Truth or Consequences

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 months 1 week (www.womenshealthmag.com)

Come clean to your doc, or you could risk more than a red face. Many patients see no harm in fibbing about whether or not they smoke, take vitamins or how much they drink. But this information should not be left out. In particular, women who do not tell their doctors that they smoke rob themselves of an accurate determination of their risk of blood clots. Doctors who know that their female patients smoke tend to recommend lower-risk methods of contraception, such as diaphragms and IUDs.

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Violence against nurses finally gets some press

Darkfrog submitted, created time 4 months 1 week (www.nytimes.com)

NUrses treat all kinds of people, including the ones who think nothing of--or are too out of it to think at all--kicking or otherwise attacking their nurse. Nurses have never been strangers to violence. What's new is that the nurses and their unions have been reporting these incidents and are starting to insist on better security at hospitals.

“Nurses find different kinds of responses from their administrations and different levels of support,” said Dr. S. Gerbich of the University of Minnesota

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Intermittent Tacrolimus Ointment Therapy Helps Prevent Relapse of Stabilized Atopic Dermatitis

kavin submitted, created time 4 months 2 weeks (www.medscape.com)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Jun 23 - In patients with stabilized atopic dermatitis, intermittent therapy with tacrolimus ointment was associated with significantly more flare-free days and longer time to first relapse compared with vehicle alone, according to a report in the June issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Tacrolimus is a topical calcineurin inhibitor (TCI) and is manufactured in ointment form under the brand name Protopic by Astellas Pharma US Inc., which supported this multicenter study by U.S. researchers

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Dissatisfaction covers doctors' careers even as paperwork covers their desks!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 5 months 2 days (www.nytimes.com)

Want to know what's it's actually like to be a doctor? I tell you, this article makes me feel a little better about not going to medical school. If the medical dramas showed just how much time doctors spent getting procedures approved and just how handcuffed they feel, we'd have a bigger shortage than we do.

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Doctors unprepared to protect themselves from violent patients

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 2 weeks (careers.bmj.com)

One in three doctors is attacked at work every year, yet few of these will have been trained on how to handle the situation. General practitioners, doctors working in accident and emergency departments, psychiatrists, and doctors in training are the most at risk.

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Prescribed pot users face transplant hurdles

kavin submitted, created time 6 months 3 weeks (www.msnbc.msn.com)

Should using marijuana be held against a patient in need of transplant? About this question, there are several different views. And people tend to advise that there needs to be some kind of national eligibility criteria. Because the patients are trusting their physician to do the right thing. The physician prescribes marijuana, they take the marijuana, and they are shocked that this is now the end result. And no one tracks how many patients are denied transplants over medical marijuana use.

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FDA to vet embryonic stem cells’ safety

jane2007 submitted, created time 7 months 1 week (www.nature.com)

Investors, biotech companies and other stem-cell stakeholders are meeting in Gaithersburg, Maryland, this week for FDA’s first public hearing on the safety of therapies that use human embryonic stem cells.

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Adverse drug reactions a big killer

jane2007 submitted, created time 8 months 1 day (www.nature.com)

More than 3% of all deaths seem to be caused by adverse reactions to medical drugs, according to new research.

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Stem cell procedure successfully treats amyloidosis patients

bianjie submitted, created time 1 year 4 months (www.eurekalert.org)

Researchers from the Stem Cell Transplant Program and the Amyloid Treatment and Research Program at Boston University Medical Center (BUMC) have found that tandem cycles of high-dose chemotherapy and blood stem cell transplantation can help treat patients with immunoglobulin-light chain (AL) Amyloidosis who did not respond to initial treatment with this method.

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