World Alzheimer’s Day

When I was fourteen, I watched my once attentive, doting grandmother carry around a baby doll like it was her own child, smitten with a plastic head and fake eyelashes, cooing at and talking to it like a playmate. Meanwhile, her own nine grown children were usually met with quizzical brows and a glazed-over, unrecognizable gaze. The doll, covered in a white and blue flowered terrycloth onesie, was the only thing my grandmother needed—besides a Wendy's chocolate Frosty from time to time—for simplicity, and Alzheimer's, had replaced her once-sharp mind.

Alzheimer's is a form of dementia that attacks brain cells diminishing a person's memory and becoming fatal over time. September 21st of each year is dedicated to Alzheimer's awareness and conferences and rallies are held to gain attention for this disease and raise money for its research. World Alzheimer's Day put on by Alzheimer's Disease International uses a theme each year to gain support. The 2008 theme is "No Time to Lose" featuring the work that caregivers (nurses, aides, friends, and family) do for Alzheimer's patients all across the world, focusing on the tremendous patience and attendance that they give to Alzheimer's sufferers.

In the last few years, a lot of research has been done to find preventative measures for the disease as well as medications for patients with Alzheimer's to help stop the depletion of brain cells. Although all of the medications have been proven to work only part of the time in patients, some are still able to slow Alzheimer's progress within the brain. While these medications are sometimes helpful in slowing down the disease and regenerating chemicals in the brain that control memory loss, they are not without their faults. According to the Mayo Clinic, daily drugs taken orally such as Donepezil, Galantamine, and Rivastigmine have also shown high risk of gastrointestinal problems, heart disease, and stroke among patients.

Recent research published by HealthNews has shown that there is still a bright future for an Alzheimer's cure from the notes of the World Alzheimer's Conference, a recent article reviewing the pros and cons of a brain scan possible in early detection of the disease, and pursuing a possible link between Alzheimer's and exercise.

I would have loved to be more involved in learning how to help my grandmother, and my family, fight against this disease, and my grandmother's beloved doll now sits wide-eyed in a basket at my home as a tangible reminder of Alzheimer's. This year maybe I'll join an Alzheimer's Memory Walk, to remember those who's minds have let them down.

For more information on World Alzheimer's Day and how to help out, visit the Alzheimer's Disease International website, find a Memory Walk in your area, or simply relive memories by telling them to your favorite Alzheimer's patient, I'm sure they'd love to hear them.

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America's Nursing Homes: How Good Are They Doing?

What happens when we are no longer able to care for ourselves? Some Americans are fortunate enough to have loved ones willing and able to take on the large responsibility of caring for them or they are blessed to afford in home care or assisted living, during their dependant times of life. A large number of the U.S. population, spend their later, more dependent years, under the care of a nursing home. However, nursing homes seem to continue with a trend of having deficiencies. This past year, 90 percent of the nursing homes surveyed were sited for at least one deficiency, with for-profit nursing homes coming out on top with the most citations.

Across the United States 15,000 nursing homes house more than 1.5 million people and two-thirds of the residents are Medicaid or Medicare participants. The annual cost for this care is more than $75 billion. In order for nursing homes to receive funding from the government through Medicaid and Medicare, they must meet federal standards and are inspected at least once, unannounced, every 15 months.

The care in nursing homes has fallen short for several years and continues to draw scrutiny from the public and the government. The inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, Daniel Levinson, in a recent government report, regarding federal violations of nursing homes stated, of the nursing homes surveyed, around 94 percent of the for-profit nursing homes, 91 percent of government-operated nursing homes, and 88 percent of non-profit nursing homes received a citation. (The majority of nursing homes are owned by for-profit companies.)

The proportions of citations for deficiencies in nursing homes across the U.S. varied from 100 percent in Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, to 76 percent in Rhode Island. The recent report says the most common violations of the nursing homes surveyed were improper storage and distribution of food, lack of services needed for patients' well being, and accident hazards. Around 17 percent of nursing homes evaluated actually were given the most serious violations for "actual harm" or "immediate jeopardy." Of the 37,150 complaints received by inspectors to conditions of nursing homes in 2007, 39 percent were substantiated, and 20% of the verified complaints involved abuse or neglect of nursing home residents, per the report.

