If you don’t yet understand about the dangers of texting while walking, exercising or driving, the American College of Emergency Physicians issued a warning this week advising texters to resist the urge to read or send messages when engaged in another activity (like, life perhaps?)

Emergency room doctors are seeing an increasing number of injuries attributed to texting while doing something else. The dangerous trend has even led to several fatalities, where people walked into traffic or had accidents when texting while driving.

The advisory, aimed primarily at teens and young adults, is timed to hit just as parents and students are gearing up to go back to school.

It is after all, mostly a young disorder, this textivitis thing.  Won’t see many 50-90’s in the ER with crushed skulls ’cause they were txtng thr grlfrnd.

In cities where there is a lot of pedestrian traffic, there are a lot of falls because people aren’t paying attention. Well, they are, but not on the right thing. Can you walk and chew gum?

Concentrate, people, concentrate.

Although several states have either banned or are working on legislation that would prohibit texting while driving, no laws exist to prevent people from walking and texting. Maybe there should be.

What is it? It’s a pill that lets them watch their TV and get their exercise, too—without ever moving a muscle. Scientists have found a drug that simulates the effects of a workout by increasing the body’s ability to burn fat.

The study indicates it can also increase endurance; lab mice that took it ran more than 40 percent longer on a treadmill than those without it.

In addition to increasing stamina, the drug, called AICAR, may also be useful in treating severe muscle disorders like muscular dystrophy as well as diseases such as diabetes, because it also appears to help the body use and remove sugar from the blood more effectively.

Researchers say it works by reprogramming muscle, turning it from speed and power into a mode doesn’t fatigue as easily and aids in endurance.

After four weeks of treatment with AICAR alone, mice that took it could run on treadmills nearly 1 1/2 times as long as those without it.

Certainly the drug would be one of those illegal substances if used in some type of sports competition but might be of great use to the average round mound person.

It may come as some surprise that one of the big movers in the health care device field is Intel. They have wisely started branching out more and stopped tying themselves so much to the computing end of things. They are showing there is a lot more that can be done in other fields as well. And what more lucrative one than health care?

Its latest product Intel Health Guide won FDA approval this week, paving its way to being offered to nursing homes and care centers across the country.  The new device collects vital signs and allows for videoconferencing with remote parties — such as nurses or doctors.  Intel feels the device may see strong interest in the consumer sector as well, especially among the chronically ill, who could use it to better remotely interface with their doctors.About the size size of a small laptop, the device sits comfortably on a countertop and comes equipped with a 40 GB hard drive.  It comes with a wide variety of features, including vital-sign collection, patient reminders, and educational content.

While Intel may have turned its back on Windows Vista, there’s no Linux here. This device is strictly Windows XP.  The device offers wireless and wired interfaces to a broad array of medical monitors.  It can be hooked up to glucose or blood-pressure monitors.

Doctors can remotely schedule times to collect vitals, or patients can do it themselves.  After the vitals are collected, they are sent encrypted over broadband to a remote database.  This setup ensures privacy of the personal information.

As you would imagine, Intel is just one of many major companies looking to diversify into the ever-growing health care field.  IBM and Google (which recently launched Google health), are among the others.  Many smaller companies are also leading the way, such as the exciting possibility from T2 Biosystems, which plans to deploy a handheld scanner, which can test for cancer, specific bacterial infections, and other health problems by 2010.

Around 30 million Americans suffer from migraines, with more than half requiring bed rest to get over an episode. That’s a lot of pain and a lot of lost work days. We were a migraine household as my wife suffered with them for over 25 years, finally finding improvement only with age. She was never able to manage them successfully with any kind of medication.

New research now suggests that drug-free techniques may be effective at relieving pain for some migraine sufferers, according to a study just presented at the annual American Headache Society meeting.

The device addresses a problem more often treated by drugs. People who frequently experience migraines may receive a preventive drug. Those who have migraines periodically may take both a preventive as well as an acute drug taken at the time the headache appears.
The treatment used in clinical trials consists of a magnetic stimulation device to treat patients who have auras. Those are the classic flashing or bright lights that many sufferers undergo that gives them a warning that a migraine is on the way.

