July 28, 2012 by
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Health
Doctors call for change in painkiller labels
U.S. health regulators should change the prescription guidelines for
opioid painkillers to prevent more people abusing the powerful and
addictive medicines, urged a group of medical and public health experts.
Thirty-seven health experts signed a petition to the Food and Drug
Administration, asking it to revise the prescription label for opioid
painkillers. They want to prohibit use of the drugs for moderate pain,
add a maximum daily dose, and only allow patients to take them for up to
90 days unless they are being treated for cancer-related pain.
Changing the label would not limit how doctors prescribe painkillers.
But it would stop pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma, Endo
Health Solutions Inc and Pfizer Inc from promoting the drugs for
non-approved uses.
Some researchers say aggressive marketing by drug companies has
fueled overprescribing of opioids like oxycodone and methadone,
synthetic versions of opium that are currently used to treat moderate or
severe pain but are also highly addictive.
Overdose from prescription drugs is now the leading cause of
accidental death in the country, eclipsing car crashes and the combined
impact of cocaine and heroin. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention says the problem has become an epidemic.
The government has tried a multitude of strategies to combat the
problem, from targeting “pill mills” and pharmacies like CVS Caremark
Corp that are accused of peddling painkillers to addicts, to asking
drugmakers to pay for training courses that show doctors how to properly
prescribe the medicines.
But some researchers say the government has done little to address
drug companies’ marketing, which often encourages doctors to prescribe
the pills for chronic pain.
Dr. Andrew Kolodny, chair of the psychiatry department at Maimonides
Medical Center in Brooklyn and one of the petitioners, said he has many
patients who started off taking opioids for legitimate medical reasons,
but then became addicted when they stayed on them for too long.
“We don’t think drug companies should be allowed to advertise these
drugs as safe and effective for long-term pain, if we know very well
that they’re not,” said Kolodny, who is also president of Physicians for
Responsible Opioid Prescribing.
“The FDA has said there’s nothing they can do about this problem (of
painkiller abuse). But there is, and that’s a label change.”
Read Full Article Here
Expanding Medicaid cuts death rates, study finds
State expansions of the Medicaid health insurance program for poor
Americans reduced adult mortality rates by more than 6 percent compared
with states that did not broaden eligibility for their plans, according
to a study released on Wednesday.
- The findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine could
fuel a political furor over new plans for a nationwide expansion of Medicaid
that erupted after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold President Barack Obama’s healthcare law in late June.
In an unexpected move, the high court ruling also left it up to
states to decide whether to participate in the law’s broader eligibility
criteria for Medicaid that would extend insurance coverage to as many
as 16 million more Americans starting in 2014. At least five Republican
governors who opposed the healthcare law have vowed to opt out of the
expansion, saying the program will pose a huge financial burden.
The lead author of the study was Benjamin Sommers, an assistant
professor in health policy and economics at the Harvard School of Public
Health who is temporarily working as an advisor to the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services. According to a disclosure note in the
study, the paper was conceived and drafted while Sommers was
employed
at Harvard and the findings do not reflect official U.S. government policy.
The study examined three states that substantially broadened Medicaid
eligibility for adults since 2000 — New York, Maine and Arizona. They
were compared to neighboring states that did not implement expansions —
Pennsylvania (for New York), New Hampshire (for Maine) and Nevada and
New Mexico (for Arizona).
Read Full Article Here
Two men unlucky enough to get both HIV and cancer have been seemingly
cleared of the virus, raising hope that science may yet find a way to
cure for the infection that causes AIDS, 30 years into the epidemic.
The researchers are cautious in declaring the two men cured, but more
than two years after receiving bone marrow transplants, HIV can’t be
detected anywhere in their bodies. These two new cases are reminiscent
of the so-called “Berlin patient,” the only person known to have been
cured of infection from the human immunodeficiency virus.
These two cases, presented as a “late-breaker” finding on Thursday at
the 19th annual International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C., are
among the reasons that scientists have been speaking so openly at the
event about their hopes of finding a cure.
