Great news for sufferers of Crohn’s disease: new drug found to work!

August 26, 2013 — xanthippa

Crohn’s disease can be debilitating and painful, so this is happy news indeed.

Via microsoft translate from Deredactie.be:

‘Those patients will now be able to be helped with Vedolizumab in the foreseeable future. So hot the new drug that blocks lymphocytes. That are white blood cells that in these patients flock to the intestine and cause inflammation.

Although medicines existed acting on lymphocytes, but those held in unacceptable risks because they not only the migration to the intestine, but also blocked to the brain. That often resulted in severe brain disorders.

“With the new drug, we managed to selectively block the migration of lymphocytes and to avoid these harmful side effects,” said gastro-enterologe Séverine Vermeire UZ Leuven.

It is expected that the drug in the course of next year will come on the European market.’

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A Four-Step Healthcare Solution (by Hans-Hermann Hoppe)

August 23, 2013 — xanthippa

Yes, I do fall into the category of unhealthy/infirm people.

That is why I have all this time to blog – I am lying in my sickbed, with my laptop propped up on my chest – typing away,  instead of being an actual productive member of society.  Those who can, do – those who can’t teach… or bitch on the internet, as is my case.

Yet, I am all for wholly unrestricted, unregulated and unsubsidized medical system because, from personal experience, it would open up options for people like I, who have chronic illnesses.  It would permit us to make healthcare choices for ourselves, rather that permit faceless bureaucrats who have never met us from limiting our options at their whim.

(And yes, those of us who are not wealthy would still have more choices open to us, by volunteering for free treatment in studies that would further the medical knowledge for all!  After all, a partial hope in a study is much better than no hope in a system that will simply not pay for innovative treatment nor allow you, the patient, to pay for it yourself outside the main medicare – i.e. the current Canadian system!)

After all, he who pays the bills is the master:  if I do not directly pay for my own medical care, then I cannot expect to be the master of it!

And, if it is my body – do I not have the right to choose the medical treatment I receive, instead of delegating it to a faceless bureaucrat who bullies the doctors who go out of their way to help their patients instead of the bureaucracy?!?!?

 

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A silver bullet to fight bacteria?

June 20, 2013 — xanthippa

Well, almost…

‘Like werewolves and vampires, bacteria have a weakness: silver. The precious metal has been used to fight infection for thousands of years — Hippocrates first described its antimicrobial properties in 400 bc — but how it works has been a mystery. Now, a team led by James Collins, a biomedical engineer at Boston University in Massachusetts, has described how silver can disrupt bacteria, and shown that the ancient treatment could help to deal with the thoroughly modern scourge of antibiotic resistance. The work is published today in Science Translational Medicine1.’

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John Goodman on Curing the Health Care Crisis

October 12, 2012 — xanthippa

 

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Blindsight

August 21, 2012 — xanthippa

I did not know that this is possible, but it’s quite amazing.

A man had several strokes which left him blind.

But, his eyes were not damaged – only the visual cortex, the part of the brain which processes the input from the eye into pictures, was damaged.

The most curious thing happened:  bits of information fed from the eyes to other bits of the brain were interpreted correctly.  The patient could even navigate a maze without help, without bumping into things – even though he could not actually see the obstacles!

Apparently, this is called ‘blindsight’!

So, what is it called when you can actually see things well, but still bump into them all the time?  ;o)

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ReasonTV: ‘Obesity in America: to Win, We Have to Lose Government’

June 6, 2012 — xanthippa

Of course, some of the ‘obesity epidemic’ in North America is directly attributable to government intervention in our individual lives……

Just recently, my father-in-law mentioned to me that he read a study of the most prescribed drugs in different regions of North America and that he found it curious that in almost all large urban areas, Synthroid (an artificial thyroid hormone) topped the list.  He was wondering why this was…

Did you know that fluoride (in the form of fluorine) is prescribed as medication to people who have overactive thyroids?

Indeed, fluoride lowers the function of our thyroid gland.

People with a healthy thyroid who are given fluoride tend to develop hypothyroidism:  a condition which is marked by fatigue, depression and lowered metabolic rate which leads to – you got it – difficult-to-control weight gain!

Most urban centres in North America put fluoride into their municipal water supply.

Most commercially sold bottled water contains fluoride.

To recap:

Governments put prescription medication in our water supply ‘for our own good’.  Once it’s made us sick, they’ll use this as an excuse to strip us of more of our rights…

…figures!!!

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The pitfalls of ‘big’ medicine

April 30, 2012 — xanthippa

This is the problem with ‘scaling up’:  something necessarily gets lost in the process.

I recall when the Canadian government was ‘standardizing’ their IM/IT infrastructure, implementings seamless inter-operability and portability and other optimization measures:  the result was that the whole system was now monolithic, with the necessary loss of flexibility and adaptability to specific, perhaps non-typical applications.

But it gets worse:  the only vendors who could service this behemoth were those who were bundling and re-selling ‘the one big solution’.  No independant little companies with clever, efficient and cost-effective solutions for particular applications could possibly penetrate this marketplace.

