A helmet that looks like it came from a sci-fi flick may offer real help to Alzheimer's sufferers. The Daily Mail reports that the helmet bathes the wearer with infra-red light. The helmet only needs to be worn for ten minutes each day.
Dr Dougal claims that only ten minutes under the hat a day is enough to have an effect.
"Currently all you can do with dementia is to slow down the rate of decay - this new process will not only stop that rate of decay but partially reverse it," he said.
The video from the Wall Street Journal discusses the issue of hidden tramatic brain injuries. Many researchers believe that hidden traumatic brain injuries may be the cause of social or educational failure for many people. Mt. Sinai School of Medicine is behind some important research in this area.
The Miami Herald documented the rise and fall of a prominent medical supply company.
Before its spectacular collapse, Pharmed Group was one of the great South Florida success stories, a medical supply company created by two brothers who started with nothing and built the eighth-largest Hispanic-owned business in America. In 2003, their profit was $48 million.
What happened to this once fabulous company, where brothers Carlos and Jorge de C
In "Avandia Mystery ... Elementary, My Dear Watson" I wrote that the mysterious disclosure outside GSK of an equally mysterious "leak" to GSK of a pre-publication article critical of Avandia might have been initiated by unhappy GSK employee(s).
Those who made the disclosure knew, or should have known, the devastating effects on the article reviewer, UT San Antonio researcher Dr. Steven Haffner. Honesty and fear of the imbroglio with the likes of Sen. Grassley might have played a role, but still, such a career-ending move against an ostensibly friendly scientist seems unusual.
If unhappiness was involved, why might GSK employees be unhappy?
The GSK diabetes drug Avandia and the Pfizer anti-smoking drug Chantix are new entries in a long "honor roll" of drugs from major pharmaceutical companies to come under suspicion of having an unacceptable degree of adverse drug effects (ADE's).
The recent Avandia issues reminded me of assertions about need for more medical informatics expertise in pharma to help track drug ADE's and improve drug safety. These recommendations come from organizations such as Gartner Group and from the prestigious Institute of Medicine of the National Academies (link).
The Avandia issue also reminded me of essays I've written about the lack of understanding of the formal specialty of Medical Informatics in the pharma industry e.g., "Why Pharma Fails" and "We don't need medical informatics here Part 2." I am also reminded how this problem, complicated by the conflation of IT and information science, cause the industry to suffer at both ends of the pipeline, that is, discovery and postmarketing surveillance.
Last week, an article in Newsday raised concerns about conflicts of interest affecting one of the largest US health care systems.
The Northshore - Long Island Jewish Health System claims to be the third-largest, not-for-profit secular health care system in the US. It has a $4 billion yearly operating budget, employs 37,000, and claims to be the ninth-largest employer in the New York City area.
The Newsday article recounted a large real-estate transaction between the hospital system and a company lead by a prominent member of its board of trustees.
In this post about Duke's decent into intellectual anarchy, I made the observation that academics have significant influence on their students, and the influence affects those students when those students become our industry's and nation's leaders.
I have been reading the various debates about the actions Duke's "Group of 88" professors, who tried to take advantage of the anger created via fabricated accusations by a dancer that the Duke lacrosse team members assaulted and raped her.
One observation was striking. The "Group of 88" refer to their writings in a most peculiar way.
At "Why I Sent It Is a Mystery - More About Avandia, Conflicts of Interest, and Confused Thinking" Roy Poses documents a response from a prominent biomedical researcher, Steven Haffner of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, as to why he rather blatantly breached scientific reviewer's code of conduct. This code of conduct is not a mystery and is quite explicit.
It is crystal clear he should not have FAXed anything or communicated about the paper he was reviewing in any way whatsover to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK):
'Why I sent it is a mystery,' Haffner told Nature . 'I don't really understand it. I wasn't feeling well. It was bad judgement.'
Most everyone is aware of the Duke lacrosse team scandal, the debacle about alleged rape by Duke lacrosse team students that led to the resignation of prosecutor Nifong for prosecutorial misconduct, exoneration of the accused, an expose of the radical agendas of a subset of Duke's faculty, and a great deal of national publicity, or, I should say, notoriety.
Now, in Dec. 2007 several of the team members have filed a civil suit. The lawsuit filing documents are downloadable from these links (PDF files):
A helmet that looks like it came from a sci-fi flick may offer real help to Alzheimer's sufferers. The Daily Mail reports that the helmet bathes the wearer with infra-red light. The helmet only needs to be worn for ten minutes each day.