Saturday, December 29, 2012

Plantar Fasciitis- Taping for Foot Pain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wy1ZEJ-kKTg

Resolving Foot Pain:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=BM4g6lRSA_E&NR=1

Foot Massage for Heel Pain: Plantar Fasciitis
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBk0_cPxNSU

KT Taping of the foot:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH0o53Kghpw

Active Release for Foot pain:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO76Gz6X38g

Friday, December 28, 2012

International Design Summit- MIT (hosted by: Amy Smith)

http://iddsummit.org/


Sanitary Pad Inventor - Great Story, Funny !! (India)

Empowering women in India:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/arunachalam_muruganantham_how_i_started_a_sanitary_napkin_revolution.html?source=email#.UN6GEbhQYeI.email

http://on.ted.com/Sanitary

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Fat chance


Obesity

Fat chance

The state can do some things to encourage people to eat less, but not a lot

IN 1937 George Orwell suggested that “changes of diet” might be more important than “changes of dynasty or even of religion”. Now he is being proved right in a way he might not have expected. Having spent millennia worrying about not having enough food, mankind’s main concern is now eating too much (see our special report on obesity).
The story of human health in the past few decades is a broadly encouraging one. Life expectancy has increased—globally, by 12 years for women and 11 years for men from 1970 to 2010. But greater longevity means that people spend more years chronically ill (see article). Obesity makes things worse by raising the risk of diabetes, heart disease, strokes and some cancers. In much of the world, being too fat is now the single largest driver of sickness.
In 2008 obesity rates were nearly double those of 1980. One in three adults was overweight, with a body-mass index (BMI) of 25 or more (at least 77kg for a man 175cm tall); 12% were obese, with a BMI of at least 30. In America, ever the world leader, about two-thirds of adults were overweight in 2008. But Britain lumbered close behind, with six in ten too fat. The problem is not confined to rich countries. Thanks to economic growth, people around the world are eating more food. Workers burn fewer calories at their desks than in the fields. Even in China, one in four adults was too fat in 2008. In Brazil more than half were. Obesity rates in Mexico, Venezuela and South Africa matched those of America. The Pacific islands and Gulf states are home to some of the world’s fattest people.
For those (like this newspaper) who believe that the state should generally keep its nose out of people’s private affairs, obesity presents a quandary. “A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits,” Orwell pointed out; “an unemployed man doesn’t…You want to eat something a little bit tasty.” If people get great pleasure from eating more than is good for them, should they not be allowed to indulge themselves? After all, individuals bear the bulk of the costs of obesity, quite literally. They suffer at work, too: their wages are often lower and, in America, some employers also make fat workers pay more for health insurance.
Yet in most countries the state covers some or most of the costs of health care, so fat people raise costs for everyone. In America, for instance, a recent paper estimated that obesity was responsible for a fifth of the total health-care bill, of which nearly half is paid by the federal government. And there are broader social costs. The Pentagon says that obesity is shrinking its pool of soldiers. Obesity lowers labour productivity. And state intervention is justified where it saves people from great harm at little cost to themselves. Only zealots see seat-belt laws as an affront to personal liberty. Anti-smoking policies, controversial at first, are generally viewed as a success.
Whose fault is fat?
Obesity is, at its heart, the result of many personal decisions. But the rise of obesity—across many countries and disproportionately among the poor—suggests that becoming fat cannot just be blamed on individual frailty. Millions of people, of all cultures, did not become lazy gluttons at the same time, en masse. Broader forces are at work. The government can try to influence them by discouraging overeating. But how?
Drugs and surgery can help in the most extreme cases. They do not, however, offer a solution to the wider problem. Economists, faced with behaviour they don’t like, tend to favour imposing “sin” taxes. But eating fatty and sugary foods is not a “sin”, even in the fiscal sense, for unlike cigarettes, fatty foods are not uniformly unhealthy. Moreover, since poor people spend a higher proportion of their income on food than rich people do, such a tax would be regressive. It would also be an administrative nightmare, as the fat content of each item of food would have to be measured. Denmark, which imposed a fat tax in 2011, abandoned it after a year.
In the absence of a single big solution to obesity, the state must try many small measures. Governments, some of which already intervene a lot in the first few months of people’s lives, should ensure that parents are warned of the dangers of overfeeding their babies. Schools should serve nutritious lunches, teach children how to eat healthily and give them time to run around. Urban planners should make streets and pavements friendlier to cyclists and pedestrians. Taxing sugary fizzy drinks—which unlike fatty foods have no nutritional value—and limiting the size of the containers in which they can be sold may work. Philadelphia and New York, for example, have implemented a range of such policies, and have seen child-obesity rates dip ever so slightly.
There is a limit, however, to what the state can or should do. In the end, the responsibility and power to change lie primarily with individuals. Whether people go on eating till they pop, or whether they opt for the healthier, slimmer life, will have a bigger effect on the future of the species than most of the weighty decisions that governments make.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Scorpion Protein Illuminates Brain Tumors for Surgeons