Whether it is your parents, grandparents, sibling, friend or spouse, more than likely someone you know lives in a nursing home. Reading the statistics of the most recent report released by the Department of Health and Human Services, it can be very disheartening when we think of someone we love being mistreated or not cared for in the manner we would like. The government continues work to improve elderly care facilities and hopes new efforts to post the names of facilities that score low during the states inspections on its website will help to reduce the number of violations. We may also soon see star ratings on the government website in regards to nursing homes quality of service as you may sometimes see for ratings of hotels, which could help when locating the best option for a loved one needing nursing home care.

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Addiction Drug May Promote Weight Loss

The millions of Americans who are overweight or obese are putting their health in jeopardy. Obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death, and can raise your risk of developing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, asthma and even gum disease. The underlying causes of obesity are numerous, from genetic disposition to binge eating, which may be caused by the same brain changes responsible for addiction. This link prompted researchers to test a potential addiction drug on lab rats bred to be obese-with surprising results.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory tested the drug, called vigabatrin or GVG, in 50 rats, some of which were bred obese and some were of normal weight. The animals were either given injections of various amounts of vigabatrin or a placebo for up to 40 days. The genetically obese rats lost up to 19 percent of their body weight, and normal-weight rats lost 12 to 20 percent of their body weight. "Our results appear to demonstrate that vigabratrin induced satiety in these animals," said Amy DeMarco, who worked on the study. "When we gave GVG, they would steadily lose weight, and when we took them off GVG, they would steadily gain weight," she told Reuters Health.

Vigabratrin works by preventing the increase of dopamine, a chemical produced in the brain that has been linked to addiction and overeating. "Given the growing obesity epidemic, we felt that examining vigabatrin's therapeutic efficacy for obesity was particularly relevant," said lead researcher Dr. Stephen Dewey, who has conducted more than 20 years of preclinical research with the medication. "A fairly significant proportion of subjects who are obese suffer from something called binge eating disorders. They binge-eat based on cues. They see a cake, they smell a hamburger and they crave and they start to eat. One of the great things about this drug is it stops this."

Vigabatrin was originally made by Sanofi Aventis and is sold as Sabril in Canada, Mexico and Britain. Ovation Pharmaceuticals currently hold the U.S. rights to develop vigabatrin as a treatment for epilepsy. It is also currently in U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved Phase II clinical trials as a possible treatment against cocaine and methamphetamine addiction. "The fact that these results occurred in genetically obese animals offers hope that this drug could potentially treat severe obesity," Dr. Dewey said. "This would appear to be true even if the obesity results from binge eating, as this disorder is characterized by eating patterns that are similar to drug-taking patterns in those with cocaine dependency."

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Vaginal Gels of Future May Protect Against HIV

A team from Tulane National Primate Research Center conducted a study that gives support for the use of vaginal microbicide gels in protecting women against the sexual transmission of HIV type 1. The study, funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and Bristol-Meyers Squibb, used vaginal microbicide gels to protect rhesus macaque monkeys against vaginal transmission of multiple strains of simian/human HIV.

The gels were successful in protecting the monkeys from infection from three different strains of simian/human HIV viruses. "The protection we observed was dose-dependent, and at the higher concentration, robust, in that all the test animals resisted infection," said the researchers.

The microbicide gels targeted one of the main cellular receptors that HIV uses to infect cells. The advantage of the microbicide gels used, called T-1249, over other compounds was that these gels targeted a receptor that is common to most strains of HIV. An ever-increasing number of different HIV strains make protection against the disease very challenging. Whether T-1249 can be developed as a practical microbicide will depend on if it can be successfully formulated at a reasonable cost.

Research on vaginal microbicides has also been conducted at UCLA and the results of that research appeared in the National Academy of Sciences online July 7th issue. UCLA researchers concluded that the vaginal microbicides currently in clinical trials may be the only direct way that women can protect themselves against infection from HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

"The antiretroviral drugs within these microbicides are the same as those used to treat people who are infected with HIV, so there is a great expectation that these microbicides will be very effective, but the concern is that these microbicides are going to lead to drug resistance," said Dr. David Wilson, of Australia's University of New South Wales.

If the microbicides are used by HIV-positive women they could lead to drug resistance. In these cases men would likely benefit more than women from their use, because the HIV infection would be less likely to be transmitted from the woman to man.

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Circumcision Does Little to Prevent HIV Infection Among Gay Men (Part 2)

In a co-authored editorial in the J.A.M.A., Dr. Sten Vermund, director of the Institute for Global Health at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine stated, “For every insertive man who is protected, there might be a receptive man who isn't infected, for the same reason why women get protected. In other words, from a herd-immunity phenomenon.”

