Ramanisblog

Category: Medicine

  • 6 Life Saving Techniques From the Movies (That Can Kill You)

    http://www.cracked.com/article/18363_6-life-saving-techniques-from-movies-that-can-kill-you/

  • Misdiagnosed With Coma, Belgian Man Communicates After 23 Years

    Very sad.Some doctors, despite fancy degrees,make a cursory examination and arrive at a prognosis.
    In this case brain activity should have been mapped or at least pupil dilation examination should have been more thorough.
    It is very hard to digest that that this should happen because of inefficiency of the doctors.
    Many of us regard doctors next to God, forgetting that medicine is an evolving science ; most of the treatments are exploratory in Nature and these procedures have contra indications as well;some of the medications are effective with out anybody knowing why and how it cures.Classic example is grand mal seizure .We know that this seizure is triggered by sudden increase in electrical discharges in the brain and Eption is prescribed to treat this.But none knows how it works or whether it has side effects.
    Because of commercialization of medicine , neither the doctor nor the patient has the time to discuss family history of the patient;nor are the patients interested in slow and steady cure or allowing body to take care with minimal supportive treatment.
    It is imperative for patients to inform and discuss with the doctor,your family history,your known allergies and your symptoms.
    It is also mandatory on the part of the patients to check the medicines prescribed for contra indications.If yes, inform the doctor and have the medicine changed.Even then you should also chek up on internet about the medicine’s efficacy.This may sound tedious, but will save not only money, but your life as well.
    When going for surgery check before hand the anesthesia that is about to me administered and see if it it is compatible with your system for some anesthetics are incompatible.
    If you had any disease prior to surgery that has resulted in Edema(especially pulmonary), Nitrous oxide is to be shunned.
    While getting tests being carried out make sure at the lab, it is done for the part for which you have problem i.e.what the doctor has prescribed and see that the report is yours when you collect it.Never depute somebody else to collect it.
    Also popping pills based on advertisement or based on what your doctor has prescribed earlier ailments is dangerous.
    All these jobs are to be carried out by Doctors.Unfortunately,Doctors have no time for patients for they are too busy.

    Story:

    Conscious but unable to communicate for 23 years after a car accident that was thought to have put him into a deep coma, a quadriplegic Belgian man has described how medical science finally put an end to his agonizing years of silence.

    Now able to make himself understood via a computer and specially built keyboard, the man, Rom Houben, said in the Monday issue of the German magazine Der Spiegel that when doctors made the correct diagnosis, it was like starting a second life.

    “I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me — it was my second birth,” Mr. Houben, now 46, was quoted as saying.

    Mr. Houben, who was an engineering student at the time of the accident, lives in a care home near Brussels. He was assumed to be in a persistent vegetative state until three years ago, when the breakthrough was made.

    In the interview he recalled the aftermath of the car accident that paralyzed him and the realization that no one understood that he was fully conscious.

    “I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,” he said. He added that he then became a witness to his own suffering as doctors and nurses tried to speak with him until they gave up all hope.

    Using brain scanning techniques, Dr. Steven Laureys, a neurological researcher at the Liège University Hospital, discovered that Mr. Houben’s cerebral cortex was still active.

    On Monday, Dr. Laureys, who recently published a paper on comas, said that as many as 4 out of 10 similar patients may have been misdiagnosed.

    He also described the moment he realized, for the first time that Mr. Houben was fully conscious. “It was one of those rare moments where you really see that what you are doing is useful,” he said in a telephone interview.

    “It was a very big moment not just for me but for the whole team, one of those few much-needed moments” for medical professionals.
    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/world/europe/24iht-coma.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a4

  • How the Brain Filters out Distracting Thoughts to Focus on a Single Bit of Information

    Difference between Mind and Matter is one of degree ,not of kind.While mind vibrates at a higher rate, matter vibrates at a lower frequency.
    Lower frequencies are associated with past experiences, higher frequencies are linked to present and Ultra high frequencies with the future.
    Consciousness is a stream that is Universal.Individual variations are due to limitations of Space and Time.Mind can relate to and transcend Time and Space with proper discipline.
    The exposition of this thought will take too much space;separate blog follows.
    What the current studies attempt to prove and proved partially have already been practiced in Hinduism.
    ScienceDaily (Nov. 23, 2009) — The human brain is bombarded with all kinds of information, from the memory of last night’s delicious dinner to the instructions from your boss at your morning meeting. But how do you “tune in” to just one thought or idea and ignore all the rest of what is going on around you, until it comes time to think of something else?

    Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for the Biology of Memory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have discovered a mechanism that the brain uses to filter out distracting thoughts to focus on a single bit of information. Their results are reported in 19 November issue of Nature.
    Think of your brain like a radio: You’re turning the knob to find your favourite station, but the knob jams, and you’re stuck listening to something that’s in between stations. It’s a frustrating combination that makes it quite hard to get an update on swine flu while a Michael Jackson song wavers in and out. Staying on the right frequency is the only way to really hear what you’re after. In much the same way, the brain’s nerve cells are able to “tune in” to the right station to get exactly the information they need, says researcher Laura Colgin, who was the paper’s first author. “Just like radio stations play songs and news on different frequencies, the brain uses different frequencies of waves to send different kinds of information,” she says.
    Gamma waves as information carriers
    Colgin and her colleagues measured brain waves in rats, in three different parts of the hippocampus, which is a key memory center in the brain. While listening in on the rat brain wave transmissions, the researchers started to realize that there might be something more to a specific sub-set of brain waves, called gamma waves. Researchers have thought these waves are linked to the formation of consciousness, but no one really knew why their frequency differed so much from one region to another and from one moment to the next.
    Information is carried on top of gamma waves, just like songs are carried by radio waves. These “carrier waves” transmit information from one brain region to another. “We found that there are slow gamma waves and fast gamma waves coming from different brain areas, just like radio stations transmit on different frequencies,” she says.
    You really can “be on the same wavelength”
    “You know how when you feel like you really connect with someone, you say you are on the same wavelength? When brain cells want to connect with each other, they synchronize their activity,” Colgin explains. “The cells literally tune into each other’s wavelength. We investigated how gamma waves in particular were involved in communication across cell groups in the hippocampus. What we found could be described as a radio-like system inside the brain. The lower frequencies are used to transmit memories of past experiences, and the higher frequencies are used to convey what is happening where you are right now.”
    If you think of the example of the jammed radio, the way to hear what you want out of the messy signals would be to listen really hard for the latest news while trying to filter out the unwanted music. The hippocampus does this more efficiently. It simply tunes in to the right frequency to get the station it wants. As the cells tune into the station they’re after, they are actually able to filter out the other station at the same time, because its signal is being transmitted on a different frequency.
    The switch
    “The cells can rapidly switch their activity to tune in to the slow waves or the fast waves,” Colgin says, “but it seems as though they cannot listen to both at the exact same time. This is like when you are listening to your radio and you tune in to a frequency that is midway between two stations- you can’t understand anything- it’s just noise.” In this way, the brain cells can distinguish between an internal world of memories and a person’s current experiences. If the messages were carried on the same frequency, our perceptions of the world might be completely confused. “Your current perceptions of a place would get mixed up with your memories of how the place used to be,” Colgin says.
    The cells that tune into different wavelengths work like a switch, or rather, like zapping between radio stations that are already programmed into your radio. The cells can switch back and forth between different channels several times per second. The switch allows the cells to attend to one piece at a time, sorting out what’s on your mind from what’s happening and where you are at any point in time. The researchers believe this is an underlying principle for how information is handled throughout the brain.
    “This switch mechanism points to superfast routing as a general mode of information handling in the brain,” says Edvard Moser, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience director. “The classical view has been that signaling inside the brain is hardwired, subject to changes caused by modification of connections between neurons. Our results suggest that the brain is a lot more flexible. Among the thousands of inputs to a given brain cell, the cell can choose to listen to some and ignore the rest and the selection of inputs is changing all the time. We believe that the gamma switch is a general principle of the brain, employed throughout the brain to enhance interregional communication.”
    Can a switch malfunction explain schizophrenia?
    People who are schizophrenic have problems keeping these brain signals straight. They cannot tell, for example, if they are listening to voices from people who are present or if the voices are from the memory of a movie they have seen. “We cannot tell for sure if it is this switch that is malfunctioning, but we do know that gamma waves are abnormal in schizophrenic patients,” Colgin says. “Schizophrenics’ perceptions of the world around them are mixed up, like a radio stuck between stations.”
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091120000140.htm

  • Drug-resistant bacteria on increase in U.S.: study-Reuters.