Jim Olson, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital, was reviewing with his colleagues the case of a 17-year-old girl several years ago who had just undergone brain surgery to remove a tumor. An MRI scan revealed a thumb-size piece of tumor left behind. In the operating room, the tumor tissue had looked just like healthy brain tissue. During the review meeting, the hospitals’ chief of neurosurgery turned to Olson and said: “Jim, you have to come up with a way to light these cells up.”
So Olson and a neurosurgical resident started searching for a way to highlight cancer cells in the operating room. Eventually, they came across a report of a scorpion toxin that binds to brain tumors but not healthy cells. By linking a synthetic version of this protein to a molecule that glows in near-infrared light, the researchers think they may have found what they call “tumor paint.”
In their very first test, the pair injected the compound into the tail vein of a mouse whose body harbored a transplanted human tumor. “Within 15 to 20 minutes, the tumor started to glow, bright and distinct from the rest of the mouse,” says Olson.
A Seattle company called Blaze Bioscience has licensed the technology from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. Olson says human trials will begin late in 2013.
The scorpion toxin is special not only because it binds to tumor cells, but because it can cross the blood-brain barrier—a cellular and molecular fortification that lines blood vessels in the brain and prevents most compounds from entering.
“Usually, peptides don’t get into the brain unless they bind to something specific that carries it in there,” says Harald Sontheimer, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, who first identified the neurological potential of the scorpion protein.
Although derived from venom, the toxin seems to be safe. A biotech company started by Sontheimer showed in early clinical trials that a version of the scorpion toxin tagged with radioactive iodine was safe in patients. However, the company closed before late-stage testing of the iodine-tagged compound, which is now owned by Japanese pharmaceutical company Eisai.
The tumor paint developed by Olson may also light up cancer outside of the brain. Animal studies suggest it could also demarcate prostate, colon, breast, and other tumors. The potential the compound has to save healthy brain tissue and improve patients’ lives is told in a short film called Bringing Light, which is in the running for the Sundance Film Festival. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508351/scorpion-protein-illuminates-brain-tumors-for-surgeons/

Friday, December 7, 2012

Geo-Medicine: How your environment affects your health

Geo-Medicine: the value of "place history"

How where you have lived makes a huge difference on your overall and long term health.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_davenhall_your_health_depends_on_where_you_live.html

First Approved Gene Therapy Treatment starts

Very interesting article about a promising trial based on gene therapy. Patients may only need one dose on the treatment to cure their rare diseases. This brought and interesting question into my mind of, "If you get a single treatment to rid of one genetic defect or bad trait in your body, what would you choose?" This is a well-wishers fantasy question, but interesting none the less to ponder. Ponder I will

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508186/gene-therapy-on-the-mend-as-first-treatment-gets-approval/

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Xerox Designs System to Reduce Busywork for Nurses (and doctors)