Theoretically, circumcision should offer protection for all men who practice insertive sex, including both heterosexual men and homosexual men. The researchers found that prior to the 1996 arrival of antiviral drugs (ARVs), many gay men avoided risky sex practices suggesting that circumcision may have provided protection.

With the availability of the powerful ARVs drugs came the widespread belief that ARVs could prevent HIV transmission. This led to a return of risky sexual behavior that caused outbreaks of sexually transmitted infections and increased rates of HIV. The study authors believe this may have weakened the comparative effectiveness of male circumcision.

According to the Centers For Disease Control, almost half of the 1.1 million people infected with HIV are men who have sex with men.

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Circumcision Does Little to Prevent HIV Infection Among Gay Men (Part 1)

Although male circumcision has been shown to effectively protect against HIV infection for men who have sex with women, there appears to be little effectiveness in protecting men who have sex with men.

Circumcision is the surgical removal of a flap of skin from the tip of a man's penis. It is believed to reduce the risk of HIV transmission since the inner surface of the foreskin contains cells that are more susceptible to HIV infection than cells located on other parts of the penis. In addition, circumcision reduces the risk of developing genital ulcers that occur from diseases such as syphilis, which also lowers susceptibility to HIV during intercourse.

In 2007, studies of heterosexual men in Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda concluded that circumcision effectively reduces female-to-male transmission rates by 48 to 60 percent. However, according to a new combined analysis of several studies, circumcision reduces the risk of acquiring HIV by only 14 percent among men who have sex with men. The study was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

The wide-ranging analysis included data from 15 studies in eight countries, including the United States, involving 53,567 gay and bisexual men. The men were predominantly Caucasian with about half of them having been circumcised. The finding that a man’s HIV risk was only reduced by 14 percent was statistically insignificant, but should be considered a launching point for future studies, according to the authors.

Gregorio Millett, the study's lead author and a senior behavioral scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said, “Over all, we’re not finding a protective effect associated with circumcision for gay and bisexual men.” However, he did note that, “This study gives us a more complete picture than we've ever had before,” and said, “The next step is to design better quality studies to see if there is an association we aren't detecting.”

The analysis also suggested that circumcision lowered the HIV infection risk by 29 percent among men who practice only insertive sex with other men, which is also statistically insignificant. Millett says that a good question to be answered in future studies would be whether circumcision can reduce infection rates among the subset of men who have only insertive sex with other men, as opposed to those who practice only receptive sex or both. The answer could be helpful in learning the specific effect of circumcision.

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FDA Admits Contradictions in Generic Drug Labeling (Part 2)

“bioequivalent and therapeutically equivalent (interchangeable) with Wellbutrin XL 300 mg. And though they admitted “small differences in the pharmacokinetic profiles” of the two formulations, they said they “are not outside the established boundaries for equivalence nor are they different from other bupropion products known to be effective.” According to the FDA statement, the recurrent nature of depression provides a “scientifically reasonable explanation for the reports of lack of efficacy following a switch to a generic product.”

On October 2nd, an FDA spokeswoman told Dow Jones that the FDA considers the product to be “labeled appropriately.” Apparently, the unsupported statements are copied from the package insert for the original Wellbutrin XL but, as explained by the spokeswoman, the labeling of a generic drug must match that of the drug it copies and this is “the standard” for all generics. After a review of the FDA’s test requirements, ConsumerLab.com found that generic products are allowed to vary from one another by a fairly wide range. For example, a twice-a-day (SR) version of bupropion is permitted to release anywhere from 60 to 85 percent of its ingredient after four hours into a dissolution test. At the completion of such a test (which only runs eight hours), a product could be as little as 80 percent dissolved or over 100 percent dissolved and still be considered bioequivalent. ConsumerLab also discovered that the acceptable limits for once-a-day (XL) versions have been blacked-out or deleted in documents on the FDA website. Dr. Cooperman says the FDA rules “clearly need to be changed to protect consumers.”

The Dow Jones also reported that the FDA is considering a highly unusual step—new tests of Budeprion XL 300 to help them understand complaints about the product.

ConsumerLab.com suggests that if you find a generic version of Wellbutrin is not working for you, either have your doctor prescribe the brand-name version and indicate “Dispense as Written” or “Do Not Substitute.” You might also try a different generic or consider a different version of the drug. For example, if a once-a-day generic is not working, consider a twice-a-day (SR) or three-times-a-day version that will yield the same total daily dose. However, you will have to remember to take the medication on schedule.

