Hot MedFax

I remember leaving a doctor I loved because I couldn't stand the hour or more wait while he was wined and dined by pharmaceutical salespeople . I'm not kidding.  This guy would take anyone who wandered in with a loaded briefcase right into his office and sit and joke and laugh with them while we patients stewed outside.  When I needed a prescription, guess what?  It was always one of the drugs these people peddled. A story today in The New York Times pointed out that all this electronic assembling of medical records is feeding right into the hands of pharmaceutical companies, giving them the lowdown on everything from the meds doctors prescribe to how often you refill your prescriptions (and if you do) to what color underwear you're wearing (just kidding, but that's probably coming, too). Databases that would have been sealed to them in the past are now open as medical records switch over to electronic health records.  And this allows drug companies to target t...

I already knew this but now research has proved it.  The ear you use to listen on your cell phone is usually --  the opposite from the hand you use to hold it. In other words, if you are left-brain dominant, like 95% of the population, you'll use your right ear to listen and your right hand to hold the phone. I'm a right-brainer and I hold my cell phone in my left hand.  I'm left-handed, though, so that may defeat the whole point. But newswise.com reports today that there's a strong correlation between brain dominance and the ear used to listen on the phone. The majority of the population who are left-brain have their speech and language center located on the left side of the brain and are far more likely to use their right hands.  These people tend to be more logical and analytical than right-brainers.  We're more creative (or so they say) and whimsical and  logic?  Fuhgeddaboutit.  Or so my husband says. But that's pretty interesting beca...

We've all been warned about skin cancer , how melanoma is rapidly increasing as our earth warms and the ozone gets stripped away.  But now we may want to get it.  A study has found that people with skin cancer are less likely to get Alzheimer's, though not those with melanoma. True, the study participants were 79 years old.  But people who had skin cancer were 80% less likely to develop this dreaded dementia. In the study, only 2 of the 141 participants was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. One of the study's authors puts it down to outside activity.  "“Physical activity is known to protect against dementia, and outdoor activity could increase exposure to UV radiation, which increases the risk of skin cancer," Richard B. Lipton, MD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, told newswise.com.  It could also be from Vitamin D, which we get from the sun and being outdoors. But don't stop wearin...

I'm not even sure you'd want to eat it.  It grew in a lab.  You've heard of in-vitro babies?  Now there's test tube meat  (well, not yet, but you get the drift).  TheNew York Times reports it may even be eaten in a couple of weeks at an event in London. According to a story at smartplanet.com, a scientist worked long and hard to develop meat in a laboratory and what he came up with was a burger that consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue (who'd want to eat that ?). The doctor who created this says it even tastes good.  He plans to serve it in London with only salt and pepper as accompaniments.  But it's not all test tubes and rubber gloves. "The meat is produced with materials — including fetal calf serum, used as a medium in which to grow the cells — that eventually would have to be replaced by similar materials of non-animal origin," smartplanet.com reports. And here's where the big bucks come in.  It cost 25...

I don't know what scares me more.  Getting old, or knowing I'm not going to be able to pay for it. A study just out says that retired couples  should plan on spending $220,000 for medical expenses.  The really scary part is that the story applauds this, because that's down 8% from last year. While we're not that close to retirement, we're still starting to think about it. According to the AP, the study assumes a woman will live to 85 and a man to 82.  Fidelity, which did the study, attributes this drop to the slowdown in healthcare costs because of the economy (people are spending less on healthcare, or avoiding it altogether). We recently switched our health insurance -- maybe I should say my health insurance (my 62-year-old husband has none) -- to a high-deductible policy.  True, we have coverage should anything drastic happen (like the cancer I experienced in 2005 and 2007), but we're paying a hefty insurance policy every month, and paying all our me...

They say it's impossible.  Figuring out a teenager's brain.  But in England almost $8 million has been put forward to try. According to smartplanet.com, researchers are scanning the brains of people between 14 and 24 to determine changes that take place as people get older.  According to a BBC report, the study hopes to "settle the question of whether changes to brain structure explains people’s habit of acting less impulsively as they grow older. It “should also shed light on the emergence of mental disorders in young adults,” the BBC story notes. “During the teenage years, scientists believe that the brain rewires itself, and that this rewiring, specifically at the front, will increase the mind’s ability to think ahead and control emotions,” a BBC video explains , It all has to do with white matter and gray matter, but the bottom line is that scientists hope to find out if white matter changes "as the brain starts to regulate strong signals generated by teena...

Did you know your weight can affect your personality?  Really.  Though it's gaining weight that does it. "If mind and body are intertwined, then if one changes the other should change too,” Angelina Sutin, author of a recent study, said in a newswise.com article. According to the Web site, Sutin's study found that participants who had at least a 10% increase in weight also showed a rise in impulsiveness, "with a greater tendency to give in to temptations — compared to those whose weight was stable." The data didn't show whether increased impulsiveness was a cause or an effect of gaining weight, the story reported, "but they do suggest an intimate relationship between a person’s physiology and his or her psychology."     A surprising additional, and, to me, exact opposite finding was that, though those who had gained weight were much more impulsive, they also had a greater tendency to think through their decisions, compared to those who st...