It got even worse:  when employees, burdened by the monolithic ‘optimized’ system would write their own bits of code to add back the functionality their specific little segment needed, but which was lost due to this stadardization, they were not celebrated as innovators – they were punished as rogues and ‘not team players’ and, eventually, this sort of innovative initiative had been completely stamped out of our Federal civil service.

This predictably depressing – but important to read nonetheless – article in Washington Monthly shows how this process had occurred in the US, as hospitals strove to optimize their purchasing practices:  they had ‘optimized’ them to such a level that now, highly superior products that would save lives – but which come from small innovators – have little or no chance to even enter the market, much less succeed in it.

‘ …  Edward Goodman, the hospital’s director of infection control, wrote a letter to the purchasing department, saying Shaw’s product was “essential to the safety and health of our employees, staff and patients.” But Shaw soon learned that the enthusiasm of health care workers was not enough to gain him entrée; the hospital initially promised him a contract, only to back out three months later. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, Shaw had just stumbled into the path of a juggernaut. ‘

…

‘… One of the first witnesses was California entrepreneur Joe Kiani, who had invented a machine to monitor blood-oxygen levels. Unlike other similar devices, Kiani’s worked even when patients moved around or had little blood flowing to their extremities, a crucial innovation for treating sickly, premature infants, who tend to squirm and need to be monitored constantly for oxygen saturation—too little and they suffocate, too much and they go blind. But most hospitals couldn’t buy Kiani’s product because his larger rival, Nellcor, had cut a deal with the GPOs. ‘  (Note:  GPO’s are the ‘purchasing optimization’ which has now gridlocked the hospitals, preventing them from purchasing better, safer and cheaper equipment.)

It also highlights something that ought to be a ‘no-brainer’, but that seems to be a mystery to our law-makers:  exempting anyone – ANYONE – from anti-trust, anti-racketeering and similar legislation is destructive and will end badly, no matter how noble the motivations may be.

‘Then, in 1986 Congress passed a bill exempting GPOs from the anti-kickback provisions embedded in Medicare law. This meant that instead of collecting membership dues, GPOs could collect “fees”—in other industries they might be called kickbacks or bribes—from suppliers in the form of a share of sales revenue.’

‘…But, as with many well-intended laws, the shift had some ground-shaking unintended consequences. Most importantly, it turned the incentives for GPOs upside down. Instead of being tied to the dues paid by members, GPOs’ revenues were now tied to the profits of the suppliers they were supposed to be pressing for lower prices. This created an incentive to cater to the sellers rather than to the buyers—to big companies like Becton Dickinson rather than to member hospitals.’

The article is long – but important and we should heed its message!

 

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Cancer treatment breakthrough – from a 17-year-old!

December 8, 2011 — xanthippa

This is one of those feel-good stories that just makes you wonder…

‘Her creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and Photoacoustics.’

For her success, Angela Zhang was awarded the grand prize at the Siemens competition which highligts research excellence at high school level.

Wow!

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Problems with the Efficacy of Vaccinations

November 2, 2011 — xanthippa

Vaccinations are an important tool to control infectious diseases.  However, like any tool, they are not perfect!

The difficulty lies in the politicization of vaccination.

Like every other time when politics intrudes into a scientific field, the politicians cite science and scientists as their justification for action while the science itself becomes subordinated to and twiste by the politics of the situation…

One of the greatest problems I have with writing this post is that I cannot reveal my sources:  some of these immunologists have spoken up openly, at the cost to their careers.  Yet, immunology is such a narrow field that if I am too specific, they will be identified from my comments and they could suffer more censure for having spoken out.  So, please, excuse my vagueness:  much of what I do say can be confirmed through independent sources and I would urge everyone to do their own homework on this.

We can never get past the fact that real life is not like the laboratory:  there are so many variations between people and factors in their environment that ‘ideal’ laboratory conditions can never be replicated when normal people are vaccinated.  The efficacy of a vaccine is its ability to actually produce an effect – immunity – when the general population is vaccinated with it.  So, when I use the term ‘efficacy’, I am referring to its effectiveness when administered to real people in normal life and not to its effectiveness in laboratory studies.

Most of the vaccines used today are generally deemed ‘good’ if they have an efficacy rate of 75%  – that is, 3/4 – or more.  And, yes – there are vaccines which do have high efficacy rates.  However, there are also vaccines which have much, much lower efficacy rates – yet which have been approved for use.  I am aware of at least two vaccines that have been approved (due to political pressure – not because the scientists considered them ready) when their efficacy rates were below 20%!!!

Efficacy rates below 20% means that less than 1 in 5 people who was properly vaccinated would acquire immunity against whatever it was that the vaccine was meant to protect from.

This would all be fine – if we were told the facts before we made the decision whether to get a particular ‘shot’ or not.