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FDA Admits Contradictions in Generic Drug Labeling (Part 1)

Generic medications provide many Americans with a money-saving alternative to name brand drugs. It is estimated that generic drugs save consumers $8 to $10 billion a year at retail pharmacies. The law requires that in order to gain FDA approval, a generic drug must meet the same standards as the innovator drug. It must: contain the same active ingredients; be identical in strength, dosage form, and route of administration; have the same use indications; be bioequivalent (meaning the generic drug’s rate and extent of absorption do not show a significant difference between that of the branded drug); meet the same batch requirements for identity, strength, purity, and quality; and be labeled the same as the branded product. That said consumers can expect that a generic drug will produce the same clinical effect and safety profile as the name brand, right? Not always!

Consider the case of Budeprion XL 300 mg, a generic version of the popular antidepressant Wellbutrin XL 300 mg. Between January 1 and June 30, 2007, the FDA received 85 post-marketing reports in which patients who switched from Wellbutrin XL 300 mg to Budeprion XL 300 mg experienced an undesirable effect. Specifically, in 78 of these cases, there was a reported loss of antidepressant effect following the switch. In addition, a number of cases reported the new onset or worsening of side effects. Personal accounts indicated that while taking the name brand Wellbutrin XL 300 for months or even years, people felt well and their psychological symptoms of depression were successfully controlled. But after switching to the generic formulation (Budeprion XL 300), many reported symptoms such as headaches, irritability, nausea and insomnia. Others shared stories of becoming easily upset or aggressive, crying, gaining weight or experiencing a return of depressive symptoms. Some reported thoughts of suicide while taking the generic form. More than half of the patients who switched back to Wellbutrin XL 300 reported improvement of depression and/or abatement of side effects.

These reports prompted ConsumerLab.com, a leading provider of consumer information and independent evaluations of products that affect health and nutrition, to investigate whether extended-release (XL) and sustained-released (SR) bupropion generics were truly equivalent to original Wellbutrin and to each other. Their analysis revealed that, while each product contained its claimed amount of active ingredient—bupropion hydrochloride—the rates at which the products released their ingredient were quite different, raising concerns about their equivalency. Results from a second lab confirmed these differences.

ConsumerLab.com also noted that statements in the package insert of the generic contradict information published by the FDA about the product. The insert claims that the product has been clinically tested, while the FDA has acknowledged that it has not. The insert states that food does not affect the absorption of drug, but the FDA has acknowledged that tests have not been done to support this. The insert states that the time to peak plasma concentration of the drug is about 5 hours, while the FDA has reported it to be 2 to 3 hours. ConsumerLab.com’s President, Tod Cooperman, brought the inconsistencies to the FDA’s attention, hoping for corrections to be made.

Surprisingly, despite these inconsistencies, the FDA issued a statement in April of this year saying that the agency considers the generic form of bupropion XL 300 mg

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Minor Heart Defect Can Cause Stroke After Sex (Part 2)

PFO is common and can be found in one out of every four adults. The connection to the stroke is that 40 percent of people who suffer a cryptogenic stroke, which is one with no known cause, have a PFO. And the PFO’s trigger point is typically excessive strain that affects blood flow, such as during an orgasm, combined with a blood clot that breaks free and enters the heart, falls into the small opening, and follows through to the brain. This makes the entire process a relatively uncommon one, but the connection is significant enough to inspire more research.

Upon investigation of the patient, it was discovered that she did have one risk factor for clotting, which was her prescriptive birth control pills, which can lead to blood clots. And the woman did have a blood clot in a main vein of her right leg, which was the clot that found its way through her heart at the moment of her sexual experience, which ultimately caused her stroke. The patient was ultimately advised to cease taking the pills and schedule surgery to repair the heart defect, though the surgery is not recommended for the majority of people with a PFO.

In essence, many factors must collide at the precise time to coincide with sex for such a stroke to take place. Biller’s study noted that this should not be a concern for the average person. He emphasized, “This is a rare occurrence.”

Strokes, on the other hand, affect more than 700,000 Americans each year. According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, approximately 160,000 of them do not survive, and many who do live with serious disabling consequences like partial paralysis and compromised brain function.

Some of the risk factors for stroke, especially in younger people, are migraine headaches, drug use, diseases that cause blood clotting, and athletic injuries that can cause a tear in neck arteries.

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Minor Heart Defect Can Cause Stroke After Sex (Part 1)

It is only a minor heart defect, one attributed to one out of every four adults. And while the defect is not said to cause strokes, about 40% of people who suffer strokes--ones with no known cause--are said to have the defect. As the cause and effect has been explored for years, another medical case recently brought the connection back into the news.

