Ramanisblog

Tag: Doctor

  • When To Say No To Your Doctor-Forbes.

    Also read my blog on Health Care Costs under Health.
    In Depth: Six Reasons To Say No To Your Doctor
    When it comes to economic threats to our country, President Obama says nothing even comes close to spiraling health care costs, expected to hit $2.5 trillion this year. Legislators are struggling to come up with health reform plans that cover millions more people without boosting the deficit.

    One obvious place that Congress could look for savings: the waste already embedded in the medical system.
    http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/12/health-care-costs-lifestyle-health-spending-tests.html

    Health policy researchers furiously debate how much is wasted on treatments that sometimes don’t make people better. There are no sure numbers because much of modern medicine remains unstudied and unproven, but by every indication the figure is colossal. Health spending is projected to hit 17.6% of gross domestic product this year. In 2008 McKinsey found $650 billion in excess medical costs, even after adjusting for the fact that rich nations spend more of their incomes on health.

    In Depth: Six Reasons Say No To Your Doctor
    Elliott Fisher and his colleagues at Dartmouth Medical School have shown that medical spending fluctuates wildly from town to town and hospital to hospital, with no measurable improvement in health in the pricey places. They calculate that 20% or more of all costs could be eliminated without harming anyone. It might even save some lives by preventing complications from unnecessary treatments and hospital stays. At least 40% of all specialist visits and 25% of hospitals stays are unnecessary, Fisher estimates. (For more, see: Useless Medicine.)

    “We don’t have any sort of system to measure the effectiveness of what we are doing,” says Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center orthopedic surgeon James Weinstein. He showed in 2006 that patients with herniated spinal discs often get better on their own, without the need for back surgery. “For all of the money we spend, we are flying blind.”

    Tests and treatments Congress could target if it decides to get serious about controlling health care costs:

    Another strand of evidence comes from health researcher Robert Brook at UCLA and the Rand Corp. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he and his colleagues looked at rates of unnecessary surgery for numerous elective procedures. “Across the board, a large percentage of surgery was inappropriate or of questionable value,” he says. Sometimes it was 30% or more. Brook says no federal agency has been interested in funding his proposals to develop a broad set of surgical appropriateness criteria. “You’d think the federal government would make this a priority. But it is politically too hot to handle,” he says.

    Wasteful medicine can be profitable. “Every time you isolate a place where we are wasting money and there is something we can do about it, it takes money out of someone’s pocket,” says Wendy Everett, who heads New England Healthcare Institute, a nonprofit research outfit.

    States With The Most And Least H1N1 Vaccine Per 1,000 Residents
    Your chances of getting inoculated against America’s worst pandemic since the 1918 flu improve greatly depending on where you live.
    But American consumers share the blame. They often falsely equate fancy tests with high-quality care.

    “There is an assumption that more testing is better care,” says Richard Deyo, a back pain expert at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. People don’t trust their physicians and assume they aren’t doing a good job if they don’t order more tests.”

  • A Headache That Didn’t Go Away

    I have relative of mine,about 50, who had difficulty in vision. Ophthalmologist advised him to wear glasses.By chance he happened to see a GP who informed him his case was not one of vision ,but of eye balls about to pop out and he immediately rushed to Specialty hospital where he was diagnosed with a disorder that has resulted in his eyeballs being held only by 40%.He was immediately operated upon and he is recovering.
    Moral-better seek second opinion .Sometimes, though cynical it may sound , it may again be not 100% correct.Sometimes there are as many opinions as there are doctors.What are we to do?
    Valerie Novak fervently wished doctors would stop telling her the intense headache she’d endured for several weeks was a migraine. For one thing, neither the Georgetown University senior nor her close relatives had headaches, and migraines are frequently familial. None of the increasingly potent drugs doctors prescribed was doing much good. And the 22-year-old had lost 15 pounds in three weeks from bouts of severe vomiting.

