French companies and schools are bringing in kissing bans to try to stop the spread of swine flu.Skip related content

The peck on the cheek known as “la bise” – a traditional greeting in France – has been outlawed by large firms like insurance giant Axa, which has told employees to salute each other with a wave of the hand rather than a kiss or handshake.

Schools in the town of Guilvinec, in Brittany, western France, were the first to introduce a bise ban for teachers and students.

Mayor Helene Tanguy said: “I asked the children not to kiss anymore. I felt that the protections sought to wash hands regularly, not throw used handkerchiefs around, and not cough any old way had no meaning if we let the kids keep kissing.”…read more here

Studies have also  shown that statin medications lower inflammation, as measured by high  sensitivity C Reactive Protein. After the JUPITER trial  was published,  many healthcare professionals beleived that this is possibly the mechanism by which statin medications such as lipitor, zocor, pravachol  and crestor decrease risk of death and exert their health benefits.

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By Rob Waters

April 29 (Bloomberg) — Patients who reduced their cholesterol and blood pressure by taking Pfizer Inc.’s Lipitor after suffering a stroke were less likely to have a second attack, researchers reported today.

People who lowered their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood fats called triglycerides to recommended levels with the drug cut their risk of a second stroke by 65 percent, according to the study funded by New York-based Pfizer. They also cut their risk of heart attack and other cardiovascular damage by 75 percent. Researchers presented results today at a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Seattle.

All cholesterol-lowering drugs knows as statins are likely to have a similar effect, said Samuel Hunter, a neurologist at the Advanced Neurosciences Institute in Franklin, Tennessee, in an interview yesterday in Seattle. Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the country and causes more serious long-term disabilities than any other disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“It is a message of hope for patients,” said Pierre Amarenco, a researcher at Denis Diderot University in Paris and the lead author of the study. “We can now tell them that if they are adherent to treatment, they may reduce the risk” of strokes and of major cardiovascular events...read more here…

The summer  of 2009 is fast approaching and with that, the demand for air conditioners.  Portable air conditioners (mobile air conditioners) have become increasingly popular over the last 10 years. While most people spend their time in only 1 or 2 rooms of a home, the costs associated with cooling the entire house can be prohibitive. Not all air conditioners are listed  by consumer research .  However, that does not mean that the other’s  are not quality, simply that they are not  discussed.

Portable air conditioners come in different energy capacities. A 7,500 BTU portable air conditioner can comfortably cool a room up to 200 sq ft.  while a  13,000 BTU  air conditioner will cool over 400 sq. ft.  All portable air conditioners I reviewed include a window kit which simplifies the setup, allowing the air conditioner to be used almost immediately upon delivery.

It makes little sense to cool an entire home  with central air when you can cool 1 or 2 rooms with a portable room air conditioner or room air cooler.  Most portable air conditioners, like those manufactured by Soleus Air or Sunpentown, have wheels which  allow them to be transported from one room to the other.  Mobile air conditioners are great for  home offices or for senior citizens who  are on a tight budget.

In addition to cooling your room down to 61 degrees,  portable air conditioners also dehumidify the air at the same time.  Some units are capable or removing up to 65 pints (8 gallons) of water per day from the air. You may be able to  use your portable air conditioner during the winter, if you purchase one that has a built in heater.

The Soleus Air- LX-140 is a 14,000 BTU remote controlled air conditioner which has a dehumidifier and built in heater -all in 1 unit. This unit retails for $799 but we found it priced at a discount for $589 at www.eHealthSupplies.com, with free shipping.  Let expensive units , such as the Sunpentown WA-7500 (7500 BTU) can cool up to 200 sq. ft for less than  $375. In all,  eHealthSupplies.com has 31 different unit to choose from.  If you have any questions, their live customer support person can help you choose which portable air conditioner is best for you. Good Luck!

Heart Muscle Renewed Over Lifetime, Study Finds

In a finding that may open new approaches to treating heart disease, Swedish scientists have succeeded in measuring a highly controversial property of the human heart: the rate at which its muscle cells are renewed during a person’s lifetime.

