Healthcare Bots and Subject Directories

Fairly comprehensive.
Annotations and ratings would have been useful, however.
Still, am thinking most of the search engines would give more focused results than general search engines.

From the directory

This white paper link compilation is designed to give you the latest resources available to find selected and niched information in the healthcare field for healthcare research both professional and personal. It is divided into two categories: a) Search Engines and Selected Bots, and b) Directories, Subject Trees and Subject Tracers. These resources allow you to begin your research using the latest sources that are available on the Internet. Using both bots and subject directories to initialize your healthcare research allows one to create a broad spectrum approach to the information available.

Click here to view the directory

And from a summary of the directory

Healthcare Bots and Subject Directories

Healthcare Bots and Subject Directories is a 30 page research paper listing selected resources both new and existing that will help anyone who is attempting to find the latest information about healthcare search engines and subject directories available on the Internet. It is freely available as a .pdf file (319KB) at the above link from the Virtual Private Library™ and authored by Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. It was completely updated, reviewed and link validated on September 1, 2013. Other white papers are available by clicking here.

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[Reblog] Pathologizing the Human Condition

There are times where I believe medications are the only answer to moderate to severe mental conditions.

 

Light bedtime reading (Photo credit: Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious)

 

However, as one of the comments stated, is the exponential increase in diagnoses largely due to the influence of BigPharma???

 

From the 1 Sept 2013 article by Dan Peters at the Health Care Blog

 

The American Psychiatric Association recently published a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). The DSM-5 is what medical, mental health, and chemical dependency professionals use to diagnose developmental, mental health, substance abuse and dependence, learning, and personality “disorders.” Now in its 5^th edition, the DSM was first published in 1952. At that time, the DSM was 129 pages containing 106 diagnoses.

Now, 61 years later, the DSM-5 consists of approximately 950 pages and roughly 375 diagnoses. The DSM-5, while researched far more than previous editions, is based on the medical model or the model of disease. Simply put, the medical model finds the causes of disease and illness and then prescribes a treatment to cure the disease or illness. This means a person has a pathology or pathogen that needs to be treated and cured.

…

Without going into detail about some of the changes in the newest edition of the DSM, some diagnostic categories have been added and some diagnosis “thresholds” have been lowered. This means that you need fewer symptoms to “meet diagnostic criteria.” Here are some examples of concerns with the new DSM-5:

• Temper tantrums will now be diagnosed as Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder
• Normal forgetting will now be diagnosed as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder
• Gluttony will be diagnosed as Binge Eating Disorder
• Grief will be diagnosed as Major Depression
• First time substance users and college partiers will get a diagnosis of Substance Use Disorder
• Everyday Worry will be diagnosed as Generalized Anxiety Disorder 

And what’s the number one treatment for all of these diagnoses? Medication.

 

Read the entire article here

 

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• Living in America will drive you insane – literally (salon.com)
• ‘Do these really exist in nature or not?’: Latest edition of psychiatry’s diagnostic manual draws fierce criticism (news.nationalpost.com)
• Why the Dramatic Rise of Mental Illness? Diseasing Normal Behaviors, Drug Adverse Effects, and a Peculiar Rebellion (madinamerica.com)
• [Reblog] A prominent psychiatrist admits helping invent ADHD as a disease (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Psychiatrists: the drug pushers (theguardian.com)

 

Poor Concentration: Poverty Reduces Brainpower Needed for Navigating Other Areas of Life

Something I’ve suspected all along…now it seems to be quantified..

From the 29 August 2013 article at Science Daily

Poverty and all its related concerns require so much mental energy that the poor have less remaining brainpower to devote to other areas of life, according to research based at Princeton University. As a result, people of limited means are more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions that may be amplified by — and perpetuate — their financial woes.

Published in the journal Science, the study presents a unique perspective regarding the causes of persistent poverty. The researchers suggest that being poor may keep a person from concentrating on the very avenues that would lead them out of poverty. A person’s cognitive function is diminished by the constant and all-consuming effort of coping with the immediate effects of having little money, such as scrounging to pay bills and cut costs. Thusly, a person is left with fewer “mental resources” to focus on complicated, indirectly related matters such as education, job training and even managing their time.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night’s sleep.

…

“Stress itself doesn’t predict that people can’t perform well — they may do better up to a point,” Shafir said. “A person in poverty might be at the high part of the performance curve when it comes to a specific task and, in fact, we show that they do well on the problem at hand. But they don’t have leftover bandwidth to devote to other tasks. The poor are often highly effective at focusing on and dealing with pressing problems. It’s the other tasks where they perform poorly.”

The fallout of neglecting other areas of life may loom larger for a person just scraping by, Shafir said. Late fees tacked on to a forgotten rent payment, a job lost because of poor time-management — these make a tight money situation worse. And as people get poorer, they tend to make difficult and often costly decisions that further perpetuate their hardship, Shafir said. He and Mullainathan were co-authors on a 2012 Science paper that reported a higher likelihood of poor people to engage in behaviors that reinforce the conditions of poverty, such as excessive borrowing.

“They can make the same mistakes, but the outcomes of errors are more dear,” Shafir said. “So, if you live in poverty, you’re more error prone and errors cost you more dearly — it’s hard to find a way out.”

…

The researchers suggest that services for the poor should accommodate the dominance that poverty has on a person’s time and thinking. Such steps would include simpler aid forms and more guidance in receiving assistance, or training and educational programs structured to be more forgiving of unexpected absences, so that a person who has stumbled can more easily try again.

“You want to design a context that is more scarcity proof,” said Shafir, noting that better-off people have access to regular support in their daily lives, be it a computer reminder, a personal assistant, a housecleaner or a babysitter.

