Yahoo! News:
Too Much Sugar-Free Gum Linked to Severe Weight Loss- Some rather strange news from the British Medical Journal(subscription required) where German physicians provide two case reports of individuals who developed diarrhea from consuming ridiculous quantities of chewing gum and candy. They actual culprit was sorbitol, a laxative which is contained in these items overseas, but less commonly in the U.S. where I assume my handful of readers are located. Apparently, the woman lost 24 pounds after consuming 15-20 sticks of gum a day and the man lost 46 pounds after consuming 20 sticks of gum and 200 grams of artificially sweetened candy. After learning of this, the physicians had the patients stop consuming these items and the symptoms quickly subsided.
Regular physical activity helps teens avoid obesity- A shocking new study out of Johns Hopkins University where researchers found that physical activity can prevent obesity. Ok, I’ll stop with the sarcasm now. Seriously though, how is this news? By this point we all know that physical activity decreases the likelihood that someone will be overweight or obese. I will admit that this study goes a little further by saying that physical activity in teens decreases their chance of being overweight as young adults, but I don’t think anybody was really questioning that.
New York Times:
Study Finds Possible Targets for H.I.V. Drugs- Using a new technology known as siRNA (a variation on the Nobel prize-winning RNAi), researchers at Harvard Medical School have identified 273 proteins the AIDS virus needs to survive in the human body. While this provides a host of potential targets for new drugs since only 36 proteins were known before and current drugs only target 15 proteins the virus produces itself, it appears that researchers are a long way to go before putting this into something clinically useful like a drug. As the lead researcher Dr. Stephen J. Elledge notes that most of the proteins the AIDS virus uses come from the human body, which makes them difficult to target without being fatal although cancer drugs employ the same technique. If you want to check out the original article, it is available here (subscription required).
Boston Globe:
Ending medical errors with airline industry’s help- Editorial from Dr. Gerald Healy, an ENT surgeon at Children’s Hospital in Boston, about how he and his team have reduced medical errors by utilizing procedures developed by commercial airlines. His teams focus on working to meet the best practices standards set by the medical governing bodies by utilizing all members of the teams and ensuring that even the lowest person on the team can point out errors. Interestingly, he doesn’t include medical students in the group that can correct errors. . . I think it’s an interesting read particularly for me with my MD-MBA (soon-to-be) background.
Health official urges higher penalty for uninsured- Some fallout from the Massachusetts universal health care plan that we alluded to in Tuesday’s post about San Francisco. Apparently, the legislature in Massachusetts is having a tough time getting people to obtain health insurance so they are planning on raising the fines. Going off economic principles, I don’t think this will work until the fines start approaching the cost of health insurance. We will see how this increase in fines will affect people’s decisions if this resolution even passes.
Health advocacy leader stepping down-John McDonough, the CEO of Health Care For All, who helped lead the fight for universal health insurance in Massachusetts has announced he will step down from his position on August 1st of this year. It does not appear to be related to the difficulty the program has had getting the much-lauded plan to actually work, but perhaps more details will come out later.
Mayor Menino blasts approval of in-store clinics- It appears that Boston Mayor Thomas Menino does not agree with our sentiment that in-store clinics are a good idea. He believes the prior decision:
“jeopardizes patient safety. Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profits corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.”
Judging from the comment section most of the populace disagrees with Mayor Menino. We will continue to follow this story as we are sure it will get more interesting.
Boston steps toward trans fat ban-It looks like Boston is riding on New York City’s coattails and banning trans fats. This doesn’t really appear to be that big of a leap to me. New York City did all the hard work by standing up to the major corporations. I live in Boston and am taught to despise everything New York, but let’s be realistic. The chain restaurants changed because New York City is a much, much bigger market than Boston. If Boston had went first with this, I think they would have been met with quite a bit more resistance than New York City was. I guess the legislature can still count this as a win when the incumbents come up for re-election, right?
Tags: AIDS, HIV, In-store clinics, Massachusetts, Medical errors, Obesity, San Francisco, Universal Health Care
January 21, 2008 at 11:30 pm |
[...] nvr1983 put an intriguing blog post on Links of the Day: January 11, 2008Here’s a quick excerptToo Much Sugar-Free Gum Linked to Severe Weight Loss- Some rather strange news from the British Medical Journal(subscription required) where German physicians provide two case reports of individuals who developed diarrhea from consuming … [...]
January 22, 2008 at 1:39 am |
[...] another WordPress weblog Fri 11 Jan Links of the Day: January 11, 2008 RawReform wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptBoston steps toward trans fat ban-It [...]