Health & WellnessS


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The shocking truth about your airline meal

Airline Food
© Associated PressCockroaches and mice have been found in airline food preparation areas.
BE WARNED: you may want to reach for your sick bag right about now.

Your airline meal may have been prepared among mice, ants and cockroaches.

That's according to US TV news program 20/20. The show has uncovered the dirt on airline food via a freedom of information act, revealing exactly what the US Food and Drug Administration found when it inspected airlines and their caterers.

More than 1500 health violations were discovered over almost four years, with "significant" problems found at a much higher rather than in other industries.

Food facilities at LSG Sky Chefs, a major provider of airline food, were found to be infested with ants, dead and live flies, and cockroaches "all over".

Magic Wand

Detox made safe and simple

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© naturallyearthfriendly.com
With the holiday season right around the corner, there is no better time than the present to fortify our diet and cement healthy eating.

Ironically, while healthy eating is our birthright, for many of us it seems like taking the plunge into eating a whole foods-based diet is the equivalent to traveling to some distant land. But it doesn't have to be such a scary or foreign experience.

In my work as a functional medicine doctor, my priority is to guide each patient through a safe, simple, realistic, and pleasurable transition into healthy eating.

Because whole foods-based diets remove all the sugary, fatty, chemical-laden, artificial stuff from the diet, they sometimes get called a detox or a cleanse.

Question

Is managed care pushing America's deadly opiate addiction?

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© soyouwanna.com
America's new addiction, which I wrote about in June in The Huffington Post, is the epidemic of opiate painkillers, which - aptly named - in recent years resulted in nearly 16,000 overdose deaths annually. This is not the stereotyped drug problem that can be solved by Miami Vice style drug busts of traffickers and periodic roundups of street addicts and pushers. In this epidemic, the traffickers are our respected pharmaceutical companies acting entirely within the law, seeking only to bring legitimate pain relief to sufferers; the addicts are, for the most part, upstanding citizens seeking a medical solution to their pain; and the "pushers" are, with few exceptions, dedicated doctors attempting to alleviate the suffering of their patients. So how can the interaction of decent people, pursuing well-intentioned and legitimate ends, result in a truly disastrous narcotics epidemic?

The answer, as counterintuitive as it may seems, is that in large part the epidemic is an unanticipated consequence of "managed care," which swept the country in the 1980s to contain rising medical costs.

Almost every week, I have received more calls from new patients searching for a pain specialist willing to take on the prescribing of their drug. In each case, the reason given for the need for a new doctor was their previous doctor's retiring or otherwise no longer being available for the task. In each case, a brief interview revealed the nature of the injury or physical problem to be either minor or, at best, partially diagnosed. Further, there is a turn of phrase, an urgency, a worn-thin quality to their stories, which informs the practiced listener that driving the call is addiction. The previous prescriber had created a demon and had withdrawn.

X

Rate of suicide by hanging/suffocation doubles in middle-aged men and women

A new report from researchers with the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy finds the majority of the previously reported increase in suicide in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 is attributable to an increase in hanging/suffocation, which increased from 19 percent of all suicides in 2000 to 26 percent of all suicides in 2010. The largest increase in hanging/suffocation occurred among those aged 45-59 years (104 percent increase). The results are published in the December issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

"Suicide recently exceeded motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury death in the U.S.; this report is the first to examine changes in the method of suicide, particularly by demographics such as age," said lead study author Susan P. Baker, MPH, a professor with and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "While suicide by firearm remains the predominant method in the U.S., the increase in hanging and suffocation particularly in middle-aged adults warrants immediate attention."

The researchers also found that the proportion of suicide by poisoning increased, from 16 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2010. Much like hanging/suffocation, dramatic increases were seen in certain age groups: the increase was 85 percent in those aged 60-69 years. Taken together, suicide by firearm, hanging/suffocation and poisoning make up 93 percent of all suicides in the U.S.

"In addition to age, detailed examination revealed important differences across gender and race," explained co-author Guoqing Hu, of Central South University, School of Public Health, China. "Suicide rates are increasing faster for women than for men, and faster in whites than in non-whites." The suicide rate increased the most among those aged 45-59 years of age (by 39 percent); in contrast, it dropped by 8 percent among those 70 and older.

Comment: The true measure of a society is the standard of living of its weakest and most vulnerable. Only in a severely decaying society would suicide be the leading cause of injury related death.


Arrow Up

Medical evidence strikes a blow against contact sports

Boxing
© Kate GeraghtyBernard Dunne (left) vs Reider Walstad (right)
Three years ago Dr Ann McKee gave riveting testimony to a congressional committee in the United States investigating head traumas among the elite of American Football playing in the NFL.

A former professor of neuropathology at Harvard University, Dr McKee, who now works for Boston University, had examined the brains of thousands of people after death to look for signs of neurological damage caused by blunt trauma.

She cited the example of a world champion boxer who had died at the age of 72 having being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at the age of 58. Instead of Alzheimer's disease, she found a massive build-up of neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) which occur in a condition called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, (CTE) which is usually found only in people who have been subject to repeated blows to the head.

"This individual, a former professional boxer, was clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease during life," she told the committee, "but the disease that actually caused his tragic 15-year decline in intellect and eventually killed him, was CTE, a disorder that would have been entirely prevented if he hadn't suffered repeated head injury in his younger years as a boxer."

Dr McKee also spoke of several NFL players who equally had suffered traumatic brain injury and found their latter years blighted by memory loss and personality disorders.

