Lauren Bard opened the hospital bill this month and her body went numb. In bold block letters it said, âAMOUNT DUE: $898,984.57.â
Last fall, Bardâs daughter, Sadie, had arrived about three months prematurely; and as a nurse herself, Bard knew the costs for Sadieâs care would be high. But sheâd assumed the bulk would be covered by the organization that owned the hospital where she worked: Dignity Health, whose marketing motto is âHello humankindness.â
25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections
Everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Can you hear that, Congress and the White House?
Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare, and although it has improved access to healthcare for some, tens of millions of Americans still cannot afford basic medical care for their family. No healthcare system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer â full Medicare for all â is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal for all basic and emergency medical and hospital services.
In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index cards!
Below please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system â and the resulting quality of life in Canada â is better than the chaotic, wasteful and often cruel U.S. system.
Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Hear that, Congress and the White House!
Number 25:
In Canada, everyone is covered automatically at birth â everybody in, nobody out. A human right.
In the United States, under Obamacare, 28 million Americans (9 percent) are still uninsured and 85 million Americans (26 percent) are underinsured. Obamacare is made even worse by Trumpcare restrictions. (See Trumpcare by John Geyman MD (2019)).
"In today's world we’re investing 5 times more money in male virility pills and women breasts implants than to find a cure for Alzheimer's. In a few years we‘ll have old women with big tits, and old men with hard penises, but none of them will remember what they are for." - D. Varella
"In today's world weâre investing 5 times more money in male virility pills and women breasts implants than to find a cure for Alzheimer's. In a few years weâll have old women with big tits, and old men with hard penises, but none of them will remember what they are for." - D. Varella
In March of this year, a judge found United Behavioral Health liable for breaching fiduciary duty and denying benefits, saying the insurer considered its bottom line âas much or moreâ than the well-being of its members in developing coverage guidelines.
25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections
Everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Can you hear that, Congress and the White House?
Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare, and although it has improved access to healthcare for some, tens of millions of Americans still cannot afford basic medical care for their family. No healthcare system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer â full Medicare for all â is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal for all basic and emergency medical and hospital services.
In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index cards!
Below please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system â and the resulting quality of life in Canada â is better than the chaotic, wasteful and often cruel U.S. system.
Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Hear that, Congress and the White House!
Number 25:
In Canada, everyone is covered automatically at birth â everybody in, nobody out. A human right.
In the United States, under Obamacare, 28 million Americans (9 percent) are still uninsured and 85 million Americans (26 percent) are underinsured. Obamacare is made even worse by Trumpcare restrictions. (See Trumpcare by John Geyman MD (2019)).
A gene called Lipocalin 2 is a major culprit in triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease for which there are few effective, targeted treatments. A team of researchers at Boston Children's Hospital has developed an innovative way to knock out the gene using the editing system CRISPR and has shown its potential for treating triple-negative breast tumors in mice.
But to make CRISPR work in breast tumors, the researchers had to figure out a way to deliver the technology into breast cancer cells without using a virus or something else that might cause off-target side effects. So they encapsulated it in nanoparticles and targeted it at ICAM-1, a molecule expressed on breast cancer cells.
The encapsulated CRISPR system knocked out Lipocalin 2 with 81% efficiency in tumor samples, and when injected into mouse models of triple-negative breast cancer, it slowed tumor growth by 77%. The researchers reported the results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is one of the clearest descriptions of advanced genome engineering toolmaking I’ve heard yet, and the potential for treating human disease is massive. Well worth watching.
Big #cancer news. #CRISPR therapies are incredible because they can be so targeted (to the sequence level) plus developed fast and inexpensively. Result is ultraprecision medicine, personalized to the individual. So necessary to beat cancer.
The gene-editing tool has been used in a trial to enhance the blood cells of two patients with cancer.
The trial: The experimental research, under way at the University of Pennsylvania, involves genetically altering a person’s T cells so that they attack and destroy cancer. A university spokesman confirmed it has treated the first patients, one with sarcoma and one with multiple myeloma.