In December of 2007, a 35-year-old Illinois woman began to feel stroke-like symptoms during intercourse. With numbness on one side of her face, slurred speech, and weakness in her left arm, she sought care at a medical facility and her condition worsened considerably over the next few hours. Face paralysis, garbled speech, and no movement in the left arm led the doctors to apply a clot-dissipating drug directly to the clot in her brain in an urgent effort to stop the stroke from progressing, and it worked. There was immediate improvement, and the stroke symptoms were nearly erased within 12 hours of the procedure.

Jose Biller, M.D., Professor and Chair of the neurology department at Loyola University in Chicago was the head of the medical team that treated the woman, and the experienced spawned a report that appeared in the September issue of Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases. The doctor initially looked further into the case because the woman was healthy with no history of cardiovascular disease; she was a young non-smoker with no known health concerns.

Strokes triggered by sex and/or orgasm are said to be rare in young people, but the factors that combine to cause the strokes in those situation are not uncommon, it is only their convergence that makes them unique. And the factor that Biller has examined is a minor heart defect called PFO, a patent foramen ovale, which is a small opening in the wall between the two upper chambers of the heart that allows blood to bypass the lung and flow straight to the brain.

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Heart Patients Prone to Depression (Part 2)

1. Trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping too much
2. Feeling tired or having little energy
3. Poor appetite or overeating
4. Feeling bad about yourself, that you are a failure, or that you have let yourself or your family down
5. Trouble concentrating on things such as reading the newspaper or watching television
6. Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed or being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual
7. Thinking that you would be better off dead or that you want to hurt yourself in some way
Screening could take place in a variety of medical settings; at the hospital, doctors’ office, clinic or cardiac rehabilitation centers. If depression is indicated, the patient may be referred to a professional qualified in treating the condition. Treatment strategies for patients with coronary disease and depression include antidepressant drugs, behavioral therapy, and exercise or a combination. The antidepressants Zoloft, sold as the generic sertraline, and Celexa, sold as generic citalopram, are considered good first-line therapies, as research has shown they are generally safe for cardiac patients.

These guidelines could potentially affect millions of Americans, including 16 million who have heart disease and 8.1 million who have suffered a heart attack. Erika Froelicher, RN, MPH, PHD, professor of nursing and epidemiology and statistics at the University of California, San Francisco and co-chair of the group that created the recommendations, said the hope is that routine screening for depression will be done on every cardiac patient. “I believe a lot of depressed cardiac patients are overlooked,” she said. “Unless you screen formally, you can miss a lot of people.”

The American Psychiatric Association endorsed the new recommendations, which were published online in advance of the October 21 issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

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Heart Patients Prone to Depression (Part 1)

Amid a dismal economy, rising food and health-care costs, and an uncertain job market, even the most optimistic person can get "down and out." But factor in a serious medical condition, and the result could be—depression. Scientists recently confirmed the long-held notion that diabetes contributes to depression, and vice versa, and multiple studies have shown a strong link between heart disease and depression. As a matter of fact, depression is so common among cardiac patients that the American Heart Association (AHA) recently issued new guidelines recommending that all heart patients be routinely screened for signs of depression.

“Studies show that depression is about three times more common in patients following a heart attack than in the general community,” said Judith Lichtman of Yale University School of Medicine, who helped write the new guidelines. Moreover, depressed heart patients are more likely to neglect their prescribed medications and are less likely to stay on a healthy diet and exercise regime, making them more vulnerable to recurrent heart problems. “There is no direct evidence yet that treating depression improves coronary heart disease outcomes, but plenty of evidence shows that having depression worsens those outcomes,” she said. “By understanding the prevalence of depression and learning more about the subgroups of heart patients at particular risk of depression, we can begin to understand the best ways to recognize and treat it.”

The recommendations call for all heart patients to be screened by initially asking two standard questions: Over the past two weeks, have you had little interest or pleasure in doing things? Have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless? If the patient answers yes to one or both, they should be further evaluated with seven additional questions:

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Honey is Now Sweet on Burns (Part 2)

One trial narrowed down the honeys that seemed to work the best healing wounds, those types that are derived from a single type of flower: aloe, jambhul, manuka or jarrah were most common. Honey is alternative medicine’s approach to harsh chemical-laden creams and ointments that are generally used to treat burns.

