Booster shots: The accidental advantages of vaccines - health - 20 August 2013 Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3 Some vaccines seem to provide us with a host of extra benefits. Is it time to see the cornerstone of modern medicine in a new light? Editorial: "Silence isn't golden when it comes to vaccines" HAVE a look at your left shoulder: if you are past your mid-twenties it almost certainly bears a circular scar. The Bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccination was given to protect you from tuberculosis. There is growing evidence that vaccines have a wider-ranging influence on the immune system than we thought. Even in the West, where it is far less common for children to die from infectious illnesses, there are still surprising benefits: some vaccines seem to reduce our susceptibility to eczema and asthma. The World Health Organization, which is the main provider of vaccines in developing countries, has asked a group of vaccine experts to get to the bottom of it. What could the explanation be? But that may not be the whole story. More From New Scientist
George Saunders's Advice to Graduates It’s long past graduation season, but we recently learned that George Saunders delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, and George was kind enough to send it our way and allow us to reprint it here. The speech touches on some of the moments in his life and larger themes (in his life and work) that George spoke about in the profile we ran back in January — the need for kindness and all the things working against our actually achieving it, the risk in focusing too much on “success,” the trouble with swimming in a river full of monkey feces. The entire speech, graduation season or not, is well worth reading, and is included below.
10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier, Backed By Science Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it. I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by science. Here are ten of the best ones I found. 1. You might have seen some talk recently about the scientific 7 minute workout mentioned in The New York Times. Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it’s actually been proven to be an effective strategy for overcoming depression. The groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. You don’t have to be depressed to gain benefit from exercise, though. 2. In NutureShock 3, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects our positivity: 3. Love this post? 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
How a secretive panel uses data that distorts doctors’ pay “I have experience,” the Yale-trained, Orlando-based doctor said. “I’m not that slow; I’m not fast. I’m thorough.” This seemingly miraculous proficiency, which yields good pay for doctors who perform colonoscopies, reveals one of the fundamental flaws in the pricing of U.S. health care, a Washington Post investigation has found. Unknown to most, a single committee of the AMA, the chief lobbying group for physicians, meets confidentially every year to come up with values for most of the services a doctor performs. Those values are required under federal law to be based on the time and intensity of the procedures. But the AMA’s estimates of the time involved in many procedures are exaggerated, sometimes by as much as 100 percent, according to an analysis of doctors’ time, as well as interviews and reviews of medical journals. If the time estimates are to be believed, some doctors would have to be averaging more than 24 hours a day to perform all of the procedures that they are reporting.
First decrease in US childhood obesity - health - 09 August 2013 The great wave of obesity in US children may have crested. Children from low-income homes – who tend to be fatter than their counterparts from wealthier families – have become slightly, but significantly, leaner in recent years, a new government study reports. Epidemiologist Ashleigh May at the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and her colleagues used data from the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System, in which medical workers recorded the height and weight of about 11.6 million preschool children from 43 US states and territories who were enrolled in government nutrition-assistance programmes between 2008 and 2011. The researchers then adjusted the data to account for differences due to race, age and sex. In 18 states and one territory, the proportion of children classified as obese declined significantly during the four years, they found. Tide turning The researchers cannot be certain about what is driving obesity rates downward. More From New Scientist
Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846. The Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow was approached by a local dentist named William Morton, who insisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. That was a dramatic claim. In those days, even a minor tooth extraction was excruciating. On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw. Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery.
Food vs you: How your dinner controls you - health - 06 August 2013 FOR those of us who would like to shed a few pounds, dietary advice usually boils down to brute arithmetic. Reduce energy input by eating less, and increase energy output by exercising more. Simple. Except that as anyone who has tried it knows, it isn't. One reason is that our evolutionary history has given us a powerful drive to eat rich foods when they are available. But there's more to it than that. “Good” Patients and “Difficult” Patients — Rethinking Our Definitions Four weeks after his quadruple bypass and valve repair, 3 weeks after the bladder infection, pharyngeal trauma, heart failure, nightly agitated confusion, and pacemaker and feeding-tube insertions, and 2 weeks after his return home, I was helping my 75-year-old father off the toilet when his blood pressure dropped out from under him. As did his legs. I held him up. I shouted for my mother. My mother was 71 years old and, fortunately, quite fit. Together, we lowered my father to the bathroom floor. In the emergency department, after some fluids, my father felt better. My mother waited with my father. After weeks of illness and caregiving, it can be a relief to be a daughter and leave the doctoring to others. I rested my hand on my father's arm to get his attention and said, “Dad, how much would you mind if I did a rectal?” We doctors do many things that are otherwise unacceptable. “Kid,” he replied, “do what you have to do.” I found gloves and lube.
Fixing broken brains: a new understanding of depression - health - 29 July 2013 Editorial: "New thinking means new hope on depression" ONE OF Vanessa Price's first chronic cases involved a woman we'll call Paula. Paula came to the London Psychiatry Centre, where Price is a registered nurse, after two years of unrelenting depression. The steady rise in this diagnosis over the past two decades reflects a little-known trend. The stubborn nature of these cases of depression has, however, spurred research into new and sometimes unorthodox treatments.