November 20th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Adults who received care from a medical home in 11 Westernized countries were less likely to report medical errors and were happier with their care, according to a new Commonwealth Fund international survey.
The 2011 survey included more than 18,000 ill adults in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It included people who reported they were in fair or poor health, had surgery or had been hospitalized in the past two years, or had received care for a serious or chronic illness, injury or disability in the past year. The vast majority had seen multiple physicians.
A medical home was defined as patients reporting a regular source of care that knows their medical history, is accessible and helps coordinate care received from other providers. Results were published in Health Affairs.
Sicker adults in the U.S. were the most likely to Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
August 28th, 2011 by ChristopherChangMD in Research
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The basic function of the human nose is to warm and humidify the air before it reaches the lungs. Because of the wide variation of human habitats from the polar cold and dry air to the equatorial hot and humid weather, one would expect the nose to accommodate to these climate extremes accordingly through evolutionary pressures.
In essence, logically one would expect the nose to change shape to enhance time that air is in contact with the warm and moist nasal interior in cold and dry climates compared to the opposite environmental extreme.
German scientists evaluated this hypothesis through Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*
August 24th, 2011 by admin in Health Policy, Opinion
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I must confess that I have a weakness for medical tourism. Patients have always been ready to go on a pilgrimage to find the world’s leading expert (we call it ‘key opinon leader’ now) hoping to find a cure. As long as traditional leaders in the field of Medicine have been the Germans, the French and the English -with some occasional Austrian and Spanish name in the mix- traffic of wealthy patients across Europe is nothing new.
Since we entered the antibiotics era, these leaders started to be located mainly in the United States, the cradle of modern, technology-driven Medicine. Thus hi-tech centers got ready to welcome foreign patients, building strong International Customer Support departments. A random example -by no means the only one- would be the Mayo Clinic. On their website you can see that their wealthy patients speak Arabic or come from Latin America. These healthcare services have a long tradition of client-oriented work because they work for private clients that pay for their treatment (sometimes the client is not the patient himself but his family). The important thing was never the price, but the patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Diario Medico*
December 10th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
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At the Charité Hospital in Berlin, researchers have built a specialty MRI machine with enough space to fit a woman undergoing labor. The Local, a German newspaper in the English language, is reporting that the first images of a baby moving through the birth canal have been captured, and that the mother and child are doing just fine. The clinicians involved in the project hope to be able to study why some women end up requiring a Caesarian section, while others do not.
More at The Local: MRI scans live birth…
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
June 13th, 2010 by Medgadget in Better Health Network, News, Research
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Research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg, Germany, have developed a helmet that will make you think twice about continuing to cycle with a damaged helmet.
For maximum protection, safety helmets need to be damage-free, but it’s often impossible to know if a helmet is actually flawed after it’s been dropped or hit by something. The researchers have used polymers that start to smell if there are any small cracks, and will really stink in the case of any large cracks. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