Nurses spend lots of time doing what seems like busywork—logging into computers, pulling up patient files, entering details of what they did, and coordinating their duties with others. Researchers at Xerox are developing what they call the Digital Nurse Assistant to automate and simplify some of this work. The project is part of a broader trend to adapt information technology to the health-care system to make it more efficient and cost-effective.
“Its craziness, because the technology solutions are out there. We just haven’t integrated them into our systems. We are running on old technology,” says Carol Bickford, a health IT expert and senior policy fellow at the American Nurses Association.
Patients do better in and out of hospitals when they receive more hours of care from nurses (see, for example, this New England Journal of Medicinestudy). And yet the United States and many other countries face nursing shortages. One solution could be to give nurses tools that make their workdays more efficient. A study published in The Permanente Journal in 2008 found that more than half of their time was spent documenting and coördinating their work with other team members. Documentation took the majority of their time—more than a third.
“It becomes burdensome for the nurse to walk to the computer, push buttons or mouse, log in, choose the right patient, then sort through the material that might be there to find what’s needed,” says Bickford.
Xerox’s PARC division, a research unit of the company, worked with ethnographers to see exactly what nurses do each day to better understand how to help them. The PARC ethnographers helped uncover some of the details of the Permanente study, such as why it took so long to document things and how difficult electronic medical records are to use. Every time a nurse logged into a workstation, he or she might have to go down six menus before arriving at the necessary information. The challenge of coördination also became clear—a nurse may repeatedly order medication  that never seems to arrive. The reality may be that another nurse did deliver the medicine, but did not document the task immediately, perhaps waiting until the end of his shift to go through all of his documentation tasks at once.
 “Imagine you are a nurse going into a patient’s room,” says Markus Fromherz, chief innovation officer of health care at Xerox. Instead of going straight to a computer workstation to log in, a badge you are wearing detects your presence and automatically logs you into a system that knows which patient is in the room and which tasks need immediate attention and the information required to complete those tasks. You can then quickly document your work with the patient into a handheld device or mobile computer.
Fromherz says that nurses were involved in the design process to shape the system and ask for additional features. A pilot system has been tested at an undisclosed location.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Interesting: Pregnancy Test Used to Detect Testicular Cancer


Home pregnancy tests may detect men's cancer

If you've been near social media or on the Internet, you may be aware of the buzz over posts claiming a teenage boy took a home pregnancy test as a joke, received a positive result, and wound up being diagnosed with testicular cancer.
CNN interviewed a girl who identified herself as a friend of the 17-year-old, but was not able to independently confirm the posts.
However, it's true home pregnancy tests can detect some types of testicular cancer in men, experts say - but the tests would not be useful as a screening tool.
According to the American Cancer Society, pregnancy tests work by detecting a hormone called Beta-HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin). Beta-HCG is produced by the cells of a woman's placenta during pregnancy, but is also excreted by some tumors "including some, but not all, testicular cancers," the cancer society says.
"At the time of diagnosis, only a small minority of men with testicular cancer have HCG levels high enough to be detected by a home urine pregnancy test," says Dr. Ted Gansler, director of medical content for the American Cancer Society, in a statement. "More sensitive blood tests for HCG with a lower cutoff level could detect a somewhat higher percentage, but several non-cancerous conditions can cause false positive results.
"Current evidence does not indicate that screening the general population of men with a urine test for HCG (or with urine or blood tests for any other tumor marker) can find testicular cancer early enough to reduce testicular cancer death rates," Gansler says.
Gansler told CNN in an e-mail that "much less often, some other cancers might cause a positive pregnancy test."  Medical journals have documented that both men and women patients with pancreas, lung, stomach or other cancers may have HCG levels high enough to cause a positive pregnancy test result, he says.
A lump on the testicle is the first sign of cancer, according to the cancer society, and men should see a doctor right away if one is found.
But even regular self-exams aren't recommended by the ACS because they have not been studied enough to show they reduce the death rate from testicular cancer. "Without that evidence, the American Cancer Society cannot make a recommendation on regular testicular self-exams for all men," the organization said. "But we do think men should decide for themselves whether or not to do regular exams."