“Everyone knows about this ‘Berlin patient’. We wanted to see if a
simpler treatment would do the same thing”, said Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes of
Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who oversaw the study. The
widely publicized patient, Timothy Brown, was treated for leukemia with a
bone marrow transplant that happened to come from a donor with a
genetic mutation that makes immune cells resist HIV infection. The
transplant replaced his own infected cells with healthy, AIDS-resistant
cells. He is
HIV-free five years later.
AIDS patients are susceptible to cancers, but they usually stop
taking HIV drugs before receiving cancer treatment. “That allows the
virus to come back and it infects their donor cells,” Kuritzkes said.
About 34 million people are infected with HIV, the virus that causes
AIDS, globally; 25 million have died from it. While there’s no vaccine,
cocktails of powerful antiviral drugs called antiretroviral therapy
(ART) can keep the virus suppressed and keep patients healthy. No matter
how long patients take ART, however, they are never cured. The virus
lurks in the body and comes back if the drugs are stopped. Scientists
want to flush out these so-called reservoirs and find a way to kill the
virus for good.
Brown, and now these two other men, offer some real hope.
Dr. Timothy Henrich and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
launched a search about a year ago for HIV patients with leukemia or
lymphoma who had received bone marrow stem cell transplants. Bone marrow
is the body’s source of immune system cells that HIV infects and it’s a
likely place to look for HIV’s reservoirs.
“If you took an HIV patient getting treated for various cancers, you
can check the effect on the viral reservoirs of various cancer
treatments,” Kuritzkes, who works with Henrich, said. They found the two
patients by asking colleagues at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston
which, like Brigham and Women’s, is associated with Harvard Medical
School.
Both men had endured multiple rounds of treatment for lymphoma, both
had stem cell treatments and both had stayed on their HIV drugs
throughout. “They went through the transplants on therapy,” Kuritzkes
said.
It turns out that was key.
“We found that immediately before the transplant and after the
transplant, HIV DNA was in the cells. As the patients’ cells were
replaced by the donor cells, the HIV DNA disappeared,” Kuritzkes said.
The donor cells, it appears, killed off and replaced the infected cells.
And the HIV drugs protected the donor cells while they did it.
One patient is HIV-free two years later, and the other is seemingly uninfected three-and-a-half years later.
“They still have no detectable HIV DNA in their T-cells,” Kuritzkes
said. In fact, doctors can’t find any trace of HIV in their bodies — not
in their blood plasma, not when they grow cells in the lab dishes, not
by the most sensitive tests.
Can the patients be told they are cured?
“We’re being very careful not to do that,” Kuritzkes said.
Read Full Article Here
Big uptick in scheduled births before due dates, Aussie study finds
Expectant mothers in Australia are increasingly having their babies’
births scheduled weeks before their due date, according to a new study.
But that hasn’t lowered the risk of stillbirth, as some had hoped. In
fact, researchers found that babies born even just a few weeks before
their due date were slightly more likely to suffer from complications
such as respiratory distress and feeding issues.
“Without a medical indication that is strong and clear right now, a
planned delivery is not supported due to the fact that consequences
after birth are likely to be relevant and severe,” said Dr. Karna
Murthy, a pediatrics professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University, who
was not involved in the study.
A baby’s due date is 40 weeks after the first day of the mother’s
last period. For scheduled births, moms can be induced by medications
and deliver vaginally or have their babies via Cesarean section.
In some cases, there are good reasons to stop a pregnancy short and
deliver the baby early, such as if the mother has severe preeclampsia,
which is high blood pressure and protein in the urine.
The condition is risky for the health of the mom, and delivering the
baby early is considered a safer option than letting the pregnancy go
on.
In other cases, such as if the mom has diabetes or there are low
fluid levels around the baby, it’s not clear whether scheduling a birth
early is less risky than letting the mother go into labor on her own,
said Murthy.