Unfortunately, we are not told the facts.  As a matter of fact, our doctors are not told the facts:  they are not informed of the efficacy rates of various vaccinations except that they have been approved for use.  That, in my never-humble-opinion, is a problem.

It is a very, very serious problem for several reasons:

  • not knowing the potential benefits (efficacy rate), we cannot possibly weigh if the risk factors in our particular case are worht it
  • being told that ‘we are protected’, as we are now being told when we are vaccinated, we do not take the same precautions against infection that we would if we knew that there is more than just a negligible chance that we have not actually acquired immunity through vaccination…which, ironically, increases the likelihood that we actually will get sick

That is the problem when politics subordains science:  the truth is distorted by half-lies.  When reality catches up with over-stated benefits and under-stated risk factors, all kinds of suspicions and conspiracy theories arise which make people mistrust the politicians and scientists both.  This is bad all around – but unavoidable if we let politics control science.

Only the full and honest disclosure of risks and benefits of vaccination can lead to their proper use as an excellent tool in fighting infectious diseases.

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Risks Associated with Vaccinations

November 2, 2011 — xanthippa

Every medical procedure has risk associated with it. EVERY ONE!!!

That is not to say that the risk is large:  getting a blood test, for example, is a very low risk medical procedure.  The benefit of learning from a bloodtest the information a doctor needs to treat a patient far outweighs the risk of getting an infection or something going wrong during or following a blood test for most people.  Yet, you might not want to perform daily blood tests on a patient with hemophilia…

The same is true for vaccination:  the danger of something going wrong is very, very low.  But it is there. 

In my experience, doctors and other health officials are likely to vastly understate these dangers: some because they truly believe that the risk is so small and the patient too dumb to make a right choice on their own, some undoubtedly do it because they actually get money for having vaccinated over a certain percentage of their patients.  Either way, doctors and medical officials rutinely mis-state the dangers associated with vaccines and manipulate people into ‘getting the shot’.

People pick up on being manipulated – and most dom’t like it…

Yes, most people are poor at risk assessment – but that does not give anyone the right to deny them the very information they need to make their own choice.  Part of being a grown up is making one’s own decisions – right or wrong!

There is a second part to my ‘risk’ rant:  another aspect of the risk associated with vaccination which medical and health officials are simply not giving the general public sufficient information they need to make an informed decision.  The fact remains that we know that some people are much more likely to have adverse reactions to vaccinations than the average person would.

Have you ever been told this?  Most doctors who are not immunologists whom I have spoken to about this are woefully undereducated and, in my never-humble-opinion, almost criminally ignorant about this.

People who have problems with their immune systems are much more likely to have a dangerous reaction to vaccinations (and it is less likely that vaccines will actually work on them).  Again, there are many factors to consider, so each person ought to do some independent research into this.  People who have immune system diseases (like lupus and so on) are the most likely to have very bad reactions to vaccinations.  Close behind them are people with immune system disorders:  asthma, serious allergies (peanuts, milk, eggs) and so on.

[Aside:  the theory of vaccination is that the ‘skin’ of viruses has a ‘fingerprint’ (made up from unique proteins in the bilipid wall of the skin of the virus).  Once our body identifies the germ, it tries to create all kinds of antibodies and tests to see if any will kill the pathogen (infection).  This trial-and-error method is slow and while it is going on, the germs multiply and make a person sicker.  Once an effective antibody is found, the body makes a lot of it and uses it to kill the germs.  Vaccination introduces dead or weakened pathogens into the body:  this causes the immune system to make antibodies against.  Then, the immune system ‘stores’ the antibody and whenever it encounters the germ again it can start to make lots of it right away, skipping the trian-and-error step.  This prevents the germ from multiplying before the body is ready to fight it, so that it is defeated before it can make the person ill.]

Since the potential of acquiring immunity through vaccination (based on healthy immune systems – not ones that don’t work right) is seriously decreased and the danger of an adverse, potentially life-threatening reaction to a vaccine is greatly increased in people with immune systems which do not function properly, these people need to be fully informed of all the specifics and decide on a vaccine by vaccine basis which course of action carries the least possible risk.

This, of course, is not a concern for people with healthy immune systems.

There are other risks associated with vaccination, which do affect everyone.  When multiple-pathogen vaccinations (such as the controversial MMR) are administered – or several single vaccinations are administered at the same time or very close in time to each other, there is some indication that the probability of an adverse immune system reaction is increased.  However, I am not as knowledgable about these risk factors as about the risks associated with vaccination in people who are immunocompromised, so I am not comfortable saying more than that this has been identified as a risk factor.

Yes, there are risk factors associated with vaccinations.  My post is nowhere near exhaustive – it just hits the highlights.  Despite all of these, vaccinations are an important tool to keep infectious diseases under control.

Information is power.  It is my deep conviction that if doctors and health officials gave people accurate information about both the benefits and the risks of vaccination, people would make more informed choices.  Because they would be aware of the true (however small) risks, many of the hysterical reactions to vaccinations would be minimized, if not eliminated altogether.

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