The finding upturns what has long been conventional wisdom: that the heart cannot produce new muscle cells and so people die with the same heart they were born with.

About 1 percent of the heart muscle cells are replaced every year at age 25, and that rate gradually falls to less than half a percent per year by age 75, concluded a team of researchers led by Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The upshot is that about half of the heart’s muscle cells are exchanged in the course of a normal lifetime, the Swedish group calculates. Its results are to be published Friday in the journal Science.

“I think this will be one of the most important papers in cardiovascular medicine in years,” said Dr. Charles Murry, a heart researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It helps settle a longstanding controversy about whether the human heart has any ability to regenerate itself.”

If the heart can generate new muscle cells, researchers can hope to develop drugs that might accelerate the process, since the heart fails to replace cells that are killed in a heart attack.

The dogma that the heart cannot generate new muscle cells has been challenged since 1987 by a somewhat lonely skeptic, Dr. Piero Anversa, now of the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Anversa maintains that heart muscle cells are renewed so fast that a person dying at age 80 has replaced the heart four times over. Many other researchers have doubted this assertion.

Cell turnover rates can easily be measured in animals by making their cells radioactive and seeing how fast they are replaced. Such an experiment, called pulse-labeling, could not ethically be done in people. But Dr. Frisen realized several years ago that nuclear weapons tested in the atmosphere until 1963 had in fact labeled the cells of the entire world’s population.

The nuclear blasts generated a radioactive form of carbon known as carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has gradually diminished since 1963, when above-ground tests were banned, as it has been incorporated into plants and animals or diffused into the oceans.

In the body, carbon-14 in the diet gets into the DNA of new cells and stays unchanged for the life of the cell. Because the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere falls each year, the amount of carbon-14 in the DNA can serve to indicate the cell’s birth date, Dr. Frisen found.

Four years ago he used his new method to assess the turnover rate of various tissues in the body, concluding that the average age of the cells in an adult’s body might be as young as 7 to 10 years. But there is a wide range of ages — from the rapidly turning over cells of the blood and gut to the mostly permanent cells of the brain.

Dr. Frisen has successfully applied his method to the heart muscle cells, but had to navigate a series of technical obstacles created by the special behavior of the cells. Many have two nuclei, instead of the usual one, and within these double nuclei the DNA may be duplicated again. “I was really impressed at the level of rigor they put into this analysis,” Dr. Murry said, calling it a “scientific tour de force.”…read more…

(NaturalNews) The herbal supplement St. John’s Wort has long been promoted as an effective alternative for treating depression. Unfortunately, St. John’s Wort has proven ineffective for people suffering severe clinical depression. In fact, the results of a recent study revealed that St. John’s Wort is completely ineffective at treating severe depression. There is another effective natural alternative, however, and it is called SAM-E (S-adenosylmethionine).

Symptoms of Depression:

•Feelings of sadness and emptiness
•Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, guilt, or worthlessness
•Loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities
•Excessive sleeping or insomnia
•Fatigue
•Lack of energy
•Difficulty concentrating and in decision-making
•Headaches or digestive disorders
•Crying and tearfulness
•Overeating or under eating

In the aforementioned study, St. John’s Wort was tested for eight weeks on 200 patients who were suffering a degree of depression that made daily functioning difficult. St. John’s Wort was no more effective than a placebo.

In a significant number of previous studies, however, St. John’s Wort was found effective for mild to moderate cases of depression. There is some evidence that points to the fact that St. John’s Wort can help with some symptoms of depression. In Germany, in fact, St. John’s Wort is available by prescription.

There have been questions about the quality of some of this research, though. One such criticism cites a lack of studies using a placebo and another drug such as Zoloft. Zoloft is classified as an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and these are commonly used drugs for treating depression. These newer drugs also have numerous side-effects, however, and while many claim to be “non-habit forming,” this does not seem to be the case.

To satisfy these criticisms about the St. John’s Wort studies, researchers gave participating patients either St. John’s Wort, Zoloft, or a placebo for up to 26 weeks. When the study concluded, researchers found that neither the prescription drug nor the St. John’s Wort was more effective than the placebo. Almost 33% of the placebo patients showed a large response to their treatment and this was compared to approximately 24% of both the Zoloft group and the St. John’s Wort group.….read more here…

Doses of vitamin B1 (thiamine) can reverse early kidney disease in people with type 2 diabetes, research shows.

