves Patient Survival to Transplant While Reducing Some Risks of Transplant Surgery
Surgeons at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center performed the first Total Artificial Heart implant in the New York City area to replace a patient’s dying heart.
“For patients who will die without a heart transplant, the Total Artificial Heart helps them survive until they can get one. By replacing the heart, we are eliminating the symptoms and the source of heart failure,” said lead surgeon Dr. Yoshifumi Naka, director of Cardiac Transplantation and Mechanical Circulatory Support Programs at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia and associate professor of surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Similar to a heart transplant, the SynCardia temporary Total Artificial Heart Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Columbia University Department of Surgery Blog*
December 15th, 2011 by DavidHarlow in News, Opinion
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Microsoft and GE Healthcare announced a joint venture last week (as-yet unnamed), trumpeted as bringing together the best of both companies’ offerings in the health care provider market. (More from the NY Times.) Late in the day, I spoke with Brandon Savage, Chief Medical Officer at GE Healthcare, and Nate McLemore, General Manager of Microsoft Health Solutions Group. They had a great deal to say about the companies’ shared vision of the use of platform technology to enable care teams to deliver the right decision at the right time, noting that their core products complement each other rather than overlap.
The centerpiece of the collaboration will be an amalgamation (so to speak) of the two companies’ strengths around Amalga (the Microsoft product) and Qualibria (the GE product). Brandon and Nate described the challenges facing these products thus: Qualibria needs to be able to pull in data from multiple sources better (Microsoft can help), and Amalga needs to be able to share best practices across sites better (GE can help).
Put another way (to quote John Moore at Chilmark Research), Amalga is “more a toolset than a product.” McLemore acknowledged that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at HealthBlawg :: David Harlow's Health Care Law Blog*
December 15th, 2011 by HarvardHealth in Research
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Do your neck and shoulders ache? Not long ago, you would have been told to rest, maybe use a neck brace, and wait until the pain had ebbed away. Doctors have changed their song about the best treatment for neck and shoulder pain. They now recommend movement instead of rest.
As described in Neck and Shoulder Pain, a newly updated Special Health Report from Harvard Health Publications, there is mounting scientific evidence for the role of stretching and muscle strengthening in treating people with neck and shoulder pain. After a whiplash injury, for example, people heal sooner and are less likely to develop chronic pain if they start gentle exercise as soon as possible. For those with long-term pain (called chronic pain), results from controlled studies show that exercise provides some relief.
One review of the research found that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
