The high cost of health INSURANCE can be directly tied to the high cost of health CARE. Why does the care cost so much? That is the million dollar question. There are many reasons for the high cost of care. I will outline one that we all forget here. TECHNOLOGY. We all want it when we are sick or hurt.

Decades ago we had X-Rays, yes old fashioned X-rays. Today, we have MRI’s, CAT Scans etc. When we are sick or hurt, we want the latest imaging technology to be employed to diagnose our issue or pain.

Decades ago, we had aspirin. Today we have all kinds of pain killers, cholesterol lowering drugs, mood altering drugs etc. I could go on and on.

Would you like to purchase a health insurance policy that does not cover those fabulous things? When we pay the premium yes. When we need care, no way.

Health Care Costs Continue to Rise

Health Care costs in New Hampshire continue to rise for a multitude of reasons. The reasons are very complicated and interconnected. This blog will be attempting to raise the level of awareness, empower the consumer and frame a discussion of the possible solutions.

Control the cost of YOUR Health Care with Health Savings Accounts

Reduce you health insurance costs with the use of a concept called a Health Savings Account – HSA. This concept has two components. Component #1 is a traditional health insurance policy with a high deductible. The premium for this type of policy is lower than an HMO for example. Component #2 is an actual savings account (HSA) with huge tax advantages. BETTER THAN AN IRA!!!!!! Tax free growth. Want to know more????

Why don’t we treat the healthcare system like any other retailer?

It seems to me that in addition to realizing that healthcare costs more every year due to medical advances and technology, healthcare costs more due to the fact that we do not question costs in the system. When is the last time you asked a hospital what your MRI was going to cost? For an idea of the huge disparity in costs from one facility to the next, visit www.nhhealthcost.org . Let me know what you think??

Yoga

Many mornings we wake up with swollen eyes and congested due to water retention. There is nothing worse in a face that looked sad and tired. Swollen eyelids drooping from exhaustion due to age, reflecting weakness, poor health, sadness and, by extension, disfiguring his face.

Sometimes reveal a sleepless night or very tired, others expose the eating habits and heredity. So to not have a dull look and a sad expression, it is ideal to know the causes of the problem and apply products or home remedies that attenuate and do exercises for eye care.

With a few simple eye exercises for Chinese origin and based in yoga can relax the eye, eyelids and congestion get our face recovers freshness and youthfulness.

A yoga routine replete with asanas, pranayama and meditation helps in achieving peace and tranquility.

Asana for the eyes. Shavasana or the corpse pose

Before beginning the eye exercises, it is important to assume the corpse pose to relax all the body parts. Steps:

1. To do this pose, one should lie motionless on the floor and close the eyes.
2. All the body parts from the toes to the head should be in a relaxed state.
3. In this relaxed posture, total calmness, and peace is felt when the whole body and mind have taken complete rest.

Takes note of the following exercises for eye care. These exercises can be performed after the asanas. They are so simple you can make them anywhere, even at home sitting on the couch.

Examples of yoga exercises for eye care

• Relax the eye: the work on the computer tired of hearing, so it is necessary to relax your eyes occasionally as we work, we might regard as golden rules: blink often and every ten minutes or so to fix on an object distant as possible for five or ten seconds.
• Palmeo: half-time it is advisable to perform a simple exercise that promotes relationship pat the eyes and around the body. It is performed seated and involves covering the eyes with the palms of the hands slightly cupped, short of eye pressure. The fingers of one hand is placed on top of another on the front. Then close your eyes, breathe deeply and imagine you are the eyes that are breathing. The auto continues imagining a pleasant landscape in which we carry out an activity that makes us feel at ease, this exercise may take about ten minutes and can be repeated at the end of the workday, with a circular massage of the eyes.
• Change of look: with open eyes gaze directed up and down, right and left and circle. We then repeat with eyes closed. Do it 3 times.
• Flickers: with closed eyes and relaxed, gently takes off the upper eyelid. Back to close the lid until it was stuck to the eye and re-detach. Repeat 5 to 10 times.
• Pinching eyebrows with the thumb and forefinger, pinch the inside of the eyebrows (the part that touches the eyebrows) and then follow the entire route of the eyebrows to tweak. Repeat 3 to 5 times.

Color is simply light of varying wavelengths (frequencies). We are in a world where color dominates our lives, from reading signs on the road to seeing if fruit is ripe to eat. It affects our moods – blue is calming – red can make us tense.