Some migraines are preceded by the lights, thought to be about 30% of patients. For them, pain is inevitably on the way. Researchers have decided this is not just a warning sign but may actually be the trigger that starts the migraine.

So the idea behind this new device and its research is that it works by creating a focused magnetic pulse that passes non-invasively through the skull and induces an electric current that sends signals to disrupt the abnormal brainwaves.

This means of course that patients would need to have the device with them or have it available so they could apply the treatment whenever the aura occurred. If it works, it seems like it would alleviate the pain very quickly.

Since it acts in the case of an aura event, obviously a lot of people would get no benefit from it, but a subset of 9-10 million sufferers should be excited to see this come to market. If you or a family member or friend suffers with migraines preceded by the flashing lights, there may be help for you coming soon.

You know how when you buy something you’ve rarely seen before that suddenly it seems to start popping up everywhere and everybody seems to have one?

It works the same in other areas too. After a diagnosis of low Vitamin D (7.1) a few months ago, something I thought was hardly possible unless locked up in a dungeon, I’ve come to find out I don’t have a rare disorder at all.

Doctors are finding more and more patients with this disorder. Vitamin D is produced in the skin from exposure to the sun. It has been said that 15 minutes of exposure a day is all the normally functioning system needs to maintain a healthy level.

So what are many people doing today? Frightened of skin cancer, any outdoor activity of more than a few minutes calls most people into action, slathering on the sunscreen. Except doctors now say that even the lowest level blocker also blocks the needed rays so much Vitamin D production is curtailed. Sunshine streaming through a house or car window will not help as the glass blocks that beneficial portion as well.

All this would seem unimportant as the role of Vitamin D has always been seen as preventing ricketts and serious bone damage, as caused by osteoporosis. Those illnesses seemed to only occur when there was excessive avoidance of the sunshine.

There has been a lot of info circulating recently to indicate that much more is involved concerning Vitamin D. Researchers are now pointing to a host of problems that are believed to be connected to Vitamin D deficiencies. One of the biggest is a doubled increase of heart attacks. D is also believed to reduce the incidence of cancers of the pancreas, prostate, and colon. It also is believed to protect against insomnia, depression, and an overactive immune system.

So how do doctors ensure your meds are taken, especially in urgent situations? Well, how do you get a dog to do something on command? Can you spell R-E-W-A-R-D?

So how can doctors ensure patients take their medicine? Simple, give them a reward.

A great example of this is tuberculosis patients who have to complete a several month course of medication or risk the spread of drug-resistant strains. Healthcare workers are assigned to be sure patients follow their doctor’s orders, but that’s a pretty expensive approach.

A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has come up with a cheaper solution that should be more reliable. Each day, patients take a urine test using filter paper produced by a timed-release dispenser. The paper reacts to metabolites of the TB drug. If the metabolites are present, the paper displays a code which the patient text messages directly to a database. Those who miss fewer than five of their pills each month receive free call time for their cellphones.

A great idea with loads of potential for other situations….

The world is in the midst of an epidemic of diabetes and snoring. Diabetes now affects over 17 million people in the United States and those in the 30+ age group face a high risk of developing diabetes. As people gain weight some develop diabetes and as they get older, snoring becomes more of a problem. We also know that up to 80 percent of diabetes patients die from cardiovascular problems. Patients with cardiovascular problems are also at a much higher risk of snoring. It is estimated that 90 to 100 million Americans are adversely affected by snoring every night. Since snoring occurs more often as we age and since the average age of the U.S. population is increasing, snoring is expected to become even a larger problem.

Note that up to 25% of patients with sleep disorders suffer from a serious condition called sleep apnea. Apnea is when a person periodically stops breathing during sleep.

Now, researchers have discovered a definite connection between snoring and diabetes. It seems up to 40% of people with apnea are also found to have Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 is often referred to as acquired diabetes, usually developing in people who have predisposing traits such as age (over 45), excess weight, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and family history.

Bottom line. If you have a snoring problem and especially if you have apnea, you should be checked for diabetes. It’s not called the silent killer for nothing.

Lead contamination is found most in dust and soil, but also from lead water pipes or pollution. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine have looked statistically at how lead levels affect the risk of being arrested in adulthood.

They recruited 250 pregnant women from a poor lead-contaminated area of Cincinnati. They took blood samples from the women early in pregnancy, then sampled the blood of the children four times a year till age 5, and then twice a year until they were about 7 years old.

