Category: Resources (Page 10 of 32)

Doctors Recognize The Need To Test Less

April 4, 2012 / Staff

Doctors urge their colleagues to perform less tests.

When you consider that the majority of insurance dollars are spent in the last 6 months of a patient’s life we have to consider if this is money well spent.

This goes for testing, as well.

The Choosing Wisely project was launched last year by the foundation of the American Board of Internal Medicine. It recruited nine medical specialty societies representing more than 376,000 physicians to come up with five common tests or procedures “whose necessity … should be questioned and discussed.”
The groups represent family physicians, cardiologists, radiologists, gastroenterologists, oncologists, kidney specialists and specialists in allergy, asthma and immunology and nuclear cardiology.

Doctors, Health Care Policy, Health Insurance, Hospitals, Quality Control, Research, Resources, Wellness

medical tests prevention public health unnecessary medical tests

Overall, American’s Get The Vitamins They Need

April 2, 2012 / Staff

Americans seem to be getting an adequate amount of vitamins and nutrients in their diets.

This is not to say that there are not deficiencies, especially in certain pockets of the population which include certain racial groups, age groups and women.

Lead researcher Christine Pfeiffer said in the release: “Research shows that good nutrition can help lower people’s risk for many chronic diseases. For most nutrients, the low deficiency rates, less than 1 to 10 percent, are encouraging, but higher deficiency rates in certain age and race/ethnic groups are a concern and need additional attention.”
Pfeiffer and her colleagues found that since the fortification of cereal-grain products with folic acid began in 1998, there has been a sustained increase in folate levels.
Folate deficiency has dropped to less than 1 percent, and blood folate levels in all racial/ethnic groups have increased 50 percent

.
Read on for more information and see if you need to fortify your diet to achieve your best health potential.

Health Care Policy, Nutrition, Research, Resources

American Diet American health CDC Center for Disease Control diet diet for nutrition healthy diet Minerals nutrients vitamins

Your DNA Blueprint May Have Very Little Valuable Information To Offer

April 2, 2012 / Staff

DNA profiles may not have much to offer most people.

It seems that other than informing you of the potential to develop certain diseases, your lifestyle choices are the greatest predictor of your health.

“Genomic tests will not be substitutes for current disease prevention strategies,” said Dr. Bert Vogelstein, one of the authors and a pioneer in the search for genes that increase cancer risk.
So a blood test of the future will not free you from the need to eat healthy, exercise, keep extra weight off, not smoke and get useful cancer detection tests such as pap smears and colonoscopies. Nor will it relieve the ongoing possibility of nasty surprises about diseases you may have never feared.
But isn’t our genetic blueprint our destiny? Many scientists thoroughly believed that not long ago. As they have learned more about genes, however, that prediction appears ever more simplistic.
Most diseases arise from a complex mixture of the genes we inherit from our parents at birth— not only what is measured in the whole gene test, but also our lifestyle and environment, and random events such as gene mutations occurring in individual cells in our body later in life.

This is great news.

We are able to have a great deal of influence on our future based on all of the choices we make everyday.

Research, Resources, Wellness

DNA DNA Blueprint DNA Testing

Generic Or Not Generic?

March 26, 2012 / Staff

Whether choosing generics because of cost or availability you would think that their safety and efficacy would be guaranteed by the maker, much like brand name products.

It seems like this is not the case.

Across the country, dozens of lawsuits against generic pharmaceutical companies are being dismissed because of a Supreme Court decision last year that said the companies did not have control over what their labels said and therefore could not be sued for failing to alert patients about the risks of taking their drugs.
Now, what once seemed like a trivial detail — whether to take a generic or brand-name drug — has become the deciding factor in whether a patient can seek legal recourse from a drug company. The cases range from that of Ms. Schork, who wasn’t told which type of drug she had been given when she visited the hospital, to people like Camille Baruch, who developed a gastrointestinal disease after taking a generic form of the drug Accutane, as required by her health care plan.

Health Insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, Quality Control, Research, Resources, Wellness

generic drugs pharmaceuticals public safety safety of generic drugs

Fixing Food Deserts

March 23, 2012 / Staff

Otherwise known as food deserts, for the lack of fresh produce and healthy food choices, efforts are being made to remedy the problem.

Thanks to Micelle Obama for taking up the cause and creating awareness, grocery stores are being built in once forgotten areas.

“Simply providing fruits and vegetables may not be enough if [they] don’t meet the expectations of those people who are supposed to buy them,” Jonathan Blitstein, a research psychologist at Research Triangle Institute and lead author of the paper, tells The Salt.
In other words, low-income shoppers dislike wilted lettuce just as much as anyone else. Not shocking.

Providing a wide variety of choices as well as well maintained and fresh produce will go a long way to encourage people to buy fresh, healthy ingredients to prepare for their families.

Nutrition, Quality Control, Research, Resources

eating healthfully food availability food deserts Food Stamps fresh produce healthy eating Michelle Obama