The team from Warwick University tested the effect of vitamin B1, which is found in meat, yeast and grain, on 40 patients from Pakistan.

The treatment stopped the loss of a key protein in the urine, the journal Diabetologia reports.

Charity Diabetes UK called the results “very promising” – but said it was too early for any firm conclusions.

The latest findings build on earlier work by the Warwick University team, showing that many diabetes patients have a deficiency of thiamine.

According to the researchers, this cheap and readily available supplement could benefit most people with diabetes – both type 1 and type 2 – as between 70% and 90% of people with diabetes are thiamine deficient.…read more of story here.

6 Sex Mistakes Men Make

Hey guys, think you know everything there is to know about having sex with women? That erotic encyclopedia you carry around in your head may contain a lot of basic errors and omissions about women’s sexuality — errors that can lead to sex mistakes.

That’s because — after learning the facts of life — most of us are left to figure out sex for ourselves. Guys tend to take a lot of cues from adult movies, and we all know how true-to-life those are. Experience may help, but many women can be shy when talking about what they like.

To help us with some sex tips, WebMD asked two acclaimed sex educators, Tristan Taormino and Lou Paget, to tell us what they think are the most common sex mistakes men make with women.

Taormino is a prolific author, lecturer, and video producer. Her latest project is the Expert Guide educational video series from Vivid Ed.

Paget is author of The Great Lover Playbook and other sex manuals, and she gives seminars nationwide.

Sex Mistake No.1: You Know What She Wants

Men often make assumptions about what a woman wants based upon what they’ve done with other women. But women aren’t all the same.

“You develop a repertoire as you mature sexually, but you should never assume that what worked for the last person is going to work for this person,” Taormino says.

That applies not only to sexual predilections, but also to relationships, she says. “There are women who can have no-strings-attached sex, and women who can get attached very easily, and then everyone in between.”

Sex Mistake No. 2: You Have All She Needs

Some women can’t have an orgasm with less than 3,000 rpm. No human tongue or fingers can generate that kind of vibration. But men typically think something is wrong if a woman needs a vibrator.

“If the only way that a woman can achieve orgasm is with a vibrator, she’s not broken,” Taormino says.

Think of a vibrator as your assistant, not your substitute. Many couples use vibrators together. “While you’re doing one thing, or two things, the vibrator can be doing something else,” Taormino says…..read more here…

5 Alternative Treatments and Practices Worth Trying

As a society full of technological advancements in all areas of our lives, we are sometimes hesitant to try traditional, or alternative, practices when it comes to our health and well-being. However, there has been a large increase in demand for therapies, treatments, and practices that are not aligned with our Western values.

Many people could feel the benefits of some of these practices, but have yet to try them. Here is a brief list of some alternative treatments and practices that are gaining popularity these days.

Therapeutic Massage

While this is the most popular alternative treatment by far, many people are still hesitant to undergo massage therapy for various reasons. Studies show, however, that there are many great benefits of utilizing massage therapy on a regular basis. Decreased anxiety, improved circulation, and increased flexibility and range of motion are just a few of these benefits. Talk to your physician or a licensed massage therapist and see if massage could help you.

Acupressure

Often confused with acupuncture, acupressure is less invasive and uses no needles to manipulate the body. Acupressure points are not generally related the affected areas, but rather associated with traditional Chinese medicine and the influences of yin, yang, and the individual’s chi. While this may not sound like something worth exploring, many who have undergone acupressure have finally felt relief which traditional medicine had been unable to provide.

Acupuncture

Acupuncture utilizes needles to manipulate the same points as in acupressure. Although acupuncture came first, some people are hesitant to undergo this procedure due to its extensive use of fine pointed needles. However, some people have gone so far as to claim acupuncture helped them to sleep better, quit snoring – even quit smoking. If you are adventurous and have explored your other options, you may want to consider acupuncture.

