A recent Associated Press article picked up by the international media reports how a sick 11-year-old girl died after her parents opted to pray for her recovery rather than take her to the hospital. The child had an undiagnosed, treatable form of diabetes, and the article implied that had she been rushed to emergency, she would have been fine. Meanwhile, her parents insist that since God is the healer, they did the right thing.
Labor can be damned inconvenient. It commences when it will -- and that can mean at some very inopportune times: when the doctor is out of town, for instance, or when the husband is away on a business trip or the Thanksgiving meal spread out on the table, or the mother-in-law too busy to lend a hand.
Back in 1990, fewer than 10 percent of pregnancies culminated with induced labor, but these days, up to 55 percent of all pregnant women in the US choose to have labor induced at some expedient, pre-scheduled time. While labor sometimes needs to be induced to ensure maternal or fetal safety -- such as when the fetus grows too large or when the mother has an acute illness -- at least half of all induced labors have nothing to do with medical necessity; they're simply the product of doctor/patient preference.
It's no secret that the US medical profession tends to be hysterectomy happy. A recent article from CNN reveals that as many as one-third of all American women have a hysterectomy procedure before reaching age 60. That's more than double the rate in Norway and just shy of double the rate in England. In fact, the hysterectomy has become the second most common surgery for women in the US, after Cesarean section. And of those many millions of women who go through the operation, about two-thirds don't need to -- that's what the experts now say, in retrospect.
Children ages 1-11 who suffer from heartburn can now find relief in the medication Nexium. The FDA just approved the drug for short-term use in young children after extrapolating data from tests on adult patients, plus running pediatric safety and pharmacokinetic tests. According to an FDA press release, "In one study, 109 patients 1-11 in age, diagnosed with GERD, were treated with Nexium once-a-day for up to eight weeks to evaluate its safety and tolerability. Most of these patients demonstrated healing of their esophageal erosions after eight weeks of treatment."
Genetic testing is beginning to emerge as a viable medical option, and the opposing teams are lining up. On one side stands the medical community, all a-flush with new possibilities for diagnosing and heading off illness--not to mention a myriad of new things to bill for. On the opposite side stand all those who believe that genetic testing presents yet another opportunity for big brother to insert himself into our lives -- and in the process, to use the resulting information against us.
A study just reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals 26 percent of Americans have back or neck problems that limit their ability to function. That's one in every four people -- a huge segment of the population -- and that huge segment spends a huge amount of money trying to get some relief. According to the report, authored by a medical team at the University of Washington, "spending on [medical] spine treatments in the United States totaled nearly $86 billion in 2005, a rise of 65 percent from 1997." The report studied large numbers of patients seeing medical doctors between the years 1997 and 2005, but it did not include chiropractic care in its findings.
There's some bad news for those hoping that the anti-viral drug Tamiflu will save them should they get sick this winter. It seems that a significant percentage of seasonal flu cases have become Tamiflu-resistant, according to a study completed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The ECDC tested 148 samples of the most common seasonal flu, Influenza A H1N1, and found that 13 percent of the samples did not respond to the anti-viral agent. These findings raised concerns, since Tamiflu currently is the frontrunner antiviral drug worldwide, and many nations have been stockpiling it in case of a bird-flu pandemic. Tamiflu is not a vaccine and doesn't prevent the flu, but rather, works to lessen symptoms and to shorten the duration of the illness.
A new study has just hit the news. According to the results of an Argentinian study released just hours ago, "the levels of thimerosal [in childhood vaccinations] don't go very high and they go down right away. By the time it's time for the next dose of vaccine, the levels are right back to where they were at the beginning." The study found that the half-life of ethyl mercury in the blood -- the time it takes for the body to get rid of half the mercury, and then another half, and so on -- was 3.7 days. That's significantly less than the half-life of methyl mercury, the kind found in fish, at 44 days. Bottom line: according to the study's authors, the study showed that the controversial mercury-containing preservative thimerosal is rapidly excreted from babies' bodies and can't build up to toxic levels.
Although researchers have known for years that use of the birth control pills can cut the risk of ovarian cancer, the medical world got all excited last week with the release of new evidence indicating that the cancer-preventing effects can last as long as 30 years after women stop taking the pill. The latest report, based on research by Valerie Beral from the Cancer Research U.K. Epidemiology Unit at Oxford University, found that the longer women take the pill, the more cancer-preventing benefit they derive. The report culled 45 studies involving over 23,000 women, and found that those women who stayed on the pill for 15 years or longer cut their risk of getting ovarian cancer in half, plus also reduced their risk of endometrial and colorectoral cancers.
In spite of the fact that up to 8 million people in this country suffer from symptoms of fibromyalgia, many in the medical community insist that the disease does not exist -- except in the minds of the "hypochondriacs" whom it affects. In fact, even the person mainly responsible for defining fibromyalgia as a disease, Dr. Frederick Wolfe, has now altered his position to claim that fibromyalgia is simply a reaction to stress. The reason for all this denial centers around the fact that the disease offers little that physicians can observe or measure -- patients complain about experiencing acute pain all over their bodies as well as profound fatigue -- but lab tests yield nothing.