In a partner study also published in the Cochrane Library, an Australian researcher and co-author Jason Wasiak of the Victoria Adult Burns Service at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and his team looked through 26 random trials to determine there is no evidence to the effectiveness of common cream SSD used with gauze to prevent infections, he writes, “The use of silver sulphadiazine (SSD) as a comparator on burn wounds for the full duration of treatment needs to be reconsidered, as a number of studies showed delays in time to wound healing and increased number of dressing applications in patients treated with SSD dressings." The Australian researchers urge for better awareness for topical applications for burn victims and urge consumers to reconsider using SSD because it may be extending the healing process instead of speeding it up.

As with many trials, even randomly controlled trials, there still need to be more tests and more investigations into the natural fighting substance called honey for the purpose of treating burn wounds. So when you’re taking your tea or slathering it on your toast and you accidentally burn your fingers on the tea pot or the toaster, you might want to hold off on soaking your fingers in honey, at least until more research is published.

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Honey is Now Sweet on Burns (Part 1)

Praised for its ancient god-quelling qualities, throat-soothing remedies, and smile-inducing taste, honey dates back to the days before records were kept. The history of honey is long and the possibilities of honey used for healing has long been documented, including most recently as a possible sinus-fighter. A new study from New Zealand proves honey’s lasting healing qualities by introducing a new topical application: honey as dressing for a burn.

The University of Auckland study used 19 small clinical trials—using less than 100 participants for each—to show that tea’s favorite sweetener can actually accelerate the healing and rejuvenation of skin affected by burns. The New Zealand researchers discovered that honey helps promote new skin tissue growth and the removal of dead tissues.

By focusing on the antibacterial qualities of honey, the University of Auckland team reviewed 2,554 patients with a variety of different wounds and found out that the healing time was reduced with the application of honey compared with commonly used wound dressings made out of gauze. Although burn wounds seem to heal faster, the researchers caution that surgical scars, ulcers or cuts didn’t seem beneficial to the use of honey.

The investigations involved applying honey to partially thick burns as well as mild to moderately superficial burns that caused damage to nerves and the blood vessels were healed up to four days faster than normal approaches to burn wounds, such as the often-prescribed cream silver sulphadiazine known as SSD.

Published in the most recent issue of the Cochrane Library one of the researchers, Andrew Jull, explains in a release, “The evidence currently does not support the use of honey on acute wounds such as abrasions and lacerations or on minor, uncomplicated wounds left to heal …following surgery." Jull goes on to say that although the trials were positive, honey is not yet released for general use yet, “health services should refrain from providing honey dressing for routine use,” and the results—as well as being re-studied by more schools—should be looked upon with caution. The number of participants in each study is significantly low to prove results as each trial used a different type of honey on a slightly different wound.

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Alternative Medicine Under the Microscope (Part 2)

One of the poor lights shined on alternative medicine recently was an investigation into a 2004 Harvard Medical School study that claimed yoga therapy was almost a cure-all for such problems such as heart and lung disease, depression, back pain, diabetes, arthritis, and even cancer. Using 181 papers in their research as accurate reports, the investigation found that only 40 percent of those used controlled trials—testing the method against a random placebo group that is not using the method over a strict period of time—which are the most effective way to discern whether a certain drug or supplement is working positively and safely on the user group so it has a better chance of being approved for commercial use. Most of these studies too, were based on groups with a very small number of volunteers, proving that a positive could mean any number of other factors could have influenced the result. It’s because of these small numbers that Dr. Briggs is taking care to provide a better controlled testing group for her clinical trials so as to not inspire any more criticism.

In fact, one of the NCCAM’s biggest trials set to end in 2009 involves multiple research centers in California working with over 3,000 patients over the age of 75 to test the effects of ginkgo biloba extract against the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Briggs continues that another way to progress in their trials is to stay consistent with product uniformity due to past studies which have used samples of vitamins, powders and extracts that had the percentage of the active ingredient misidentified, which could also yield unexpected results.

Even though the finger is wagging strongly in her direction, Dr. Briggs still thinks that alternative medicine trials can prove beneficial, “I believe that as the sensitivities of our measures improve, we’ll do a better job at detecting these modest but important effects.” I am glad to see NCCAM doing their best to work with the government to provide more accurate numbers for research but I wonder if spending all this money on clinical trials for alternative medicine will yield the same economical results as Western medicine. Instead of a health-conscious consumer throwing away money on pills or diet drinks, if yoga makes you feel better, would the absence of hard evidence be harmful? Alternative medicine ultimately is about healing the mind and the body and focusing on healthy complements to western medicine’s ideals, not about knowing the statistical analysis a daily glass of wine or a back adjustment has on your wellness scale.

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