Heart Pumps
I’ve seen a couple stories about a new heart pump that is attached through a hole in your abdomen and is worn like a book bag on your back.
One woman with a failing heart could no longer wait for a transplant so they attached this device to her to keep her blood pumping. Artificial hearts are no big news but what happened here is wonderful.
As a result of this pump taking over the heart function, her heart was not only able to rest, but after some time it grew stronger, healed, and was able to resume it’s duty without the pump.
The second woman had two arteries to one side of her heart burst at once, she would have been dead if not for this new pump taking over. She cannot do anything strenuous but she gets around and functions almost as normal.
Care has to be taken of course. Batteries must be changed several times a day and the area where the tube enters the body has to be watched for infection.
This pump offers hope for many who are waiting for transplants.
The Uninsured and Cancer
Studies show that people who are not insured and those on Medicaid don’t go to the doctor until their cancers are advanced.
Obviously this is not good because everyone knows or should know by now that there is a better chance of survival when tumors are caught early. Putting aside the fact that these people have a much higher incidence of death, treatment is also more expensive.
The problem is, that sometimes tumors are benign and the folks that have personal insurance will often have early caught tumors treated when they are not cancerous. Bad news for the insurance companies. Too bad!
Women and New Knees
Research shows that women wait a lot longer before they opt for knee replacement surgery than men.
The main reason is that doctors usually explain to patients that the new artificial knees will probably also need replacing in the future because even the titanium knees will wear out. Women will eventually die without having to have those second replacements, whereas men will live to have another surgery.
For that reason doctors tell people to wait to have the surgery until they can’t get around or stand the pain anymore. Men tend to elect for the surgery when they can no longer get around outside the home. Women wait until they can no longer get around inside the home.
Another way to interpret this data is that women simply can tolerate more pain and immobility than men. That is just my theory, what do you think?
Pre-Chewed Food Passes On HIV
Researchers have determined that parents or others who are infected with HIV and pre-chew their babies food can pass the infection on to the infant.
Surprisingly, only three cases of this type of transmission have been documented and they are all in the US.
I understand that in some underdeveloped countries this could be a problem, however I didn’t expect that to occur here. All I can say is “duh!”
Perhaps they were thinking that because they heard HIV could not be passed on by saliva it was OK to do this, but would it not occur to them that they could have a cut or sore in their mouths that would cause an extra exchange of blood with the saliva?
I could go on ranting but what would be the use? There is no law preventing morons from having babies.
The Accord Study
The Accord study was a research project where they took two groups of people with diabetes type 2 and put one of the groups into an extremely intensive program to lower blood sugar. This study lasted about four years and was just ordered to stop because this group had 54 more deaths than the other.
They have yet to figure out exactly what caused the deaths. Theories range from the fact that some of the people were way more sick than first thought, to the intensity of the program caused too much stress and anxiety.
They did find out that a combination of lowering blood sugar, cholesterol, and high blood pressure with low doses of aspirin seemed to extend the lives of the other group.