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American Medicine
Many people take multivitamins to try to prevent disease. A recent study confirms that these vitamins do not prevent the leading cause of death in America, cardiovascular disease.
The study and its editorial http://bit.ly/RaLhNO showed that multivitamins had no evidence of benefit despite about 40% of American using them. so what should you do to prevent heart disease?
Here are my tips:
Concentrate on proven methods of reducing heart disease: exercise, weight control, smoking…
Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms in people. When fatigue is severe or constant, many doctors do not spend enough time trying to diagnose and treat the problem, leading to poor quality of life in the person suffering from weakness and lack of energy.
Here are some tips for getting to the cause and treating this common condition:
Ask your doctor to do a complete workup looking for all causes Suggest your doctor…
You can develop potentially serious health conditions or illnesses. Good doctors develop excellent treatment plans for their patients, and you may get lots of information about tests, treatments and drugs you may need. But there is a possible problem in how you understand what the doctors and nurses tell you. In an excellent study http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1204410 J. Weeks and coauthors evaluated over 1100 patients with serious diagnoses of cancer. Between 69% and 81% of the patients…
Getting enough sleep is very important. Reduced sleep can lead to diabetes and obesity. Sleep also helps learning and memory.
A recent study shows how the benefits of sleep occur. In a study by J. Broussard and coauthors http://bit.ly/QKf7b1 people were allowed either 4.5 or 8.5 hours of sleep. In people with shorter sleep, biopsies of fat cells from the area around the navel showed resistance to insulin compared to people with more sleep.
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After a woman gets a diagnosis of breast cancer, she has anxiety, depression and fear until she gets her treatment plan from her doctors, and begins therapy (surgery possibly followed by radiation, chemotherapy and/or hormonal treatment). This delay from diagnosis to treatment with surgery has been growing (according to Dr. Richard Bleicher and coauthors, J. Clin. Oncol. 30: 4485, 2013). The delay averaging 21 days in 1992 has grown to 32 days in 2005 (the…
In America we face periodic shortages – of different foods, gasoline, jobs, loans, and controversially either taxes or spending cuts. but now we are experiencing shortages of drugs because of poor reimbursement of inexpensive generic drugs (which does not provide manufacturers with enough profit to promote production) and limits on factories and importation. Now we know that these shortages…
Alcohol abuse has always been common. Now new information has discovered how frequently this occurs in young high school students as discussed in this CDC report http://1.usa.gov/VNlAGA. Binge drinking occurs in 17.1% of Americans, 11% of women and 23% of men. But in high school girls, 20% are binge drinkers (4 drinks per occasion or more at least once in the last 30 days). In high school girls 54% report using alcohol, and 50% of…
A friend who works as an actor in health dramas is also a patient and a caregiver for an ill parent. We discussed the relevance of TV depictions of medical care and real-life health care issues.
TV programs are presenting issues that people are dealing with every day. Although TV scripts tend to over-dramatize the emotional consequences of problems in medical care (e.g. too little time for doctors and nurses to provide adequate care, insensitivity…
Healthcare reforms are already taking place every day. ObamaCare regulations should prompt you to ask some questions and explore some options so you are prepared and confident about your medical care.
The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is resulting in higher premiums for private insurance and for Medicare fees. These added costs are necessary to achieve widely supported goals of healthcare reform: more coverage for the uninsured; payments for preventive medicine; and elimination of pre-existing conditions, arbitrary insurance…