We use and experience colour everyday in our lives without even appreciating it.

Colour therapy is a bit like aromatherapy. The difference is that colour therapists believe in the therapeutic effects of coloured lights instead of smells.

The ancient belief that colours can heal was developed into an alternative medicine in the XXth century.

Colour therapy can be shown to help on a physical level, which is perhaps easier to quantify, however there are deeper issues around the colours on the psychological and spiritual levels. Our wellbeing is not, of course, purely a physical issue. Fortunately, many more practitioners, both orthodox and complementary are now treating patients in an holistic manner. That is to say, we are body, mind and spirit and none of these areas function entirely alone; each has an effect upon the other. This is why Colour Therapy can be so helpful since colour addresses all levels of our being.

The energy relating to each of the seven spectrum colours of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, resonates with the energy of each of the seven main chakras/energy centres of the body. If you can imagine the chakras as a set of cogs/wheels, they are rather like the workings of a clock or an engine; each cog/wheel needs to move smoothly for the clock/engine to work properly. Thus good health and wellbeing is achieved by a balance of all these energies. Balance of the energy in each of the body’s chakras is very important for health and wellbeing. Colour therapy can help to re-balance and/or stimulate these energies by applying the appropriate colour to the body and therefore re-balance our chakras.

Red relates to the base chakra, orange the sacral chakra, yellow the solar plexus chakra, green the heart chakra, blue the throat chakra, indigo the brow chakra (sometimes referred to as the third eye) and violet relates to the crown chakra.

Colour Therapy is a totally holistic and non-invasive therapy and, really, colour should be a part of our everyday life, not just something we experience for an hour or two with a therapist. Colour is all around us everywhere. This wonderful planet does not contain all the beautiful colours of the rainbow for no reason. Nothing on this earth is here just by chance; everything in nature is here for a purpose. Colour is no exception. All we need to do is to heighten our awareness of the energy of colour and how it can transform our lives.

Like most alternative strategies its concept has been around for centuries although the term ‘Aromathérapie‘ was coined in the 1928 by a French chemist, René Maurice Gattefossé, whose family owned a perfume factory.

Essential oils are concentrated extracts taken from flowers, trees, fruits, bark, grasses, seeds and roots. Each essential oil contains its own mix of active ingredients, and this mix determines the healing properties of each oil.

Aromatherapy should not be undertaken lightly. Essential oils are highly concentrated liquids that can be harmful if not used carefully. Most topical and inhaled essential oils are generally considered safe.  Some oils are toxic, and taking them by mouth could be fatal.

Aromatic oils are frequently used in conjunction with other quack remedies and practices. For example many aroma-therapists tailor their treatment to a person’s star sign. Other aroma therapists work on a person’s aura or use acupuncture points as the site for their treatment. The new reflexology points also are used, so that someone who has a backache might be treated by having a spot of oil rubbed into a toe!

Apparently, essential oils can help the body to destroy viruses and the smaller the amount of oil used, the greater is the effect.  It is claimed that aromatherapy can treat all manner of ailments. Whan essential oils can be used for?  There are several ways for essential oils to be used:

Easy Inhalation. Place three or four drops of essential oil on a tissue. Place the tissue near your nose and inhale. When you are trying an essential oil for the first time, use only one drop to ensure that you do not have a reaction to the oil.

Steam Inhalation. Boil 2 cups of water. Pour the water into a bowl and add from three to seven drops of oil to the water. Use fewer drops if you are using an oil that may cause irritation to your mucous membranes (i.e. cinnamon, eucalyptus, rosemary, pine, thyme,  etc.). Place your nose about 12″ away from the bowl and inhale. Don’t inhale the steam constantly and if you notice any irritation or discomfort, stop immediately. Steam inhalation can help with colds and influenza. Use of energizing or relaxing oils can also make this method useful any time of day or night.

Room Freshening. Use the aromatherapy diffuser or lamp with candle under it. Pour into a small quantity of water (2 spoons) up to 10 drops of oil. Enjoy!

General Household Freshening.  Add a few drops of oil to your trash can, laundry wash, drain, vacuum bag filter, or on a tissue for placement in your drawers.

Insect Repellent. Some of the essential oils (including citronella, lavender, and peppermint) act like a natural repellent against insects. Sprinkle a few drops of essential oil onto tissues or cotton balls and place near your doorways and windows to help repel bugs and mosquitoes. Be careful not to apply the essential oil directly onto fragile surfaces.