Health

Inpatient sleeping drug quadrupled fall risk

A drug commonly prescribed to help patients sleep in hospitals has been associated with an increased risk of falls, according to a study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine.

U.S. sleep specialists from the Mayo Clinic found that the fall rate among the 4,962 patients who took zolpidem during their hospital stay was more than four times as high as the 11,358 who did not take the drug.

They also found that the risk posed by the drug was greater than the risks posed by factors such as age, cognitive impairment, delirium or insomnia, regardless of the dosage used.

"Ensuring that people get enough sleep during their hospital stay is very important, but it can also prove very challenging," says the Clinic's Chief Patient Safety Officer Dr. Timothy I. Morgenthaler, who specializes in sleep disorders and pulmonary and critical care.

"Patient falls are also a significant patient safety issue in hospitals and one that has been quite difficult to tackle, despite considerable efforts. That is why it is one of the target aims of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Partnership for Patients project."

Arrow Down

Miss America contender latest to surgically remove breasts to 'prevent' cancer

Cancer
© PreventDisease.com
Following in the footsteps of women like Sharon Osbourne and others, a 24-year-old Miss America contestant who is set to represent Washington D.C. has announced that she will be removing both of her breasts through double masectomy in order to 'prevent' breast cancer that killed her mother. This trend, which is actually advocated by many doctors (gynecologists in particular, it seems), is considered 'heroic' by many mainstream media outlets that fail to mention the barbaric nature of the procedure and the powerful importance of nutrition and lifestyle when it comes to real cancer prevention.

Miss America contestant Allyn Rose says that she is genetically predisposed to breast cancer, and that she feels it is the only choice for her to stay alive because of it.

If Rose wins the pageant this year, she says she will undergo surgery later in January of 2014. If not, she will have the surgery performed as early as next June. According to her interview with the NY Daily News, Rose says she is 'choosing life over beauty'. She said:
"Breasts don't define your life. I'm choosing life over beauty. I'm choosing to remove something that's so iconic to my womanhood."
Rose's statements echo those of Sharon Osbourne and other women like Allison Gilbert who have decided that a double masectomy is the only way to truly prevent breast cancer from taking their lives. Gilbert explained to CNN, in fact, that her gynecologist had convinced her that the procedure was necessary to 'stay alive' for her children.

Pills

U.S. drug shortages leave dying patients without medicine

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© Agence France-Presse/Martin BureauMorphine: not guaranteed even for the dying.
A nationwide drug shortage has left American hospital patients untreated and in pain. Manufacturing problems have left emergency care providers without some of the most crucial medicines, putting lives at risk.

More than 100 drugs were put on the shortage list this year, prompting Congressional hearings and leading to an executive order by President Barack Obama, which forces drug companies to publicize their shortages.

Health care workers have had no other option than to ration some medicines, giving it only to patients that need it most. Paul Davis, the chief of a rural ambulance squad in Ohio, told the New York Times that he was unable to give morphine to a woman with a broken leg because he was saving his last pills for patients he thought needed it more.

Elsewhere, desperate health care workers are treating patients with expired drugs and less effective medicine. Those with cancer have been hit particularly hard. About 80 percent of the drugs in short supply are generic medicines for injection, including the chemotherapy treatment drug Doxil, WFTV reports. Sodium bicarbonate injections, which are used to stabilize critically ill patients suffering from sepsis, heart attacks or other cardiac problems, are also in short supply.

"When you can't treat basic things - cardiac arrest, pain management, seizures - you're in trouble. When you only have five tools in your toolbox and three of them are gone, what do you do?" Dr. Carol Cunningham, state medical director for the Ohio Department of Public Safety's emergency services division, told the Times.

Light Sabers

The battle for control over our plates

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© Activist Post
You may think it unlikely that the government would have any real interest in exactly what is landing up on the plate of the average American, but in truth nothing could be more wrong. The lid has started to be lifted on the huge scale deception that has lead to the worst health epidemic that this country has ever seen. When you stop and think about it for just a few seconds, it really doesn't make sense that in this day and age, in one of the most developed countries in the world, with the best medical facilities and doctors; we have the worst state of public health ever seen. How could an affluent, forward thinking country have higher rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease and countless other problems that simply did not exist on this scale 50 years ago? It is no accident.

Who's Responsible?

The blame game could lead us down a number of avenues, all of which take us back to the same answers. Those who have money to be gained from illness and disease.
Now this is not some form of twisted joke, it is a real issue, and as hard as it may be to comprehend, the illnesses that we, our friends, families, and co-workers are all getting in such high numbers are largely avoidable simply by changing our diet. It is not down to one company, or group, but a huge industry that profits from packaging up chemicals and toxins and selling it as food, and another that profits from selling the drugs that are supposed to heal you. In truth, the best way to prevent illness is to stop eating all of the processed sugars, additives, preservatives and colorants, and return to a natural diet consisting mainly of fresh fruit and vegetables. There is a direct correlation between the amount of processed foods we are consuming and the amount of illness and disease in the country yet the government seems intent on covering it up to protect the interests of the industries that are profiting from it.

Alarm Clock

Teen suffers from 'Sleeping Beauty' syndrome, slept for 64 days straight

North Fayette - A local teenager is dealing with a sleep disorder called Kleine-Levin or Sleeping Beauty Syndrome.

Nicole Delien, 17, of North Fayette, slept 64 days in her longest sleeping episode.

Her mom, Vicki, says Nicole will sleep 18 or 19 hours a day, and when she does wake up to eat, she says Nicole is in a sleepwalking state which she doesn't remember.