Evidently, a group from The International Volkssport Association was recently in Madison. This group has organized walking tours of US Capitol Areas. Interesting stuff. I remember running across these sort of opportunities in Europe.
Category: Health/Fitness
The Illiterate Surgeon
Kristof posts a moving story from Addis Ababa. Check out the photos & video.
Herbert’s Reawakening
Firefighter Donald Herbert suddenly became lucid Saturday after living in an unresponsive state for 10 years.
audio
Pre-Surgery Safety Checks
patients awaiting surgery are subjects of various questions and checklists. The queries get redundant, but the procedure is akin to the aviation industry’s safety precautions.
The Economist: Health Care & Information Technology
Fascinating and timely article from the Economist on health care & IT
The inability, and reluctance, of doctors and hospitals to use information technology more widely is killing thousands of people
IT is strategic – when used wisely.
Fetal Cell Therapy for Humans
University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher said he would ask federal regulators Friday to approve the first clinical trial injecting special stem cells into the spinal cords of people with the degenerative nerve ailment called Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The trial would test whether a technique anatomy professor Clive Svendsen has pioneered on rats afflicted with the disease is safe to use on people. If successful, Svendsen said a much larger clinical trial aimed at treating the disease could be under way in two or three years.
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The research does not involve human embryonic stem cells, the blank-slate cells derived from human embryos that can be molded into any type of tissue cell in the body.
Losing Patience, Not Weight
Great article by Bruce Weber on the President of the Cooper Institute, a non-profit organization in Dallas dedicated to research on the relationship between living habits and health:
“I’m a short, fat guy who runs every day,” Dr. Blair said in a recent phone interview. “I’ve run tens of thousands of miles over the past 40 years, and in that time I’ve gained 30 pounds.”
This doesn’t exactly please Dr. Blair. (People who are skinny and never exercise “are going straight to hell,” he said, “because they’re living in paradise now.”) But he was using himself, he said, to illustrate why the federal government’s new physical activity recommendations, which are clearly aimed at the alarming rise in obesity in America, are misleading. Even though he has been doing what the guidelines advise for decades, it hasn’t controlled his weight.
50 Years Ago: Jonas Salk Conquers Polio
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Joe Palca:
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Physicians & Drug Abuse
“Medicine tolerates behavior that in any other industry would be unacceptable,” said Lucian Leape, a physician and expert on patient safety who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health. “There are patients’ lives at stake . . . and that’s more important than a doctor’s career.”
Why is Tommy Thompson Sad?
Finally, Thompson voiced his regret just one day after Medicare’s trustees announced that the drug benefit by itself has an unfunded liability 60 percent larger than that of the entire Social Security program. (The unfunded liability for all of Medicare is nearly six times that of Social Security.) Medicare’s financial outlook has grown so dire that its two public trustees broke with the trustees who are members of Bush’s Cabinet to say that it is in far worse shape that Social Security.