“There’s very little you can do with time to get more money, but a lot you can do with money to get more time,” Shafir said. “The poor, who our research suggests are bound to make more mistakes and pay more dearly for errors, inhabit contexts often not designed to help.”

 

Read the entire article here

Related articles

• Poor concentration: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life (princeton.edu)
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• Social Emotional Learning Can Help, But More Research Shows It’s Not Enough (larryferlazzo.edublogs.org)
• Poverty can rob you of brainpower, UBC study shows (vancouversun.com)

 

New Report: Call for President Obama Urged to ‘Remove Public Veil of Ignorance’ Around State of US Health

View larger map at http://gamapserver.who.int/mapLibrary/Files/Maps/PerCapitaUSD_2011.png

From the 29 August 2013 Science Daily article

In a call to action on the sorry comparative state of U.S. health, researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health are urging President Obama to “remove the public veil of ignorance” and confront a pressing question: Why is America at the bottom? The report, published in the journal Science, appeals to the President to mobilize government to create a National Commission on the Health of Americans. The researchers underscore the importance of this effort in order for the country to begin reversing the decline in the comparative status of U.S. health, which has been four decades in the making.

This is not a challenge that can be left to private groups, no matter how well meaning. Drs. Ronald Bayer and Amy Fairchild, both Professors of Sociomedical Sciences, argue, “The health status of Americans is a social problem that demands social solutions.” More is at stake than the U.S. healthcare system, which fails to provide needed care to millions of Americans. “There is a need for bold public policies that move beyond individual behavior to address the fundamental causes of disease,” Bayer and Fairchild conclude.

A January 2013 report by the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) and Institute of Medicine (IOM) ranks the United States last among peer nations in health status and compares it unfavorably to 17 peer countries at almost every stage of the life course. The report, titled “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” emphasizes that socioeconomic causes are the drivers of these outcomes and details the categories in which the U.S. has the worst or next-to-worst results:

• The U.S. has higher rates of adverse birth outcomes, heart disease, injuries from motor vehicle accidents and violence, sexually acquired diseases, and chronic lung disease.
• Americans lose more years of life to alcohol and other drugs.
• The U.S. has the highest rate of infant mortality among high-income countries.
• The U.S. has the second highest incidence of AIDS and ischemic heart disease,
• For decades, the U.S. has experienced the highest rates of obesity in children and adults as well as diabetes from age 20 and up.

Read the entire article here

Related articles

• Call for President Obama to ‘remove public veil of ignorance’ around state of US health (eurekalert.org)

Scientists Show How Antibiotics Enable Pathogenic Gut Infections

 

From the 1 September 2013 Science Daily article

A new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine could help pinpoint ways to counter the effects of the antibiotics-driven depletion of friendly, gut-dwelling bacteria.

…

“Antibiotics open the door for these pathogens to take hold. But how, exactly, that occurs hasn’t been well understood,” Sonnenburg said.

In the first 24 hours after administration of oral antibiotics, a spike in carbohydrate availability takes place in the gut, the study says. This transient nutrient surplus, combined with the reduction of friendly gut-dwelling bacteria due to antibiotics, permits at least two potentially deadly pathogens to get a toehold in that otherwise more forbidding environment.

In the past decade or so, much has been learned about the complex microbial ecosystem that resides in every healthy mammal’s large intestine, including ours. The thousands of distinct bacterial strains that normally inhabit this challenging but nutrient-rich niche have adapted to it so well that we have difficulty living without them. They manufacture vitamins, provide critical training to our immune systems and even guide the development of our own tissues. Antibiotics decimate this gut-microbe ecosystem, which begins bouncing back within a few days but may take a month or more to regain its former numbers. And the ecosystem appears to suffer the permanent loss of some of its constituent bacterial strains.

It is thought that our commensal, or friendly, bacteria serve as a kind of lawn that, in commandeering the rich fertilizer that courses through our gut, outcompetes the less-well-behaved pathogenic “weeds.” It has also been suggested that our commensal bugs secrete pathogen-killing factors. Another theory holds that the disruption of our inner microbial ecosystem somehow impairs our immune responsiveness.

 Read the entire article here

 

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State of the Air (report and findings by geographic area) by the American Lung Association.

For 14 years, the American Lung Association has analyzed data from air quality monitors to compile the State of the Air report. The more you learn about the air you breathe, the more you can protect your health and take steps to make our air cleaner and healthier.

Want to know what the air quality is where you live or another US location?
Just enter the zipcode at the home page.

Excerpts from the key findings page

Thanks to the Clean Air Act, the United States continues to make progress providing healthier air. The “State of the Air 2013” shows that the nation’s air quality is overall much cleaner, especially compared to just a decade ago. Still, over 131.8 million people—42 percent of the nation—live where pollution levels are too often dangerous to breathe. Despite that risk, some seek to weaken the Clean Air Act, the public health law that has driven the cuts in pollution since 1970.

Ozone Pollution — Nearly 4 in 10 people lived in areas with unhealthful levels of ozone in 2009-2011.

Year-round Particle Pollution — More than 44.3 million people live in an area burdened year-round by unhealthful levels of deadly particle pollution.

Short-term Particle Pollution — Many cities endured more days where particle pollution spiked during this period. Fifteen percent (15%) of people in the United States live where they suffered too many days with unhealthful levels of particle pollution.

Cleanest Cities — Only four cities made the cleanest list in all three categories, but several were among the cleanest in two.

People at Risk —More than 4 in 10 people live in counties that have unhealthful levels of either ozone or particle pollution. Learn more about people who face the greatest risk—probably someone you know is one of them.

What Needs to be Done to Get Healthy Air —What do we need to do as a nation? How can you help clean up the air?

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