Massage. Add up to 20 drops of essential oil to 1 ounce carrier oil such as sweet almond oil for massage. Keep away from eyes and genital areas. Do not apply essential oils to the skin without first diluting them. Be sure to also read the safety data for the essential oils you choose to use.

Taking a bath. Add 5-7 drops of essential oil to 1 ounce carrier oil. Add this blend to your running bath water and mix well before getting into the tub.

Aromatherapy is one of the fastest growing fields in alternative medicine. It is widely used at home, clinics and hospitals for a variety of applications such as pain relief for women in labor pain, relieving pain caused by the side effects of the chemotherapy undergone by the cancer patients, and rehabilitation of cardiac patients.

Today acupuncture is actively used not only in the East, but also in countries all around the world. There are 650 points in the human body, acting on which, the doctor may regulate vital energy. Some points tone the body, the others transfer the energy from one meridian of the human body to another.
Meridian is the imaginary line on the human body. It is assumed that they relate to internal organs, although it is completely different from that anatomy teaches, meridians are called “yin yang lines”. Acupuncture was banned in China by the Emperor in 1822, because it was a serious obstacle to progress in traditional medicine.

The practice of acupuncture was revived only for political reasons by Chairman Mao as a cheap form of anesthesia. Acupuncture has always been a mystery to the West, but the mystery disappears when we found that patients were carefully selected and that only 10-15% of these carefully selected patients were considered appropriate for the procedure of acupuncture.
Information about using acupuncture as an anesthetic disappears in the late 70’s. In 1980, two Chinese professors announced that acupuncture is a myth and a political hoax.

1. The first reason is that the cure is a direct result of treatment, as in the case of bacterium killed by antibiotics.
2. Secondly, the disease is what is known as self-regulating – in other words, the natural healing power of the body clears it ultimately whether it is treated or not, as in the case of cold.
3. Thirdly, when is given the substance that has no healing power, but because of patient’s faith in its curative power, he is recovering.

This is called the placebo effect. The new idea of the placebo goes back to the dawn of medical history, but this term in a medical sense was not coined until 1890. The editor of Medical Press talks about a woman who successfully sued her doctor for water injection instead of her morphine. The editor says: “We feel sorry for it, but apparently the law does not think well of placebos”. Despite the doctor’s use of water, however, the woman had thought it to be morphine at the time and had been cured. If the doctor had told her that it was pure water, her cure would probably not have happened.

Most people visiting the doctor’s surgery have symptoms such as headache, backache, stomach upset, sore throat or fatigue. When a person with such a complaint believes in his doctor and the doctor demonstrates faith in his treatment, this combination is powerful enough to effect the improvement, and in most cases, a cure. As a rule, no medication is needed. However, the patient is expecting medication and feels cheated if simply told to go home and rest. The doctor, knowing that prescribes something. In a typical medical practice, a placebo isn’t usually water, but some kind of licensed medicines, tonic, cough syrup, etc., which will have no adverse side effects, but will be effective because the patient believes that it will be.

It was estimated that between 35 percent and 45 percent of all prescriptions today are unlikely to have any therapeutic effect on diseases for which they were prescribed.
Patients are mistaken in thinking that their treatment is curing them. Doctors may also come to believe it.

Outstanding physician, Richard Asher, pointing out that the enthusiasm of the therapist is as important to the success of treatment as the faith of his patients went on: “If you truly believe in your treatment, even thou controlled studies show that it is useless, then your results will be much better, your patients are much better, and your income is much better, too.”
The placebo effect is very strong. Its power is confirmed in double-blind, controlled trials, which are used to test the effectiveness of drugs and other treatments.

Patients are usually divided randomly into two groups: one group will take the medicine, and the other group, serving as controls, will be given something that appears to be identical to the drug, but which in fact is an inert substance that has no healing properties (a placebo).

Neither the patients nor the doctors administering substances know which group is taking placebo and which is taking the drug. They both are “blind”. In these conditions we can expect changes in those who took drugs and those who took placebo will remain without any changes. In fact, there always are changes in both groups, changes in the symptoms of those who took placebo, an imitation of changes in those receiving the drug. This is the placebo effect.

In fact, nanomedicine doesn’t even exist yet. There are only nanoprojects in medicine embodiment of which will lead to the “eternal youth” due to canceling the aging.