Years later, the researchers checked to see how many had been arrested since they reached the age of 18, and if so, how many times and for what. After accounting for factors including IQ and arrest rates of the mothers, parenting style and socioeconomic factors, they found that prenatal and childhood lead concentrations in the blood predicted likelihood of adult arrest.

A small increment of change in average childhood blood lead levels, saw an increased rate of arrest for violent crimes by 26%. And high prenatal blood levels predicted the total number of adult arrests.

Certainly, that brings into play interesting legal scenarios. No doubt, there will be a number of attempts by lawyers to plead on behalf of their defendant, ‘the lead made me do it.’ Other contributing behavioral factors have been used in the past to attempt justification of a person’s illegal behavior, but the bottom line has always come down to whether a person is deemed to have been sane at the time of the offense. If so, then historically, at least, actions are deemed to have been controllable.

An editorial in a recent issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry presents the case for “Internet addiction” as a legitimate disorder deserving of inclusion in the DSM. (The DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–the official compendium of the conditions and syndromes that afflict humanity. If you want to get insurance coverage for your mental problem, it has to be in the DSM.)

So What?

Three areas comprise Internet addiction: excessive gaming; excessive preoccupation with (let’s call them) basic drives; and excessive e-mail/texting. Each of these areas has three components: withdrawal symptoms; rising tolerance; and negative repercussions (as when relationships suffer or you start lying about your usage).

South Korea (which has had 10 cardiopulmonary-related deaths at Internet cafes) is out in front on investigating Internet addiction. As of 2006, an estimated 210,000 children are thought to have the condition; 80 percent of these are thought to require psychotropic medication. South Korea has also tried to address the issue with special camps(!) at which PCs are eschewed and healthy exercise encouraged.

But Internet addiction strikes me as being as hard to treat as TV addiction. The equipment necessary to indulge it is so commonplace and the social pressure to use it is so immense. So if we do have a problem, the question is whether there’s anything meaningful we can do about it. Maybe it just has to be accepted (as we accepted TV addiction) as an inevitable, if unattractive, facet of modern society.

One thing seems sure. No matter how bad IA is or gets, something new, some opiate for the masses, will present itself and become an addiction of equal or greater mass.

My maternal Grandfather was an amputee from gangrene and my Dad’s sister was one due to cancer, both losing an entire leg due to their illness. I was too young to remember my Grandfather’s experience but am told it was similar to my aunt’s. I can vividly remember her wincing in great pain when she came to visit as from time to time the pain would hit her.

It’s a process of pain that is hard for most people to accept as real except for those who have it and to them it is very real indeed — and very intense. ‘Phantom pain’ as it is often called, is pain where the limb used to be. Seems impossible to most that there could be pain where there is no limb but that’s exactly what it is for sufferers of this debilitating condition.

One of the problems with this kind of pain is that since there is no physical site or location of the pain, pain medication (even strong narcotics) do little to provide relief.

Doctors aren’t completely sure what goes on in this condition except that there is evidently some sort of mismatched signal from the nerves. There seem to be a couple of sets of neurons involved, one set thinking (perception) that the leg is still there and the other set (motion) realizing they have no work to do and firing randomly thus the two sets confusing the brain with conflicting signals.

Enough of the problem – what about the relief? Well, help is here in the most unlikely and inexpensive of forms, the simple mirror. Using a group of veterans from the Middle East who had lost legs in bombings, doctors set up three groups. One group was to sit and imagine their two legs, one group was to sit with a mirror in front that allowed them to see their leg reflected back and try to move both legs, and the third group sat in front of a covered mirror and tried to move both legs.

The results were amazing. In the mirror group, all had significant improvement in pain levels. In the covered mirror group, only one had a decrease in pain and in the group that just thought about their legs, pain level actually increased for most of them. When they were all moved to the visible mirror approach, 90% had a substantial decrease in pain.

It seems that the mirror reflection confuses the brain into thinking there are still two limbs there and settles the neurons down, reducing their confusion.

You never know where help will come from. Don’t hesitate to try seemingly unconventional ways of dealing with problems — as long as you know there are no risks or potential health repercussions from doing so.