HealthyConcerns.com

Wow, I finally feel like the Jetsons are here: Artificial pancreas in the works

Thanks to Amy Tenderich from Diabetes Mine for doing a thorough job reporting on the recently announced partnership between the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) and a J&J company that makes insulin pumps and the like. Their goal? To create an artificial pancreas for Diabetes patients that can be ready for market within something like four years!

It's fascinating to read the details. 

It's not that this pancreas will create insulin...there will still be a need to have some kind of patch/pump system to provide the insulin, but the "pancreas" would monitor levels and dispense in an automated fashion.

Read the whole post, so much information.

It may not be a hovercraft, but it feels like the future to me!

Quick link: PCRM's 21-day Vegan Kickstart

If you've ever considered becoming vegan because for health reasons, then you might get the little boost you need by signing up for the PCRM's 21-day vegan kickstart. I signed up, even though I'm already a vegan, because after all: Who wouldn't want daily healthy tips and recipes?

And just in case you'd like some links on vegan being the healthiest way to eat:

PCRM's entire Health section

WebMD: Vegan diet good for Type-2 diabetes

NIH: Vegan proteins may reduce risk of cancer, obesity, and cardiovascular disease

So, apparently I've been doing it wrong: Vitamin D and sunlight

Ever since I found out I have a Vitamin D deficiency (like half the population), I've been trying to get a little more sunlight into my life, unblocked by sunscreen

This consisted mostly of me exposing my face and lower arms to the sun when I got a little chance to. (Not for extended periods of time mind you, I was shooting for 10 minutes.)

Well, apparently, my approach is all wrong. 

Thanks to this link from Jack Norris, RD, I got this very different advice about sun exposure from a Vitamin D expert, Dr. Michael Holick:

“I typically recommend people go out for a period of time—depending on the time of the year, the time of day, the latitude, and the degree of skin pigmentation—if you know you’re going to get a mild sunburn after 30 minutes, I typically recommend about 10, no more than 15, minutes of arms and legs exposure, or if you’re in a bathing suit, abdomen and back exposure as well, 2 to 3 times a week. Always wear sun protection on your face because that’s the most sun-damaged area and it’s only about 9% of your body surface, so it doesn’t provide you with that much vitamin D. Go out, enjoy yourself, get some sensible sun exposure, then put sunscreen on if you plan to stay out for a longer period of time. People with a higher degree skin pigmentation, such as African Americans, are walking around with an SPF of 8 to 15. That’s why they need to be exposed for much longer periods of time and why people of color are at especially high risk of having vitamin D deficiency.”

So yeah, "always wear sun protection on your face". D'oh.

I've been doing it wrong :(

Vote: Good idea/bad idea?

I gotta ask: Will this teddy bear-shaped blood bag designed for use in pediatric wards make kids feel all comforted and cozy?

Or scare the living daylights out of them, giving them nightmares about bloodthirsty teddy bears coming to life and wanting to swallow all their blood?

I'm just asking. Is that so wrong?

Hat tip: Kevin MD.

What do you think of Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General?

Well, to answer that question, perhaps first you need to know what the Surgeon General actually does. So, for that, you might want to go read the interview Dr. Val does with the 17th Surgeon General of the US, Richard Carmona. 

Now, Dr. Val is clearly not too hep to the idea of Gupta as SG.

But not everyone is so automatically opposed. You can find people on both sides of the argument in the comment thread on this Kevin MD post.

And Robert Laszewski over at Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review actually claims Sanjay Gupta could be a great pick for Surgeon General.

But then there's recent Nobelist and current NY Times columnist Paul Krugman telling us the trouble with Sanjay Gupta.

Not to mention the Daily Green seeming to have strong feelings about it, as evidenced by the post The 6 Most Idiotic Positions of Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Gee, tell us how you really feel.

I really can't say I know what to think. I can't say I think much about the Surgeon General. The only two I can name are C. Everett Koop and Jocelyn Elders. And I can't understand exactly why Obama would expend a controversial selection on such a low-profile role?

All very odd. Your thoughts?

Non-stick cookware a threat to your health? Or just for the birds?

Sigh. The list never ends. Whether it's hidden animal ingredients or testing, unfair business practices or environmental policies, or just plain safety: The list of products to eschew grows longer the more attention you pay.

This time the culprit is non-stick cookware. Hat tip to Green LA Girl on BlogHer for pointing me to this study from the Environmental Working Group on how Teflon releases toxic fumes within minutes of being heated up...and that it's known and acknowledged to kill birds.

I think it's safe to say these are modern canaries in the coal mines of our kitchens. And while their lungs may be much, MUCH tinier than ours, so we can all debate how long it would take to kill us...I'm really not comfortable with using something that would kill a bird if I had one. Are you?

Unfortunate that we just received a bunch of Calphalon cookware as wedding gifts. Guess I unknowingly registered to be slowly poisoned.

There are three suggestions:

-Cast Iron

-Stainless Steel

plus

-A new non-stick alternative called GreenPan

The question is whether you'll trust that GreenPan is truly safe...or if we just haven't figured out yet how it's dangerous.

