Tag: pain

Look at it!

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Jeh Charles Johnson. homeland security secretary, 2013/2017

After the mass murder of children in Uvalde, Tex., America desperately needs to bring the true horror of mass shootings home — through pictures. We need an Emmett Till moment.

I am surprised that when I make this reference, multiple generations of Americans, White and Black, know what I mean. For those who don’t: Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black youth who dared to say something sassy to an adult White woman in Mississippi in August 1955. For this “crime,” Till was abducted, tortured, shot in the head and dumped in a river by two White men who were later acquitted by an all-White Mississippi jury.

At Till’s funeral, his mother insisted on an open casket for her son, to in effect say to the world, “Look what they did to my boy.” Photographs of Till’s body, dressed in a suit but with a bloated, mutilated head and face, became an international spectacle, burned into the conscience of anyone who saw them. The images helped spark the civil rights movement, including the Montgomery bus boycott that began three months later in December 1955. Time magazine called the image of Till’s body one of the 100 “most influential photos of all time…”

Certain images do more than speak a thousand words. Some actually reveal to us what no words can adequately convey. Images have the capacity to shock the conscience into action, galvanize a population, and alter the course of history…

JCJ

Someone will have to say, “YES” to this request. Let the coppers release the worst images. Let our “Free Press” have a chance at showing these pictures to the nation, to the whole world. If we can’t bear to look at them, maybe we’ll work harder at stopping these crimes against humanity.

Lego’s anti-Lego Pain slippers

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” You all know the favorite assembling toy that every child and as well as an adult enjoys, the Lego blocks. You must have them at home and when your child plays with them some of them must be scattered all around the room. The most dreadful part about these blocks is when you stumble on one that makes your feet hurt you like crazy. Well, the LEGO Company has come to an inventive solution, the creation of anti-LEGO slippers. Once you have them in your home, your child can play as much as he or she wants because when you stumble on one it will not harm your feet.

Available soon!

Thanks, UrsaRodinia

‘Complaining’ now an Official Vital Sign in Patient Care

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❝ After extensive deliberation, the American Medical Association (AMA) has decided to make complaining a vital sign…According to Merriam-Webster, to complain is “to say or write that you are unhappy, sick, uncomfortable, etc., or that you just don’t like something.”

The research that led to the AMA’s change demonstrated that 100% of patients (within a margin of error of 0%) meet the criteria for complaining. “The prevalence is astounding,” said lead researcher Mike Weber, PhD. “It’s amazing we didn’t add complaining to the vital sign lexicon before.”…

❝ Healthcare providers report hearing complaining even when they can’t assess other vital signs. “Sometime I can’t hear any reparations or a heartbeat, but I don’t even need a stethoscope to hear the complaining,” explained Jodie Marcus, RN.

Complaining is even more prevalent than the controversial former fifth vital sign, pain. The data reflect that patients often forget they’re in pain, but they never forget to complain.

Patients are thrilled with the recent designation.

Of course.

Opioids are killing thousands of veterans and the VA played a role in that

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❝ Opioids, mostly illegally obtained counterfeit pills and heroin, now account for 63 percent of all drug deaths in the U.S., with fatalities climbing at an astounding rate of nearly 20 percent a year. In fact, the estimated number of drug deaths in 2016 topped the total number of soldiers killed in the Iraq and Vietnam wars. There’s a grim irony in that statistic, because the Department of Veterans Affairs has played a little-discussed role in fueling the opioid epidemic that is killing civilians and veterans alike. In 2011, veterans were twice as likely to die from accidental opioid overdoses as non-veterans. One reason…is that for over a decade, the VA recklessly overprescribed opiates and psychiatric medications. Since mid-2012, though, it has swung dangerously in the other direction, ordering a drastic cutback of opioids for chronic pain patients, but it is bungling that program and again putting veterans at risk…

❝ Today, the number of patients affected by the VA’s swinging opiate pendulum is staggering: 60 percent of veterans who fought in the Middle East and 50 percent of older veterans have chronic pain. Since 2012, though, there has been a 56 percent drop to a mere 53,000 chronic pain VA patients receiving opioids—leading to swift, mandated cutoffs regardless of patient well-being and with virtually no evidence that it’s a safe approach…

RTFA. The VA stumbles from one side of the wrong-way highway to the other. Crippled by the fake president and tame bureaucrats relying on positions already corrupt and ineffectual – our veterans’ medical treatment is on the way to being as useless as any Republican-designed healthcare system.

