Friday, March 29, 2024
Michael Stone Online

Health Care, Medicine & Nutrition

A Cure for Cancer Might Come from Within (Our Town magazine)—Along Newell Drive on the University of Florida campus, at the bottom of a rare steep slope in Gainesville, stands an imposing, six-story structure in which minds of great intelligence study the mind, hoping to make life better — or longer — for those suffering from mental illness or injury.

All in Your Head: BME Alum Carries Brain Work to Presidential Level (CrossLink magazine)—When Justin Sanchez completed his doctoral work in 2004 from the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, he was only the second Ph.D. student to graduate from the young department, formalized just two years before.

Alternative Food Diets: Vegan, Paleo and Raw (Our Town magazine)—These days, there seems to be a diet for almost any food-related goal — mainly for heath reasons like weight loss, increased energy and body building, but also for ethical reasons such as animal rights and environmental stewardship. Our Town explores the pros and cons for three of the most popular ones: vegan, paleo and raw.

As Three Systems Install ‘Volume Pledge,’ Others Watching for Its Outcomes (Physician Leadership Library)—More than a year ago, three academic-based health systems announced that their surgeons would be allowed to perform certain procedures only if they did a sufficient number of such procedures annually.

BME Seniors Partner with Tampa Biotech Company to Evaluate Cancer-Cell-Separation Technology (CrossLink magazine)—Julian Rey admits that he was a tad intimidated last fall when he started the College of Engineering’s Integrated Product and Program Design (IPPD) program. The J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering senior considers it the closest to a real-world scenario he’s experienced in his undergraduate career.

BYOD in Health Care Requires Extra HIPAA Precautions (iboss cybersecurity blog)—Hospitals have differing policies when it comes to letting healthcare providers use their personal — or bring-your-own-device (BYOD) — mobile phones and other electronics to transmit and work with patients’ protected health information (PHI).

Communication, Defensive Medicine Persist as Malpractice Armor (Physician Leadership Library)—While the total number of malpractice claims has fallen over the past decade, the risk still lingers for physicians, with 154,621 paid claims between 2004 and 2014 (or about 38 a day) listed by the National Practitioner Data Bank. And despite the drop in total claims, the size of the ones actually paid has been climbing slightly, said Dr. Anupam Jena, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who studies malpractice. “It could certainly be that overall quality of care is improving,” Jena said of why total claims have fallen, or it could be that lawyers are focusing more on winnable and larger suits, which could explain the swelling of individual payouts.

Computing a Healthier Future: Biomedical Informatics Rising at UF (CrossLink magazine)—A Star Trek-like device that can monitor and diagnose your health while you’re on the go. A prescription that truly factors in “you” (your medical records, genetics, behavior, and community) when choosing the right medicine and dosage. A supercomputer, much like IBM’s Watson of Jeopardy! fame, able to easily absorb the often overwhelming inflow of new medical research while offering invaluable advice to doctors in their decision making.

Curing the Community as a Whole (Patch)—Josh Myers, a first-year medical student in Mercer’s community medicine program, has studied Powder Springs the past two weeks: the economy, the schools, the primary health concerns and more. Myers is one of about 100 first-year Mercer students shadowing doctors across Georgia for two weeks to get a holistic feel for their communities so they can identify what drives certain illnesses.

Deep Breath: Parkinson’s Patients Continue Struggle as JU Presses Forward on Solutions (The Wave magazine)—On a Tuesday night in Gainesville, you might find Stu Pearson singing karaoke at the Dirty Bar. Or at Crafty Bastards on a Wednesday. Or at Napolatano’s on a Friday. As he steps in front of the crowd and the song plays through its intro, he’ll pass the mic from one hand to the other. He doesn’t leave the audience without an explanation for the shifting: It’s not because he’s nervous but because he can’t help it. “I’m telling the folks that, ‘We Parkinson’s people just have to keep moving,’” said Pearson, a 70-year-old civil engineer for the city of Gainesville who, in 2009, became one of the 7 to 10 million worldwide living with the motor-system disease.