“There is a widely held perception of a change in obstetric decision
making that has lowered the threshold at which and for which planned
birth occurs,” the researchers write in their report in the American
Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
The result is that preterm births have become more popular around the
world, with increases seen in both C-sections and inductions. In the
U.S., for example, about one of every three babies is now born through a
C-section.
To see whether planned births have also increased in Australia, and
if there are health benefits to planning births, Jonathan Morris at the
Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney and colleagues collected
information on all births in New South Wales, Australia, from 2001 and
2009. The study included only single births.
Births that were planned between 33 and 39 weeks of pregnancy rose
during the study period, from 19 percent of all births in 2001 to 26
percent in 2009.
Both inductions and C-sections became more popular; inductions rose
from nine percent of all births in 2001 to 11 percent in 2009, while
early, planned C-sections rose from 10 to 15 percent.
At the same time, severe health problems among newborns increased
slightly, from three percent of all births in 2001 to 3.2 percent in
2009.
Among the babies whose births were scheduled between 33 and 39 weeks,
4.5 percent had a major health complication and 43 out of every 10,000
died.
In comparison, 3.3 percent of babies whose moms went into labor
naturally and delivered between 33 and 39 weeks had a severe health
problem and 40 out of every 10,000 died.
Read Full Article Here
Why married men are happier
Getty Images / Image Source
Married guys are happier post-nuptials than if they’d stayed bachelors, a new study finds.
Think bachelors have it made? It turns out married men are actually
happier after marriage than they would be if they stayed single,
according to researchers at Michigan State University.
The study looked at 1,366 people who weren’t married before
participating in the survey, got married at some point during, and
stayed married. Researchers compared the subjects to a control group who
was demographically alike in every way other than being married.
The results: “People, on average, aren’t happier following marriage
than they were before marriage, but they are happier than they would
have been if they stayed single,” says Stevie C. Y. Yap, a doctoral
candidate in the Department of Psychology at MSU and one of the study
authors.
“Just being in a well-adjusted, long-term romantic partnership with
someone may be the underlying mechanism,” says Yap. “It may not have to
do with the marriage itself, the fact that you step up to the altar and
say, ‘I do.’” (Want to know the secret to long-lasting love? Discover
What Every Woman Wants.)
Happiness in a marriage might not always seem as exciting as when you
first meet your wife, says Marsha Lucas, Ph.D., a psychologist in
Washington, D.C
. That’s because, as research proves, many
people have a baseline level of happiness they tend to return to after a
positive life event.
“During early romance, we’re getting all kinds of great, pleasurable
experiences that are giving us a bit of a hit of dopamine, stimulating
the brain areas involved with reward—even euphoria—as well as the
motivation to seek out and return over and over to that same source to
get some more,” she says. “After you’re married and the thrill has
settled, those big, constant hits of dopamine taper off, and like coming
down from a high, it can feel like a huge letdown.” (For more must-have
relationship advice delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for
our free Girl Next Door newsletter.)
Read Full Article Here
Sorry, But What We Told You Is Wrong
|
- Dr. Gifford Jones Sunday |
Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, once remarked,
“To every question there is a clear, concise, coherent answer that is wrong”.
In medicine there are also many questions, and all too often the
answers from experts are found years later to be wrong, sometimes with
devastating consequences.
A report in the
Archives of Internal Medicine found that 13 percent of research articles published in the prestigious
New England Journal of Medicine in 2009 reported reversals in medical findings involving drugs, screening tests and invasive procedures!
For example, for years we’ve been told that increasing good
cholesterol is a prudent move. But new research shows it does nothing to
protect against heart attack, strokes and early death.
Here’s another hummer. Doctors have urged men to have regular PSA
testing. Now, it’s reported that routine prostate-cancer screening is
less likely to save lives and more likely to cause substantial harm from
the treatment.
