Are you allergic to certain foods? My wife is. She is allergic to most fruits
and vegetables. Sounds crazy doesn’t it. People who suffer from allergies to
foods such as raw fruits and vegetables, and who have their allergic reactions
largely in the mouth may be suffering from something called Oral Allergy
Syndrome. The term Oral Allergy Syndrome
was first
used in 1987 and, at that time, referred to people who had pollen
sensitivity as well. Now the term can be
used to describe anyone with food allergies, who have symptoms in the mouth,
regardless of pollen sensitivity.
Patients with this type of allergy will generally have a feeling of
burning or itching in the oral cavity or throat as well as, possibly, the ear
canal. Diagnosis is often made though
taking a thorough history, and then reintroducing the foods one at a time after
they have been eliminated from the diet to see if, in fact, they cause a
reaction. Come to find out my wife isn't as wierd as I thought. The diagnosis is actually
quite common among food-related allergies.
Blackhurst M.D., Medical Communications
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Prescriptions online?
We can buy so many things online these days. A handbag, a pair of running shoes, a new
watch and the list goes on. So what
about prescription drugs, can they be bought online as well? The answer is yes, they can. It can be done legally, and with the
expectation that what will be delivered will be the correct product. Now, having said all that, it is also true
that prescription drugs can be sold or bought online illegally. So how do you know what’s legal and what’s
not? The FDA
provides some guidelines to help you as you try to decipher if the website your
considering buying from is legitimate or not.
These include: buy in the U.S. only, don’t buy if they don’t require a
prescription, and look for understandable privacy and security policies to name
a few. The bottom line is, before making
a purchase you should carefully research who you are buying your prescriptions
from.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Tecfidera—a new pill for MS
On Wednesday (3/27/13) Biogen announced the FDA
approval of its new oral medication for multiple sclerosis (MS), which it
will call TecfideraTM. Its
chemical name is dimethyl fumarate, and it was formerly called BG-12. TecfideraTM is an oral medication,
unlike Biogen’s current offerings of AvonexTM and TysabriTM,
which are both injections. It is,
however, not the first oral MS medication.
Novartis has GilenyaTM and Sanofi produces AubagioTM. One of the things that have set this
medication apart is that its most common side effects were only flushing and
certain GI events like diarrhea, nausea and abdominal pain. It’s conceivable that this medication will
become the new main pill on the market. Allowing MS suffers an easier and safer way to
manage their disease.
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Cellphones and Medicine
What’s one thing that nearly all patients have with them
when they come to the office? Aside from
the need for expert medical advice, most patients also have a cellphone. Why is this important? Advances in medical technology have made it
possible to use a cellphone to do things like take an EKG or check your glucose,
without the pain of having a needle stick.
These are just a couple of things that Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic
officer for Scripps Health, talked about with Dr. Nancy Sniderman on NBC’s Rock Center
with Brian Williams. It’s interesting that a 17-year-old
girl actually developed the program for taking EKGs over a cellphone.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Search Engine Optimization
SEO means search engine optimization. As doctors, we
don't usually think about this much. Search
engines, however, are how many patients find us these days. In other words, if we have web pages, we have
to know how to optimize them. That way patients
can quickly find and search our pages to get the information they need. Hopefully coming back to us again in the
future.
That being said, many of us in the medical world don’t want
to think about search engines. That’s
understandable, we would much rather spend our time healing patients than worrying
about how they found us. There are a few
simple things we should consider, however, in putting together our web pages. Things like key words and image descriptions
can be very important in steering patients to and through our websites. In Business
Insider Magazine you can find a short list of things to consider as you
seek to build or improve upon your website.
Monday, March 11, 2013
HIV Cure?
The National Institutes of health has published a
statement saying that a two-year-old child, born to a mother with the AIDS
causing HIV virus and testing positive for the virus itself, is now off
medication. How did this happen? What implication does this have for future
treatment of HIV infected newborns? First
off, lets be clear, being off medication is not the same thing as being
cured. The child, whose sex has not been
released, has undetectable levels of virus using standard tests. However, more sophisticated test still show
that the virus remains. The amount of
virus is very low, and it is not replicating at this point.
The theory is that this “functional” cure occurred because
the child could be treated so quickly.
He or she received the first doses of antiretroviral medication (the HIV
virus is a retrovirus) approximately 30 hours after it was born. Thus preventing the virus from firmly
establishing itself in its host’s cells.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is that this is a
functional, not an absolute, cure. It is
certainly not impossible that in the future this child may need to be put back
on antiretroviral therapy. However, in
the meantime at least, he or she does not have to be medicated and can go on
living a normal life.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Sequestration
If you look anywhere in the news these days your bound to
find something about sequestration. In
this case sequestration refers to budget cuts that were just put in place this
month. The cuts, however, were planned
in the Budget Control Act of 2011. The government
spends tax dollars on many industries, but healthcare is one of the major
players in this cut, taking up 3.6% of the GDP (Wikipedia: Medicare (US)).
So how will sequestration affect healthcare? In a study done by Tipp
Ubach, a firm that specializes in economic impact studies, it was found
that sequestration could cost us 766,000 healthcare related jobs by 2021. Both directly and indirectly the healthcare
industry and it’s supporters are going to be hit by the spending cuts.
I hope this study overestimates the effect sequestration
will have. I imagine we’ll see some job
loss but we will also see some healthcare business adaptations. Doctors and
patients will be on the frontlines as the healthcare spending cuts roll out, I
hope they won’t be disappointed.
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