Reiki

Though this particular alternative treatment has no scientific basis, the people who claim to have experienced the healing powers of Reiki are growing on a significant scale. Reiki practitioners believe they’re able to manipulate a universal healing life-force energy, and that they are able to transfer this intelligent energy to their patients through the use of nothing more than their palms. People who undergo Reiki treatment claim to feel not only physical, but mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits from the treatments as well.

Aromatherapy

Aromatherapy involves the use of essential oils to manipulate physical and/or emotional responses to help with an individual’s healing process. This is actually a Western derivation of alternative medicine, as essential oils are used in various ways in other holistic treatment options in varying degrees. Aromatherapy is used, with varying levels of success, in many people who don’t wish to venture too far beyond the realm of traditional medicine.

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of medical coding online training. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

Posted in Alternative, Fitness, Longevitiy, Wellness, Women's Health Tagged: acupressure, acupuncture, aromatherapy, reiki ]]> http://healthandsurvival.com/2008/12/18/5-alternative-treatments-and-practices-worth-trying/feed/ 2 Eric Madrid http://healthandsurvival.com/2008/11/22/5-myths-about-our-ailing-health-care-system/ http://healthandsurvival.com/2008/11/22/5-myths-about-our-ailing-health-care-system/#comments Sun, 23 Nov 2008 06:42:09 +0000 healthandsurvival http://healthandsurvival.wordpress.com/?p=788 ]]>

5 Myths About Our Ailing Health-Care System

By Shannon Brownlee and Ezekiel Emanuel
Sunday, November 23, 2008; B03

With Congress ready to spend $700 billion to prop up the U.S. economy, enacting health-care reform may seem about as likely as the Dow hitting 10,000 again before the end of the year. But it may be more doable than you think, provided we dispel a few myths about how health care works and how much reform Americans are willing to stomach.

1. America has the best health care in the world.

Let’s bury this one once and for all. The United States is No. 1 in only one sense: the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag behind many developed countries on virtually every health statistic you can name. Life expectancy at birth? We rank near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just ahead of Cuba and way behind Japan, France, Italy, Sweden and Canada, countries whose governments (gasp!) pay for the lion’s share of health care. Infant mortality in the United States is 6.8 per 1,000 births, more than twice as high as in Japan, Norway and Sweden and worse than in Poland and Hungary. We’re doing a better job than most on reducing smoking rates, but our obesity epidemic is out of control, our death rate from prostate cancer is only slightly lower than the United Kingdom’s, and in at least one study, American heart attack patients did no better than Swedish patients, even though the Americans got twice as many high-tech treatments.

Moreover, the quality of health care is different in different parts of the country. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have issued a list of 26 measures of quality, such as making sure that heart-attack patients being discharged from the hospital get a prescription for a beta blocker or aspirin to help reduce the risk of a second attack. It turns out that quality is all over the map, and it isn’t necessarily better in the places we might expect, such as academic medical centers. Worse still, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), there appears to be no connection between how much Medicare and other payers spend on patients in different parts of the country and the quality of the care the patients receive. You are no more likely to get that beta blocker or aspirin in Los Angeles than in Portland, even though Medicare spends twice as much per beneficiary in Los Angeles.

2. Somebody else is paying for your health insurance.

Nope. Even when your employer offers coverage, he isn’t reaching into his own pocket to cover you and your fellow employees; he’s reaching into your pocket, paying you lower wages than he would if he didn’t have to pay for your health insurance.

Rising health-care costs are partly to blame for stagnant wages. Over the past five years, health insurance premiums have risen 5.5 times faster on average than inflation, 2.3 times faster than business income and four times faster than workers’ earnings. Four times. That’s why wages have been nearly flat since the 1980s, even as U.S. productivity has been going up. In effect, about half the money you should be earning for being more productive is being sucked up by ever more expensive health-insurance premiums.

If you pay taxes, you’re also paying for the health care provided through state and federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration and the military. All told, the average family of four is coughing up $29,000 a year for health care through taxes, lower wages and out-of-pocket medical expenses.