Passed my EMT exam today...WooHoo


Comeback Kid gets Elected to Congress....pretty cool story


Great post from George Takei about about newly elected Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who lost both legs in combat.
These are the kinds of people who inspire me. Tammy Duckworth is an Iraq War Veteran elected to Congress on Tuesday, representing the 8th Congressional District of Illinois. Never let life, or anyone, tell you that you can't.
These are the kinds of people who inspire me. Tammy Duckworth is an Iraq War Veteran elected to Congress on Tuesday, representing the 8th Congressional District of Illinois. Never let life, or anyone, tell you that you can't.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Memory Loss Linked to High Blood Pressure as Early as 30's


Memory Alert: Even Slightly High Blood Pressure May Age Your Brain - And Even If You're Under 40

The white and gray matter of the brain are important in memory and thought (image from University of Maryland)
Researchers at the University of California at Davis released a studytoday that should give anyone with even mildly elevated blood pressure pause. It seems that having blood pressure higher than the optimal 120/80 may be aging your brain, putting you at risk for memory problems and eventually for dementia and Alzheimer’s. And this appears to be true even for people in their thirties and even for people with pre-hypertension.
(This might include cutting back on salt today, says the American Heart Association (AHA) in a new advisorydescribing recent studies linking salt and heart disease risk.)
Using data from the highly regarded Framingham Heart Study, the UC Davis team led by professor of neurology Charles DeCarli compared detailed brain scans of 575 people who joined the study in 2009, most in their thirties. DeCarli and his team divided the participants into three groups: hypertensive, pre-hypertensive, and normal blood pressure. They then analyzed the gray and white matter of their brains using high-tech MRIs.
Previous studies have linked high blood pressure with memory loss, Alzheimer’s, and dementia but this study, published online today in the November online version of The Lancet Neurology, appears to be the first one showing that the decline may begin as early as the 30s and 40s. Experts believe that stiffening or hardening of the arteries caused by high blood pressure gradually limits blood flow to the brain, depriving the brain of oxygen over time.
The scans used were both MRIs and diffusion tensor imaging, which obtains a micro view of the brain’s white matter and the axons within it that carry electrical signals between different parts of the brain. According to the researchers, the brains of 30-year-olds with high blood pressure looked similar to the brains of people in their 40s who had normal blood pressure.
DeCarli wants the public to get the message that high blood pressure should be controlled to prevent brain aging, and this is true no matter what age you are. What this would mean is that people in their thirties should regularly get their blood pressure tested, something that most people don’t do until they’re older.
If your blood pressure is elevated, make lifestyle changes (lose weight, exercise, lower your salt intake) or take medication or both to lower it to below 120/80.
Back to Salt: Yes, you should cut out salt if you’re pre-hypertensive or hypertensive. But actually, this applies to you no matter how healthy your numbers, the AHA announced this week. In fact, cutting out salt might be one of the fastest and easiest fixes all of us can make to save our brains.
According to the AHA, eating more than the recommended 1500 milligrams a day puts you at direct risk of high blood pressure. Yet in America we consume an average of 3400 milligrams a day; more than twice what we should. While people with hypertension and heart disease are always advised by doctors to eat less salt, the AHA wants all of us to do this, whether or not our blood pressure is currently in the normal range. “The entire U.S. population, not just at risk groups” should restrict salt to 1500 milligrams, says Nancy Brown,  chief executive officer of the AHA.
Follow me on Twitter, @MelanieHaiken or find me on FacebookLo

New Breakthrough Offers a Better Way to make Drugs - up to 10x Faster

This manufacturing breakthrough is a major deal to the cost and availability of future medicine around the world.