    “I was so frustrated and upset,” recalled Novak of her ordeal last summer, which involved consultations with half a dozen doctors, several trips to area emergency rooms and two hospitalizations. Novak, who had always been healthy, said she feared the unrelenting pain in her left temple and associated symptoms were something “I’d have to live with for the rest of my life.”

    Her mother, Kathy Novak, a nurse practitioner in Bowie, was similarly skeptical of the diagnosis but grateful that doctors had ruled out more ominous possibilities, such as a brain tumor. When her middle daughter began complaining about double vision, Kathy took her to an ophthalmologist. His judgment led to an accurate diagnosis that had nothing to do with migraines but was instead a rare complication of a common item listed on Novak’s medical records. Left untreated, it might have killed her……………….

    Back home with her parents, unable to go to class, Novak recalled that her “eyesight was getting wonky, with really, really weird double vision.” Alarmed, her mother made an appointment with an ophthalmologist, hoping he might have an explanation that didn’t involve migraines.

    After dilating Novak’s eyes, the eye specialist immediately spotted something alarming: Her optic nerves were dangerously swollen. “This is not a migraine,” he told Novak. “You have increased intracranial pressure.”

    The unrelenting headache as well as the numbness, tingling and vomiting were caused by a rise in pressure in the brain. The condition, which can result from a head injury or meningitis, is considered a medical emergency; increased pressure caused by a buildup of fluid can permanently damage the central nervous system by restricting blood flow to vessels that supply the brain. In Novak’s case, the double vision was caused by pressure on her cranial nerve.

    The ophthalmologist’s first thought, given Novak’s age and history, was pseudotumor cerebri, a rare condition sometimes called a false brain tumor, that affects women between ages 20 and 45. Valerie’s illness had nearly all the hallmarks but lacked one critical variable: She was not overweight or obese, as are most of those with the condition.

    The ophthalmologist immediately sent Novak to Greenbelt neurologist Roger Whicker. She immediately began taking a drug to reduce the pressure and underwent another MRI and other testing, which revealed the actual cause of the illness and changed the diagnosis to sagittal sinus thrombosis, or SST, caused by a blood clot in her brain.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/02/AR2009020202209_2.html

  • Orgasm Patient Withdraws Case Against Gynaecologist

    In any rape or attempt to molest case, woman’s word is taken.Unless Providence intervenes, Man is doomed.Tricky to define rape.Detailed blog follows.
    Consensual sex may also be denied by the woman later.
    In this case, the woman need to be awarded exemplary punishment.

    A Brit women who accused a gynaecologist of sexually assaulting her has withdrawn the case and paid the doctor 30,000 pounds as legal costs.

    Bibi Giles, 50, had claimed that Angus Thomson, 40, exploited her sexually and gave her two “leg buckling orgasms” while checking her after a surgery.

    She also alleged that Thompson pressed her into having a fling with him.

    Giles had come to Thomson, a consultant gynaecologist from Droitwich Spa, Worcs, after a 16-year history of medical problems.

    However, it was revealed that Giles had sent explicit messages to the gynaecologist, including one where she asked him to christen her with his “Angus beef sausage”.

    The case completely turned in favour of Thompson when Giles’ former GP, Dr William Dowley, revealed medical notes taken when he was treating her from 2002-2004.

    During the hearing, Christina Lambert QC, Thomson’s lawyer called Dr Dowley “in respect of invites and conversations between him and Mrs Giles”.

    She said the evidence showed that Giles had wanted a relationship with Dr Dowley.

    “Mrs Giles had reported to him that there had been a previous relationship above and beyond a doctor patient relationship,” the Telegraph quoted Lambert, as saying.

    Judge Daniel Pearce-Higgins told the court that Giles had decided to withdraw the case.

    He said: “Life would have been much easier if Mrs Giles had admitted this incident at the start of the case. She has got form. She has pestered a doctor in the past.
    http://www.medindia.net/news/Orgasm-Patient-Withdraws-Case-Against-Gynaecologist-62543-1.htm

  • The Placebo EffecStudies Reveal How Fake Medicine Actually Reduces Pain.