Do you ever cringe when you’re with a friend who has a
knuckle-cracking habit? Since we’ve been told this leads to arthritis,
why not bite the bullet and bluntly tell them to stop it. But in a
research study that reviewed hand X-rays of 215 people aged 50 to 59 the
incidence of arthritis was about the same in those who did or did not
crack their knuckles.
We’ve also been warned by health nuts, and everyone else, that for
good health we must drink at least eight glasses of water a day. This
feeling persists in spite of the fact that there’s never been any
scientific evidence of its benefit.
The Institute of Medicine reports that most people get the water they need by letting thirst guide them.
Read Full Article Here
Smokers produce unusually large amounts of two proteins that foster
production of bone-resorbing osteoclasts compared to non-smokers.
|
- American Chemical Society By Gary Guishan Xiao, Ph.D.
|
Almost 20 years after scientists first identified cigarette smoking
as a risk factor for osteoporosis and bone fractures, a new study is
shedding light on exactly how cigarette smoke weakens bones. The report,
in ACS’
Journal of Proteome Research, concludes that cigarette
smoke makes people produce excessive amounts of two proteins that
trigger a natural body process that breaks down bone.
Gary Guishan Xiao and colleagues point out that previous studies
suggested toxins in cigarette smoke weakened bones by affecting the
activity of osteoblasts, cells which build new bone, and osteoclasts,
which resorb, or break down, old bone. Weakening of the bones, known as
osteoporosis, can increase the risk of fractures and is a major cause of
disability among older people. To shed light on how cigarette smoking
weakens bones, the scientists analyzed differences in genetic activity
in bone marrow cells of smokers and non-smokers.
They discovered that human smokers produce unusually large amounts of
two proteins that foster production of bone-resorbing osteoclasts
compared to non-smokers. Experiments with laboratory mice confirmed the
finding.
The authors acknowledge funding from the Cancer and Smoking Related
Disease Research Program and the Nebraska Tobacco Settlement Biomedical
Research Program.
Alcohol – not marijuana – is the gateway drug, study shows
By J. D. Heyes, July 21 2012
(NaturalNews) For years Americans have been told that marijuana should
remain illegal because it is the ultimate “gateway” drug – that is, the
drug that most often leads to the abuse of other, more potent drugs. Not
so, according to a new study which says alcohol – not marijuana – is
the true gateway drug. Of three drugs or drug-containing substances –
alcohol, tobacco and marijuana – the study found that the former, not
the latter, led to more drug use. In examining a nationally
representative…
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Holistic Health
Chocolate can improve blood circulation, EFSA rules
By PF Louis, July 21 2012
(NaturalNews) The EFSA is the European Food Safety Authority, and it
considers it okay for a food to promote health benefits based on
scientific proof. This is not the attitude of USA’s Food and Drug
Administration. Our militantly aggressive FDA has the viewpoint that
only large pharmaceutical corporations can promote health benefits for
their toxic formulas that harm more than they help. Look out for the FDA
if any food group, such as walnut growers, cherry producers, and others
who have promoted…
Essential Fatty Acids and the sun
By John McKiernan, July 21 2012
(NaturalNews) Most of us are now aware of the importance of Essential
Fatty Acids to our overall health and well being. What isn’t so commonly
discussed; however, is the relationship between EFAs and the sun. Don’t
be afraid of the sun It seems many people are so concerned with
covering themselves up from any sun exposure that they are missing out
on the important benefits of sunlight. Dr. Robert S. Stern, chair of the
Department of Dermatology at Harvard Affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical…
Why virgin coconut oil is superior to highly refined, processed coconut oil
By Donna Earnest Pravel, July 23 2012
(NaturalNews) Many people in the natural health community have been well
aware of the health benefits of coconut oil and other coconut products
for decades. More recently, “clean eaters” and people following an
ancestral diet have been replacing canola oil and other cooking oils
with coconut oil. Unfortunately, some people do not realize that certain
brands of coconut oil pose serious health risks. Innocent health
seekers may be consuming a product that makes them sick. Not all coconut
oil is…
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Pet Health
Dr. Becker Interviews Dr. Michael W. Fox (Part 1 of 3)
http://healthypets.mercola.com/
Dr. Karen Becker, a proactive and integrative wellness veterinarian
interviews Dr. Michael W. Fox about the book Healing Animals & The
Vision of One Health. (Part 1 of 3)
Dr. Becker Interviews Dr. Michael W. Fox (Part 2 of 3)
Dr. Becker Interviews Dr. Michael W. Fox (Part 3 of 3)
BANG!!!! You’re a DEAD dog
My Dog… Playing dead… over and over again….This is how I did it…
My dog already knew now to sit and wait for food… if you don’t know
how to teach that… just wait till your dog stops moving (in the seated
position) and give him a treat. Do that about 30 times and he’ll
understand pretty quick.