Better chemistry: To produce drugs in a continuous-manufacturing method, MIT engineers had to develop several new pieces of equipment, including this reactor, which enabled a faster reaction and eliminated the need for a toxic solvent.
Despite the huge amounts of money that the pharmaceutical industry spends on drug discovery, it is notoriously old-fashioned in how it actually makes its products. Most drugs are made in batch processes, in which the ingredients, often powders, are added in successive and often disconnected steps. The process resembles a bakery more than it does a modern chemistry lab. That could be about to change.
This summer, a team of researchers from MIT and Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis proved that a continuous production line that integrated several new chemical processes and equipment specially designed for the project could make a higher quality drug faster, and in a less wasteful manner.  This more nimble method may even create more opportunities in early drug discovery. In their continuous-manufacturing process, raw ingredients are fed into a parade of heaters, spinners, extractors, and sensors that relay the intermediates through chemical reactions. At the end, round, coated pills fall out.
Earlier this year, Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez said that his company plans to build a commercial-scale continuous-manufacturing facility by 2015 (see “The Future of Pharma is Incredibly Fast”). Other pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, the world’s largest, have invested in research to develop their own continuous-manufacturing technologies. But the success of the MIT collaboration suggests that Novartis may be the first to use it for production.  
Moving from the batch method to the continuous method requires new kinds of reactions and equipment. While some segments of a batch process may themselves be called continuous because they are constantly running, the breakthrough in the MIT Novartis collaboration is that each step of the process is fully integrated. The products of one reaction flow into the next, typically through small-volume tubes. This enables drug makers to use certain kinds of chemical reactions that aren’t feasible in the large vats used in batch processing, such as those that require higher temperatures or that happen very rapidly. The method could bring new types of molecules into drug discovery.
Making the switch from batch to a fully integrated, continuous production meant that even the way a pill was formed had to be tweaked. The experimental system built at MIT was a jumble of wires, heaters, filters, mixers, and tubes, all enclosed in a 24-foot-long and eight-foot-wide clear plastic case. It could produce a drug that would typically have to be made in multiple facilities. At a few spots, technicians could reach in and adjust equipment or add material, but for the most part, the system was controlled by software that was fed details on temperature, pressure, and other reaction parameters by the many sensors that keep a close eye on the chemistry inside. The MIT system was made to produce one specific drug, but the researchers say the system is adaptable—different pieces of equipment could be swapped in to create a different final product.  
The experimental plant at MIT has been dismantled, and the technology is now being further studied at the Novartis headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. The hope is that the continuous-manufacturing method would be more cost-effective. One benefit could be a significantly reduced time between issuing a manufacturing order for a product and having the finished drug in hand. This would be especially helpful during clinical trials, in which companies have to balance the need for sufficient drugs for upcoming trial stages with the risk that most of those drugs will end up failing. The faster production times promised by the continuous method—at least 10 times speedier in the MIT experimental facility—and the smaller scale of production would be much better suited to the uncertain nature of drug development.
The speedier manufacturing could also reduce the risk that pharmaceutical companies face when bringing a new drug to market. “When you launch a new drug, there’s often a lot of uncertainty in demand. Forecasting is very tough in the business,” says Gary Pisano, a Harvard Business School professor who specializes in life science manufacturing. “If you have a small amount of production and the [drug’s sales] takes off, then you are short, and ramping up will be slow. But if you’ve got a big plant for that drug and if it is not successful, then you are stranded,” he says.
The method could also reduce costs, because continuous facilities can be much smaller and require less energy and fewer raw materials. The smaller amounts of material used in continuous also demand more control over reactions, which, in the end, may ensure a higher quality final product. If you are running a batch process over time and end up with hundreds or thousands of gallons of a chemical at a certain step, you can in some sense “mix away your mistakes,” says MIT chemical engineer Richard Braatz. But the small volumes and fast reactions that typically occur in continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing require that higher product quality requirements be built into the design of the control system.
Yet despite all its benefits, it may be a struggle to bring this new method of drug manufacturing into widespread use. “People have talked a lot about the idea of continuous-flow manufacturing in pharmaceuticals but there’s not been much progress,” says Pisano. “A lot of companies were very conservative about trying anything radically new with their manufacturing,” he says. The batch method, while it has its shortcomings, was tried and true. “Finding a more efficient and effective way to do manufacturing was not high on the priority list,” says Pisano.  
This resistance to change is also due to a lack of financial pressure. “For decades, these inefficiencies of batch processing have been masked by large margins earned by blockbuster drug sales, but now the pharmaceutical business model is changing,” says Salvatore Mascia, project manager for the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing. “The combination of our new technologies with an end-to end integration strategy will allow production of pharmaceuticals on-demand, with benefits in term of speed, quality, and cost,” he says. As revenues continue to decline for many companies and they move toward more targeted therapies with smaller markets, producers are showing interest in continuous manufacturing.
Allan Myerson, an MIT chemical engineering professor, says the drug industry’s engineers have long understood the potential efficiencies of continuous manufacturing, but never took it seriously because of the relatively small scale at which drugs are produced. “The difference in pharma is that they make so many different products,” says Myerson. “But there is much more economic pressure on pharma now to reduce manufacturing costs.” The MIT-Novartis collaboration demonstrated that companies could use the techniques of continuous manufacturing with only a small facility. “There’s a lot of potential financial as well as environmental benefits,” he says.
In addition to cost savings, continuous manufacturing could also provide benefits in manipulating the chemistry. Take, for example, the ability to use light-dependent reactions, which could give medicinal chemists more options of molecular structures to use when creating new candidate drugs. In batch processing, light cannot efficiently shine through the large volumes of material used, says Tim Jamison, an MIT chemist. The volumes of chemicals used in the team’s continuous system, however, are smaller and flow through tubes that enable a more even light exposure. Other kinds of reactions—those that produce dangerous chemical intermediates or that run very quickly, are more amenable to continuous. “One of the most exciting aspects is that this could open up new families of chemical structures that really aren’t viable currently and therefore expand treatments we have available for various diseases,” says Jamison.
The pilot facility was built to produce one particular compound. Now, the 11 MIT groups involved in the collaboration continue to find new reactions and tools so that other drug compounds can be produced in the automated, continuous-flow manner. “Traditionally, the industry has not been focused on manufacturing, but there’s a lot of momentum now,” says project director and MIT chemical engineer Bernhardt Trout. “We understand we have to make a long-term commitment to get this started.”