I'm torn. I really can't imagine throwing out all of this very new and very expensive cookware. I don't cook a lot or for extended periods. I don't own birds. The EWG mostly wants warnings affixed to warn bird owners, not humans.

What would you do?

Cross posted at Elisa's Green Scene

The tangled web we weave on reproductive rights

One of my regular reads, ShortWoman pointed me to a story about the Department of Health and Human Services with this provocative paragraph (Which is only part of a much longer post about the global war on women that I urge you to go read):

And now, the federal Department of Health and Human Services has decided that they know better than actual doctors, and is attempting to redefine pregnancy in such a way as to magically turn the use of hormonal birth control into an “abortion.” This would of course free up pharmacists and doctors to refuse allow women to get it on “moral” grounds. It would also effectively prevent any public health system from dispensing birth control. This, ironically, will raise the number of unwanted pregnancies, which will in turn raise the numbers of abortions out there. Bizarro Government.

Which led me to the post she linked to for the above, HHS Moves to Define Contraception as Abortion at RH Reality Check. The article includes this introduction:

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services.

And goes on to describe how the government proposal seeks to define "abortion" as follows:

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term "abortion." Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term "abortion" only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

Finally, as I've mentioned before, I follow Mike Leavitt's blog...he the Secretary of the Dept. of H&HS. And in a post, entitled "Physician Conscience", he says the following:

An early draft of the regulations found its way into public circulation before it had reached my review. It contained words that lead some to conclude my intent is to deal with the subject of contraceptives, somehow defining them as abortion. Not true.

The Bush Administration has consistently supported the unborn. However, the issue I asked to be addressed in this regulation is not abortion or contraceptives, but the legal right medical practitioners have to practice according to their conscience and patients should be able to choose a doctor who has beliefs like his or hers.

The Department is still contemplating if it will issue a regulation or not. If it does, it will be directly focused on the protection of practitioner conscience.

So, I like Secretary Leavitt's blog in general...it's not mind-blowingly creative, but he does tell long, substantive stories about his travels around the country and the world looking at public health issues. It's an insider view at a lot of different kinds of places and problems.

All that to say that although I'm sure he and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum I respect what he does and I respect that he blogs. The above, however andunfortunately, is plain old political doublespeak. At first you might think he's denying that he's trying to define contraceptives as abortion. He says "Not true", and if you only scan it quickly you might be relieved.

But be not so relieved. All he is doing is denying that the intent of the proposed regulations is to address abortion or contraception. No, the intent is to accommodate physician conscience.

Whatever. I don't really care about the intent, what matters is the outcome...what does the regulation, you know, regulate?

His blog post doesn't pass the smell test by about a mile.

Two interesting posts from the Women's Bioethics Project

I'm going to point you to two posts on a prolific blog that could suck up all the time in my day if I weren't careful: The Women's Bioethics Project.

The first discusses a ruling Kansas that is requiring a healthcare provider to turn over the medical records of all patients who not only received but inquired about late-term abortions.

The Women's Bioethics Project lays out the details pretty succinctly, so I recommend reading their post.

I'll just say that the details provided make it clear this isn't really about medicine, or even about law enforcement (which the folks who want those records are purporting the issue to be) but about politics plain and simple. Or perhaps more about the continued assault on a government that respects all religions and is ruled by none.

The second is about the Daily Mail's report that british scientists have discovered how to turn women's one marrow into sperm. Yes, you read that right. So, now, apparently, we really can self-reproduce.

I don't know why I'm pointing this out, except I find some of the comments on the Daily Mail story pretty funny in their paranoia, especially the ones about malevolent feminism. Hilarious.

'cause it's women who have cause all the world's problems, yeah.

So, there you go...some good weekend reading.

7 Pains you shouldn't ignore? Try basically EVERYWHERE

OK, perhaps I have a dark sense of humor, but WebMD's list of 7 Pains You Shouldn't Ignore actually made me crack up.

Why?

Because here's where such un-ignorable pains are:
Head
Throat
Jaw
Chest
Shoulder
Arm
Abdomen
Lower Back
Between Shoulder Blades
Leg
Calf
Feet

And "Vague, Combined, or Medically Unexplained Pains"

I'm sorry, but didn't they just ay you shouldn't ignore pain anywhere???!!!

I find it amusing. I'm dark like that.

Is this a surprise? Emotional support has physical results

Been meaning to point to this NY Times article from a couple of weeks ago about new discoveries they're making into how supportive relationships can affect us physically.

A positive example:

"Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."

An alternate negative example:

"But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.

So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say."

But seriously, does any of this surprise you? Don't get me wrong, though, I think it's very cool that they're discovering actual physical evidence. (Described thusly: "The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.")

I'm just not surprised by it.

Here's the little twist I immediately thought of: People are always saying they believe one's own attitude can have a lot to do with how well or how sick we are. This always has the risk of taking on a blame-the-victim undertone. In other words: If you only had a better attitude. yo wouldn't die from cancer. Which can't be helpful.

With this new scientific validation of how our loved ones and their emotional states can benefit us if we're sick we can move straight on over to blaming our loved ones! If you had only done a better job of tending to me and had a better emotional state...then I would be better!

Mwa-ha-ha.