3. We would save a lot if we could cut the administrative waste of private insurance.

The idea that we could wring billions of dollars in savings this way is seductive, but it wouldn’t really accomplish that much. For one thing, some administrative costs are not only necessary but beneficial. Following heart-attack or cancer patients to see which interventions work best is an administrative cost, but it’s also invaluable if you want to improve care. Tracking the rate of heart attacks from drugs such as Avandia is key to ensuring safe pharmaceuticals.

Let’s just say that we could wave a magic wand and cut private insurers’ overhead by half, to what the Canadian government spends on administering its health-care system — 15 percent. How much would we save? Not as much as you may think. Private insurers pay a little more than a third of what we spend on health care, which means that we’d cut a little more than 5 percent from our total budget, or about $124 billion. That’s not peanuts, but it’s not even enough to cover everybody who’s currently uninsured.

More to the point, we only get to save it once. That’s because administrative waste isn’t what’s driving health-care costs up faster than inflation. Most of the relentless rise can be attributed to the expansion of hospitals and other health-care sectors and the rapid adoption of expensive new technologies — new drugs, devices, tests and procedures. Unfortunately, only a fraction of all that new stuff offers dramatically better outcomes. If we’re worried about costs, we have to ask whether a $55,000 drug that prolongs the lives of lung cancer patients for an average of a few weeks is really worth it. Unless we find a cure for our addiction to the new but not necessarily improved, our national medical bill will continue to skyrocket, regardless of how efficient insurance companies become.

4. Health-care reform is going to cost a bundle.

Only if you think that covering the uninsured is our only priority. Yes, making health care available to all citizens is the right thing to do. But it isn’t the only thing to do. We also have to fix the spectacularly wasteful and expensive way doctors and hospitals deliver care.

Our physicians are working within a truly dysfunctional, often chaotic system that prevents them from caring for us properly. Between 50,000 and 100,000 patients die each year from preventable medical errors. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1.7 million Americans acquire an infection while in the hospital and nearly 100,000 of them die from it. Laboratory imaging tests are routinely repeated because the originals can’t be found. Patients with such chronic illnesses as heart failure and diabetes land in the hospital because their physicians fail to monitor their condition. When patients have multiple doctors, there’s often nobody keeping track of the different medications, tests and treatments each one prescribes.

Our doctors and hospitals are failing to provide us with care we need while delivering a staggering amount that we don’t need. Current estimates suggest that as much as 20 to 30 percent of what we spend, or about $500 billion, goes toward useless, potentially harmful care.

There are two bright spots. One: We can improve the quality of care and cut costs without rationing. There are models out there for how to do it right — the Mayo Clinic, the Geisinger Clinic in Pennsylvania, the Cleveland Clinic and California’s Kaiser Permanente are just a few of the organized group practices that are doing a better job for less. Their doctors are better than average at using the best medical evidence available. They’re more likely to be using electronic medical records, which can help keep track of patients who have multiple physicians and need complex care. And they’re less likely to provide unnecessary care.

Two: Even moderate reform of the delivery system would improve care and save money. The Lewin Group’s analysis shows that a bill proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, calling for a more comprehensive overhaul of the health-care system than either McCain’s plan or Obama’s could actually insure everyone and save $1.4 trillion over 10 years. More reform is cheaper.

5. Americans aren’t ready for a major overhaul of the health-care system.

We may be readier than you think. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that only 7 percent of Americans rate our health-care system excellent. Nearly 40 percent consider it poor. A whopping 70 percent believe it needs major changes, if not a complete overhaul.

Now is not the time to think small, to cover a few million Americans and leave the bigger job of controlling costs and improving quality for another day. We can’t afford not to reform the delivery system as soon as possible. At 17 percent of gross domestic product, health care is the biggest single sector of the economy, and it’s consuming a larger and larger proportion every year. According to CBO projections, health care will account for 25 percent of GDP by 2025 and 49 percent by 2082. That’s simply unsustainable. Any plan that reforms health care has to do more than simply cover the uninsured. The nation’s health and wealth depend on it.

brownlee@newamerica.net

Shannon Brownlee, a visiting scholar at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, is the author of “Overtreated.” Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and author of “Healthcare, Guaranteed,” is chairman of the center’s Department of Bioethics. The views expressed here are the authors’ own.