Monday, November 5, 2012

Great use of tracking technology for natural disaster management

State of New Jersey Awards Radiant RFID 5-Year Emergency Management Solution Contract. - SFGate.com

Radiant RFID will provide the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (OHSP) with an RFID-based managed evacuation solution that tracks evacuees, pets, emergency transport vehicles and commodities deployed at state shelters in preparation for and in the event of a hurricane, natural disaster or other incident to assist in reunification of families.

Radiant RFID (“Radiant”) announced today that the State of New Jersey has awarded the company a five-year contract to assist evacuation and emergency tracking during catastrophic events.

Radiant will provide the Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness (OHSP) with a managed evacuation solution that tracks evacuees, pets, emergency transport vehicles and commodities deployed at state shelters in preparation for and in the event of a hurricane, natural disaster or other man-made incident to assist in reunification of families. In addition, Radiant will manage hardware components, deployment processes and training as well as all maintenance and management functions in support of the State of New Jersey.

Continue Reading: http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/State-of-New-Jersey-Awards-Radiant-RFID-5-Year-3960284.php#ixzz2BO1vhNXU

Sunday, November 4, 2012

General Cancer Treatment

PA Programs - big tip

Important Announcement:

  If you are seriously considering a PA program, I got a big tip from a PA yesterday. The PAEA (Physician Assistant Education Association) has a great school locating service. After creating an account you can type in all the classes that you have taken in school so far, your volunteer hours, work experience and it will find all of the schools in the country that you can apply to and are eligible for. It really helps to know all the ones you are eligible for.  The PA I was talking to was a new graduate and said it was totally worth it for the small subscription fee they charged. There are many PA programs that require enormous hours of work experience or volunteer hours even to apply, so this locator service really helps find programs you are eligible for and not waste your time.

http://www.paeaonline.org/index.php?ht=d/sp/i/25515/pid/25515

Breadcrumb:
  Home > Admissions > Applicants > PA Program Directory