    Proof that mind controls the body.;shows that mind controls the brain(which is different from Brain according to Indian Philosophy).
    Story:
    New medical research is finding that the pain relief induced by placebos may come from releasing the body’s own chemical pain relievers.
    A team of researchers smears a cream said to contain a powerful anesthetic on the skin of your forearm. Then, in their mad-scientist way, they apply an electric heating pad that can be dialed up to painfully hot levels.

    Imagine being pleasantly surprised to find that the cream works — the heat seems quite bearable. The researchers even run a brain scan to document just how well this cream works.

    But picture your dismay at learning that the cream was actually inert and contained no anesthetic. Nada.

    Guileless lab rat that you are, you have been punked. By a placebo.

    Scenes like this are playing out in U.S. and European laboratories as neuroscientists try to figure out how our brains can be tricked by sham treatments into producing potent pain-blocking effects that rival (and may sometimes enhance) the effects of real drugs.

    The details of the emerging picture are still being sketched in, but it seems that our expectations — whether shaped through conditioning or a simple verbal instruction — can trigger our native pain-control networks, some of which extend from higher cognitive regions deep into the brain stem and spinal cord.

    In recent papers published in Science and Neuron, a team of scientists led by Falk Eippert and Ulrike Bingel at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany explored how placebos activate the brain’s “descending pain control system,” which involves structures in the brain stem. It’s a complex process that relies on opioids — naturally produced substances that chemically resemble opium and block the transmission of pain signals.

    The scientists induced the placebo effect in their 48 test subjects by falsely telling them they were applying a cream containing lidocaine, a topical anesthetic. But some subjects also received naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids (the rest got an inert injection of saline solution).

    Next, the scientists studied their subjects’ brains with a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner and asked them to subjectively rate the pain intensity.

    The subjects who received naloxone (which blocked opioid activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and midbrain structures like the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, the periaqueductal gray and the rostral ventromedial medulla) saw markedly lower pain relief than those who had received saline, the team reported.

    “Until now it was believed that placebo was just a psychological phenomenon that has no neurobiological basis, but that’s really not the case,” Eippert said. He noted that naloxone did not completely erase the pain-relief effect, suggesting that placebo treatment may also engage other less-studied brain networks.

    The placebo effect is probably at work even when proven opiates are administered for pain relief, Eippert said. Experiments have shown that patients experience some pain relief when they are given opiates without their knowledge, which is no surprise. “However, when you give this drug and tell the patient, the pain relief is going to be much, much stronger,” he said. “The interesting thing is if you give naloxone at the same time, then this additional effect of telling the patient is completely canceled. There’s a placebo component in treatment as well.”

    http://www.alternet.org/story/144327/the_placebo_effect:_studies_reveal_how_fake_medicine_actually_reduces_pain

  • Dirt can be good for children, say scientists

    Very true.Our obsession with cleanliness and rushing to Doctor even for small ailments is not healthy.Our system’s defense mechanism gets weakened to fight disease and use of antibiotics help the the disease inducing agents to become immune, they mutate and more violent forms are created for which we need to go in for still heavier dosage of medicine and these medicines more than curing disease creates serious side effects.
    Best is to wait for sometime excepting in the case of high fever and allow the system to take care.
    Story:
    Children should be allowed to get dirty, according to scientists who have found being too clean can impair the skin’s ability to heal.
    Normal bacteria living on the skin trigger a pathway that helps prevent inflammation when we get hurt, the US team discovered.
    The bugs dampen down overactive immune responses that can cause cuts and grazes to swell, they say.
    Their work is published in the online edition of Nature Medicine.
    Experts said the findings provided an explanation for the “hygiene hypothesis”, which holds that exposure to germs during early childhood primes the body against allergies.
    Many believe our obsession with cleanliness is to blame for the recent boom in allergies in developed countries.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8373690.stm