Breakthrough treating sickle-cell anemia

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Physicians at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System have cured 12 adult patients of sickle cell disease using a unique procedure for stem cell transplantation from healthy, tissue-matched siblings.

The transplants were the first to be performed outside of the National Institutes of Health campus in Maryland, where the procedure was developed. Physicians there have treated 30 patients, with an 87 percent success rate. The results of the phase I/II clinical trial at UI Health, in which 92 percent of treated patients were cured…

The new technique eliminates the need for chemotherapy to prepare the patient to receive the transplanted cells and offers the prospect of cure for tens of thousands of adults suffering from sickle cell disease.

About 90 percent of the approximately 450 patients who have received stem cell transplants for sickle cell disease have been children. Chemotherapy has been considered too risky for adult patients, who are often more weakened than children by the disease.

“Adults with sickle cell disease are now living on average until about age 50 with blood transfusions and drugs to help with pain crises, but their quality of life can be very low,” says Dr. Damiano Rondelli, chief of hematology/oncology and director of the blood and marrow transplant program at UI Health, and corresponding author on the paper.

“Now, with this chemotherapy-free transplant, we are curing adults with sickle cell disease, and we see that their quality of life improves vastly within just one month of the transplant,” said Rondelli, who is also the Michael Reese Professor of Hematology in the UIC College of Medicine. “They are able to go back to school, go back to work, and can experience life without pain.”

Sickle cell disease is inherited. It primarily affects people of African descent, including about one in every 500 African Americans born in the U.S. The defect causes the oxygen-carrying red blood cells to be crescent shaped, like a sickle. The misshapen cells deliver less oxygen to the body’s tissues, causing severe pain and eventually stroke or organ damage.

Bravo! Some of the best medical news in a while.

Flesh-eating bacteria invades Florida

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Yum!

A terrifying deadly flesh-eating bacteria that lives in the warm waters off the coast of Florida has killed two people and infected seven so far this year.

Vibrio vulnificus is found naturally in warm marine waters and it poses a grave risk to beachgoers and consumers of shellfish that they may not be even aware of. A total of 32 cases of the bacteria were reported in 2014 in Florida, with about 85 percent of the infections happening during the summer months and into the fall when beaches become packed, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as reported by Fox News.

Eating raw shellfish is the most common way to contract the bacteria, according to Florida Health Department spokeswoman Mara Burger in a statement. If you ingest the bacteria, you will experience vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. If you suspect you have it, get treatment immediately because it can result in death…

The best way to avoid getting it is to avoid raw shellfish and to thoroughly cook any shellfish you intend to consume, and eat it quickly after consuming it. Also, be careful to avoid cross-contamination of raw shellfish with cooked foods.

But that’s not the only way the bacteria can get in your bloodstream. If you are swimming and you get a puncture wound from a stingray or tilapia, the bacteria can make its way into your bloodstream, which can be very serious and may require amputation.

So, enjoy summertime in Florida.

From the pages of IMPROBABLE RESEARCH

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$_12

Dr. Pravin Jaiprakash Gupta, MS, FICS, FAIS, FASCRS, FACS of the Fine Morning Hospital and Research Center, Laxminagar, Nagpur, India, presents, in the journal Digestive Surgery, Vol. 24, No. 5, 2007, a paper entitled : Red Hot Chilli Consumption Is Harmful in Patients Operated for Anal Fissure – A Randomized, Double-Blind, Controlled Study.