Nanotechnology is a more than promising radical solution to the problem of aging. Nanobots can participate (as in addition to genetic engineering, and instead of it) in the redesign of the genome of the cells, changing or adding new genes to improve the functions of the cell.
The important point is that such transformation in the future can be performed on live cells, already existing body, altering the genome of individual cells, in any way to transform the body itself!
Investments in this area (already billions of dollars) are growing rapidly, and some simple techniques of molecular manufacturing are already applying.
Nanotechnology may lead the world into a new technological revolution and completely change not only the economy but also the habitat of man.

It is possible that after improvements to ensure the “eternal youth” nanobots will no longer be needed.
To achieve these goals, humanity must address three main issues:

1. Develop and establish a molecular robots that can repair the molecule.
2. Develop and create nanocomputers, that will “instruct” the nanomachines.
3. Write a complete description of all the molecules in the human body, in other words, create a map of the human body at the atomic level.

The main difficulty with nanotechnology is to create the first nanobots. There are several promising directions.

• One of them is to improve the scanning tunneling microscope or atomic force microscope and achieving a positional accuracy and power grabs.
• Another way to create the first nanobots leads through chemical synthesis. Perhaps the ingenious design and synthesize chemical compounds that are capable of self-assembly in solution.
• The third path leads through biochemistry. Ribosomes (inside cells) are specialized nanobots, and we can use them to create more versatile robots.

With nanotechnologists of the Foresight Institute said that the rapid growth of nanotechnology is out of control, but unlike Bill Joy, instead of a simple ban on the development of research in this area, they proposed to establish government control over the research.
Such oversight can prevent accidental disaster, such as nanobots create themselves (to infinity), consuming as building material all in its path, including plants, animals and people.
Ray Kurzweil predicts that it will be possible to place inside the circulatory system billions of nano-robots the size of a cell  by 2020. According to Robert A. Freitas Jr, a leading scientist in the field of nanomedicine, this will happen only by 2030-2035.
These nanobots will be able to retard the aging process, heal individual cells and interact with individual neurons.

During the massage is also accelerating the metabolic processes and stimulation of blood and lymph vessels, which promotes the excretion of metabolic products and excess fluid to relieve venous congestion. Under the action of massage is growing network of small blood vessels, and thus improves blood supply to the skin, subcutaneous tissue, muscle tissue and internal organs.

The variety of species and methods of massage

First of all, massage is divided into therapeutic and hygienic.

Therapeutic massage is appointed to the sick people in order to restore their health and hygienic massage is for prevention objectives for healthy people.

Also there is such a division as hand massage or massage with the help of special equipment.

Hand massage also has several sub-types: classic, segmental-reflex, pinpoint, etc. Massage with the help of special equipment is divided depending on the physical effects on the body by using special equipment: hot stone massage, oscillatory (vibratory), water jet (water massage), etc.

Hand massage

Manual massage consists of four basic techniques: stroking, rubbing, kneading and vibration. But since the aim of classic therapeutic massage depends on what the sick person, then the basic techniques have their own helper methods which allow to achieve different effects on the body of the patient.

The basic techniques of hand massage:

• stroking, which is conducted longitudinal, transverse, zigzag, spiral, a circle, depending on the anatomical location of part of the body, stroking – is to prepare the body to another, more intensive methods, it begins and ends a session of massage, hand massage movements usually have a direction along the lymph ways in the direction of nearby lymph nodes, lymph nodes are not affected by massage;
• rubbing – this displacement or stretching of the skin together with subcutaneous fat and muscles in different directions (longitudinal, transverse, a circular, helically, zigzag), this technique can be performed in the course of lymph flow and blood and against him;
• kneading - the skin together with subcutaneous fat and muscle capture retard and compress (squeeze), it increases muscle tone, stimulates blood circulation;
• oscillation (vibration), in which vibrating movements of the hands massage the patient’s tissues are transmitted and distributed to other parts of the body, the vibration is carried out in different ways, depending on the challenges facing the masseur: weak vibration enhances muscle tone and excitability of nerves, severe – reduction these indicators; fluctuation also contributes to dilation of blood vessels, the restoration of altered tissue and speed up metabolism.

One kind of hand massage is a segmental-reflex manual massage, which is based on the fact that the skin and internal organs are connected together by a single innervation, and therefore, acting on a certain area (segment) of the body, you can get some changes in the internal organs. It uses all the basic techniques of hand massage.