Then what I would do is get the dog and lay him down by hand…the
first 20 or so time it was kinda tough and the dog would not
cooperate…but as you hold the dog down and after he stops resisting…say
“bang!” and give him a treat…. Keep doing that and the dog will “die”
the second you show him a treat..or when you say “BANG!” LOL…
10 Steps to a Housetrained Dog
- The first rule of housetraining any puppy or dog is: never leave
your little guy or gal unattended. Consider crate training. Despite how
many people feel about “caging” their pet, crates actually work with a
dog’s natural instinct to be a den dweller. And that’s only one of the
benefits of crate training.
- Consistent feeding times are very important during housetraining and
even afterwards. It’s much easier to predict when your dog needs to go
outside if he eats at specific times each day.
- Another rule of housetraining: reward and reinforce good behavior,
and do not punish your pet for mistakes. If your dog goes potty indoors,
consider it your mistake – not hers. The goal of housetraining is to
set your pet up for success. She can’t be successful without your
consistent and patient guidance.
Read Full Article Here
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Positivity Mind and Body
Tom Campbell & Anthony Peake – Consciousness Creates Reality
Henrik Palmgren In Conversation With Tom Campbell And Anthony Peake. For More Information Check out
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2011/02/RIR-110201.php
http://www.mybigtoe.com
http://www.anthonypeake.co.uk/index.php
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Articles of Interest
Big Pharma’s Oxycontin addicts being forced to heroin; war on drugs is complete failure
By J. D. Heyes, July 21 2012
(NaturalNews) Is the suggestion that the so-called “War on Drugs,” begun
in the early 1980s, has turned out to be a complete failure? Not
really, when you consider the connection between Big Pharma and the
illicit drug trade. What? You didn’t know there even was a connection?
Well, there is, and if anything, maybe it could even be said that
current Big Pharma and other accepted medical practices have worsened
the illicit drug industry. It stems from a concerted effort within the
medical community…
New strategies for raising veggie-loving kids discovered via research
By PF Louis, July 21 2012
(NaturalNews) In addition to the normal aversions to fresh fruits and
vegetables displayed by many young children, there are the pervasive TV
and peer pressure enticements for sweet cereals, beverages, and stuff
the cookie monster liked. TV advertising, especially, attempts to con
parents into thinking those delightfully tasty items with cartoon
figures displayed on their packaging contain healthy nutrients as well.
Unless you consider food coloring and other toxic additives healthy,
that’s totally…
Australian woman wins multi-million dollar payout from Thalidomide drug distributor Diageo
By J. D. Heyes, July 23 2012
(NaturalNews) A woman in Australia won a multi-million dollar settlement
recently from a British Big Pharma firm, Diageo Plc., a local
distributor for the drug Thalidomide, which caused birth defects in
thousands of babies around the world in the 1960s, according to her
attorneys. Lynette Rowe, 50, was born without any limbs – no arms and no
legs – after her mother, Wendy, took the medication for just a single
month when she was pregnant. At the time she took it, Thalidomide, a
sedative, was being…
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By Michael Snyder, on October 13th, 2015
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