“Patients were randomly assigned to receive analgesics and fiber supplement alone (control patients) or consumption of 1.5 g chilli powder twice daily along with identical fiber and analgesics (chilli group). “

“Conclusion: This study shows that consumption of red chillies after anal fissure surgery should be forbidden to avoid postoperative symptoms.”

Note: Dr. Gupta is also known for his invention — “A surgical device which is called as radiowave gun handle was named after him as ‘Pravin Gupta Procto Gun’ by the famous USA company Ellman International Inc.”

Anyone living where the state question is “red or green?” knows the answer to this study well in advance. You only have to make a mistake like this once to remember the result for the rest of your life.

Note: Everyone in New Mexico has their personal favorites. The illustration at right is mine. Try it on a sandwich of leftover roast pork for a breakfast treat.

Pfizer cheated, deceived and cherry-picked Celebrex studies

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A research director for Pfizer was positively buoyant after reading that an important medical conference had just featured a study claiming that the new arthritis drug Celebrex was safer on the stomach than more established drugs.

“They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote in an e-mail to a colleague.

The truth was that Celebrex was no better at protecting the stomach from serious complications than other drugs. It appeared that way only because Pfizer and its partner, Pharmacia, presented the results from the first six months of a yearlong study rather than the whole thing.

The companies had a lot riding on the outcome of the study, given that Celebrex’s effect on the stomach was its principal selling point. Earlier studies had shown it was no better at relieving pain than common drugs — like ibuprofen — already on the market.

The research chief’s e-mail, sent in 2000, is among thousands of pages of internal documents and depositions unsealed recently by a federal judge in a long-running securities fraud case against Pfizer. While the companies’ handling of the research was revealed a dozen years ago, the documents provide a vivid picture of the calculation made by Pfizer at the time and its efforts ever since to overcome doubts about the drug…

In one e-mail, an associate medical director at Pharmacia (which was later bought by Pfizer) disparaged the way the study was being presented as “data massage,” for “no other reason than it happens to look better…”

The importance of Celebrex to Pfizer is indisputable. It is one of the company’s best-selling drugs, racking up more than $2.5 billion in sales, and was prescribed to 2.4 million patients in the United States last year alone.

The drug is the last of the so-called COX-2 inhibitor pain drugs, after Vioxx and Bextra were withdrawn in 2004 and 2005 because of safety concerns.

And that, at root and cause, is what it’s all about. Pfizer – like their peers – doesn’t care if the wonderful new pharmaceutical they’re preparing to inflict upon unhealthy Americans and citizens of every other nation cures warts on your genitals or prevents death by drowning. It’s a commodity and coming from the Pharma industry it is designed to produce mammoth profits on the order of billion$.

Ethics have little to do with it. Aid to individuals struggling with ill health only define the market. Profiteering is the name of the game and if that involves deceit and outright deception – hey, we’re all grownups in the boardroom.

American sonic weapon being deployed in London during Olympics

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The Ministry of Defence has confirmed a sonic device will be deployed in London during the Olympics. The American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) can be used to send verbal warnings over a long distance or emit a beam of pain-inducing tones.

Anyone placing bets on which function the MOD is looking forward to testing on London crowds?

The equipment was spotted fixed to a landing craft on the Thames at Westminster this week…Royal Marines operating in patrol craft from HMS Ocean are also heavily armed with conventional firearms…

Oh, good. I was worried they might not be equipped to kill anyone the old-fashioned way.

The piercing beam of sound emitted by the device is highly directional. Some versions of the LRAD are capable of producing deafening sound levels of 150 decibels at one metre…

LRAD Corporation has previously sold the device to the US Army, which deployed them in Iraq for crowd control. They have also been bought by the US Navy and Air Force as well as a number of police forces worldwide.

It has been successfully used aboard ships to repel Somali pirates.

On a danger scale from 1 to 10 I wonder where Homeland Security classifies Somali pirates, Occupy demonstrators, trade union or Labour Party members?