    Could this be the mutated Strains of known Bacteria whose growth /mutation may be attributed to indiscriminate use of Antibiotics?
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Cases of a drug-resistant bacterial infection known as MRSA have risen by 90 percent since 1999, and they are increasingly being acquired outside hospitals, researchers reported on Tuesday.

    They found two new strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus — MRSA for short — were circulating in patients and they are different from the strains normally seen in hospitals.

    Ramanan Laxminarayan of Princeton University in New Jersey and colleagues studied data on lab tests from a national network of 300 microbiology laboratories in the United States for their study.

    “We found during 1999-2006 that the percentage of S. aureus infections resistant to methicillin increased more than 90 percent, or 10 percent a year, in outpatients admitted to U.S. hospitals,” they wrote in a report published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

    “This increase was caused almost entirely by community-acquired MRSA strains, which increased more than 33 percent annually.”

    MRSA is now entrenched in U.S. hospitals. It was also known to be circulating in the community but it was not clear whether patients were carrying the infections out of hospitals, or the other way around.

    Laxminarayan’s team found that many more people were being diagnosed with the community-acquired strains, and these strains were not replacing the known hospital strains. Instead, they are just adding to the overall number of MRSA cases.

    “Our findings have implications for local and national policies aimed at containing and preventing MRSA,” they wrote.

    For one thing, new, fast tests are needed so patients can be diagnosed and treated quickly. It is possible to treat MRSA but doctors need to know straight away so they start patients on the correct antibiotics.

    “Lastly, infection control policies should take into account the role that outpatients likely play in the spread of MRSA and promote interventions that could prevent spread of MRSA from outpatient areas to inpatient areas,” they added.

    MRSA is one of the most common causes of hospital-acquired infections. It can also now be picked up in schools, at fitness centers and elsewhere.

    Symptoms range from abscesses to bloodborne infections that can kill quickly.

    The researchers estimate that 20,000 people in the United States die each year from MRSA, and treating MRSA can range from $3,000 to more than $35,000 per case.
    http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSTRE5AN0N020091124

  • Pharmaceutical Giant Paid $500,000 to Psychiatrist Who Used Chicago’s Poor as Guinea Pigs.

    Eye opener.
    Story:
    This story was co-published by ProPublica the Chicago Tribune.

    Executives inside pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca faced a high-stakes dilemma.

    On one hand, Chicago psychiatrist Dr. Michael Reinstein was bringing the company a small fortune in sales and was conducting research that made one of its most promising drugs look spectacular.

    On the other, some worried that his research findings might be too good to be true.

    As Reinstein grew irritated with what he perceived as the company’s slights, a top executive outlined the scenario in an e-mail to colleagues.

    “If he is in fact worth half a billion dollars to (AstraZeneca),” the company’s U.S. sales chief wrote in 2001, “we need to put him in a different category.” To avoid scaring Reinstein away, he said, the firm should answer “his every query and satisfy any of his quirky behaviors.”

    Putting aside its concerns, AstraZeneca would continue its relationship with Reinstein, paying him $490,000 over a decade to travel the nation promoting its best-selling antipsychotic drug, Seroquel. In return, Reinstein provided the company a vast customer base: thousands of indigent, mentally ill residents in Chicago-area nursing homes.

    During this period, Reinstein also faced accusations that he overmedicated and neglected patients who took a variety of drugs. But his research and promotional work went on, including studies and presentations examining many of the antipsychotics he prescribed on his daily rounds.

    The AstraZeneca payments, filed as exhibits in a federal lawsuit, highlight the extent to which a leading drug company helped sustain one of the busiest psychiatrists working in local nursing facilities.
    http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/144011/pharmaceutical_giant_paid_$500,000_to_psychiatrist_who_used_chicago’s_poor_as_guinea_pigs/