Massage with the help of special equipment

There are various devices for carrying out this type of massage:

• using the vibration apparatus having a general or local influence, held vibrotherapeutics;
• influencing the water, hold water massage (combined effects of water jets massage and manipulation), here are underwater shower massage, whirlpool, underwater jet massage brushes, etc.;
• with alternating high and low air pressure in the special aspirator, which is applied to the body of a patient being pnevmomassazh or vacuum massage, this massage can be performed using standard medical banks, which is made by burning the air with burning cotton flame, and then moves on skin.

Preventive massage

A prophylactic or hygienic massage is used in cases where a person is healthy, but you need to quickly restore its capacity to work, which is especially important for athletes. A hygienic and massage for the prevention of various diseases, mainly diseases of musculoskeletal system and nervous system. To perform this type of massage apply the basic techniques of hand massage.

Massage is a highly effective way to impact on the body, so it can perform a medical worker who has special training and a certificate in massage.

]]> http://healthnewmedicine.com/types-of-massage/feed/ 0 http://healthnewmedicine.com/medical-nanoscale-robots/ http://healthnewmedicine.com/medical-nanoscale-robots/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:59:12 +0000 Medical Doctor http://healthnewmedicine.com/?p=188 Ever since the invention of nanotechnology, scientists tried to foresee its medical potential. By operating on such a small scale, tiny nano-robots could potentially enter the human body, making for better diagnoses, rushing through the bloodstream delivering medicine, or even performing complex operations too difficult for human hands.

“Nanorobotics can play a major role in medical applications, especially for target interventions into the human body through the vascular network,” says Sylvain Martel, director of the nanorobotics laboratory at École Polytechnique de Montréal. ” I believe that nanorobotics could bring new methods and tools to these particular applications.”

While medical molecular machines are not likely to appear soon, there are a great amount of research going into the development of nanoscale robots, and not only for therapeutic use. Can we really use robots at the nano level? Or can we reduce our current machines to that size? We simply do not have the technology yet to make microscopic robotics…

This does not mean that nanomedicine is impossible. Nanomaterials can do anything from improve dental and bone implants, because their mechanical and chemical properties can be tuned to match those of the surrounding tissue, as well as improving medical imaging and better delivering drugs in the body.

Scientists working in this area say the nanorobotic systems could lead to new surgical techniques far more sophisticated and far less invasive than methods currently in use. Such techniques would rely on devices capable to perform diagnostic procedures or repair tissue. “The mechanisms of life operate at the nanoscale,” says Aristides Requicha, director of the laboratory for molecular robotics at the University of Southern California. “If we build devices at their scale, we will be able to interact intimately with them.”

As a discipline, medical nanorobotics remains young for now, but many scientists are already demonstrating new developments they say will form the foundations for the next major breakthroughs in this area. Such breakthroughs could lead to novel applications that offer new ways of accessing small spaces in the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive surgery.

Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle from Embryonic Stem Cells by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks.

Director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, the Professor of Basic Science at Harvard Medical School, Chien said “This is the beginning of making heart parts for heart disease.”

Chien called the new findings “the latest in a chain of scientific discoveries that have come out of our lab here at Mass General and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute that have been a collaboration of physicians, scientists and bioengineers. For the first time we report the identification of a cell that could be viewed as perhaps an optimal cell type to promote cardiac muscle regeneration because the cells that we use come from embryonic stem cells and then have been induced to form an intact strip of functioning ventricular muscle.” Chien said the work takes the most basic form of undifferentiated stem cell and directs its differentiation and development “to ventricular muscle – and that’s the type of muscle in the heart we’re trying to regenerate.”

To test whether what they had created were in fact cardiomyocytes, the researchers ran a variety of tests. They analyzed the electrical and chemical activities of the cells, examined their structure with an electron microscope, investigated their responses to hormones such as adrenaline, and probed the genes and proteins within the cells. Comparing the results to known cardiomyocytes suggested that they had successfully cultured the cells.

Parker, whose lab developed the technology that produces a strip of muscle from the cardiac cells, said that “We try to develop technologies that are cell-agnostic; technologies that can work with Ken’s cardiac progenitors, or anyone else’s stem cells. These techniques are not limited to cardiac cells, or even to stem cells for that matter.”

Doctors today have lots of treatments to prevent a heart attack. But once one strikes, there’s no way to restore the heart muscle it kills. Gradually the weakened heart quits pumping properly, leading to deadly heart failure.

“We’re not saying this is going to happen tomorrow,” said Chien, who also is working on repeating the work with human cells. “I believe within five years,” it might be ready to try with people.