Developing an Eye for Detail with Art and Science (LeadDoc medical journal)—On the first day of class, Paula Trepman is skeptical. Before her is Thomas E. Hill’s 1878 painting Palo Alto Spring, depicting a get-together of the affluent Stanford family on its farm, the future site of the university bearing the family’s name. First, Trepman and other students in the class silently observe the painting.

‘Helistroke’ Presents New Opportunity for Saving Critical Time in Stroke Care (Physician Leadership Library)—The idea of sending physicians away from their home hospital came from organ transplants. Typically, once an organ becomes available, one surgeon will begin prepping the recipient while another will go by plane to harvest the organ from the donor. That makes for a “nearly seamless connection in the timings,” said Dr. Ferdinand Hui of Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Industry Growth Propels Need for Physician Recruitment, Retention (Physician Leadership Library)—U.S. job growth over the next eight years is expected to be spearheaded by health care. From 2014 to 2024, service jobs are predicted to account for almost 95 percent of all new ones in the U.S. — a total of 9.3 million jobs — according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in December 2015. And of that 9.3 million, about 41 percent, or 3.8 million, fall within the bureau’s “health care and social assistance” category.

In Politically Turbulent Times, Where Are the Boundaries for Physicians? (Physician Leadership Library)—Dr. Dhruv Khullar is an advocate for physicians diving headfirst into politics. Doing the opposite — fully abstaining from elections and legislative processes — equates to letting sweeping decisions on the health-care system be made by outsid- ers and unchecked, he said, noting that physicians have historically had low turnouts during elections.

Michigan State Launches Medical Exchange with Mexico (LeadDoc medical journal)—In January, representatives from Michigan State University and its longtime partner in hospital education, Sparrow Health System, landed in Merida, the capital of the Mexican state of Yucatan. One of the first things they noticed was the care given to keeping the city squeaky clean.

Opioid Alternatives Making Headway But Won’t Bring Full Phase-out, Physicians Say (Physician Leadership Library)—As the U.S. continues to struggle with its growing opiate-painkiller problem (33,000 deaths in 2015, the most ever, and an annual $78.5 billion price tag on abuse), physicians and policymakers are ramping up their pushes on alternatives for patients seeking pain relief.

Teen ‘Starting All Over’ (Chattanooga Times Free Press)—Before late August, David Anderson III didn’t know anything about spinal cords, bedsores, electric wheelchairs or all the gizmos modern science has contributed to the rehabilitation of paralysis. But since then, he’s become somewhat of an expert.

Telehealth Finds a Niche in Improving Long-Term Care (Physician Leadership Library)—In long-term-care settings — where help with the everyday is needed by the disabled and chronically ill but especially older adults — health care costs tend to boom.

Tennessee’s Medical Society Helps Members Take the Leadership Reins (Physician Leadership Library)—When physicians’ decade-plus of post-secondary education and training leaves gaps in non-clinical topics, Dave Chaney sees an opportunity for state medical societies — often the largest professional organizations for physicians at the state level — to step up and fill them in. And this is sometimes nowhere more important, he said, than physician leadership: doctors participating in more administrative duties outside the examination or operating room.

Volunteer Logs 3,500 Hours (Chattanooga Times Free Press)—Every Thursday, as Herb Cohn sits at the information desk on the second floor of Erlanger hospital from 8 a.m. till 3 p.m., he’ll greet you with a smile — and by name if he knows it.

Will You Live for 100 Years? (Patch)—About seven in 1,000 people live to be a centenarian, or someone who is at least 100 years old, according to an estimate in the academic journal Science. You have a 50 percent chance for every year beyond that, and living from 100 to 110 “is like tossing heads 10 times in a row,” James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, told Science. Well, Besse Cooper must have a double-headed quarter.

ZocDoc’s Patient-First Philosophy Clicks with Users and Their Physicians (LeadDoc medical journal)—When Randye Karmin, MD, opened a new ob-gyn office in Miami in 2010, the patient load wasn’t exactly a problem, but she did want to find a way to invite in at least a little more business.