Slow start: Plans for the pioneering study were first reported in 2016, but it was slow to get started. Chinese hospitals, meanwhile, have launched a score of similar efforts. Carl June, the famed University of Pennsylvania cancer doctor, has compared the Chinese lead in employing CRISPR to a genetic Sputnik.
Ex vivo: It’s safer and easier to employ the CRISPR technique on cells removed from a patient’s body. That’s the case in the new cancer study, in which doctors collected blood from patients and then genetically engineered the immune cells present in it before returning the cells to the patients.
The edit: Researchers added one gene to make the T cells attack cancer, but they also used CRISPR to delete a different gene, called PD-1, which can act as a brake on the immune system’s defenses.
Pharmaceutical drugs that inhibit PD-1, known as immunotherapies, have been dramatically effective in treating a few cancers. Now the idea is to install the same capacity directly into the DNA of T cells.
CRISPR wave: The Pennsylvania cancer study is just one of many tests of medical treatments using CRISPR that are on the way. This year, for example, a patient in Europe became the first person to be treated with CRISPR for an inherited disease, beta thalassemia.
Funding: The Penn study is funded by the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, an organization started by Napster cofounder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker, as well as by a startup firm, Tmunity. Parker has likened T cells to “little computers” that can be reprogrammed.
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For the past quarter century, scientists battled Alzheimer’s disease under a single guiding principle: that protein clumps—beta-amyloid—deposited outside sensitive brain cells gradually damage neuronal functions and trigger memory loss. The solution seems simple: remove junk amyloid, protect the brain.
They could be completely wrong.
Last month, Alzheimer’s disease defeated another promising near-market drug that tried to prevent or remove amyloid deposits, adding to the disease’s therapeutic “graveyard of dreams.” Although the drug removed toxic amyloid, the patients didn’t get better. The failure is once again spurring scientists to confront an uncomfortable truth: targeting amyloid clumps when patients already show memory symptoms doesn’t work. Wiping out soluble amyloid—fragments of proteins before they aggregate into junk—also dead ends.
It’s time to think outside the box.
Last week in Nature Neuroscience, Dr. Mark Mattson’s team at the National Institute on Aging Intramural Research Program added substantial proof that senolytics, the golden child of anti-aging drugs, rescue memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease, at least in mice genetically engineered to accumulate amyloid clumps in their brains.
Oh, a little word of caution about those so-called 'stand-alone emergency rooms' popping up everywhere. It's a racket. I know, you're shocked.
They are not 'Urgent Care' clinics like Minute Clinic or whatever. Those are great for colds, flu, etc. These 'emergency rooms' are equipped and staffed like, well, an emergency room. Sounds good so far, right? Well, all that really means is they can charge emergency room rates! And it's not usually covered by insurance or Medi-anything. It's a racket designed to gouge people when they're desperate.
If you're seriously injured, the ambulance will not take you to one of those, it'll go to a real emergency room affiliated with a hospital system. That is, until these 'emergency rooms' get into the ambulance business, which I expect any day now... c.
The oncology practice where P's was treated was bought by a hospital group. They made a bunch of upgrades to the facility that resulted in it actually being re-classified as a hospital. This enabled them to charge hospital rates. Her doc bailed after a few months and started his own practice.
Oh, a little word of caution about those so-called 'stand-alone emergency rooms' popping up everywhere. It's a racket. I know, you're shocked.
They are not 'Urgent Care' clinics like Minute Clinic or whatever. Those are great for colds, flu, etc. These 'emergency rooms' are equipped and staffed like, well, an emergency room. Sounds good so far, right? Well, all that really means is they can charge emergency room rates! And it's not usually covered by insurance or Medi-anything. It's a racket designed to gouge people when they're desperate.
If you're seriously injured, the ambulance will not take you to one of those, it'll go to a real emergency room affiliated with a hospital system. That is, until these 'emergency rooms' get into the ambulance business, which I expect any day now... c.
This is very cool but I'm not sure that as this therapy in current form will ever offer affordable treatment to the general population. This therapy as I understand it requires analysis of a tumor's genetic code and pinpointing genetic vulnerabilities that, if attacked by T-cells or other agents of the immune system, would cause tumor cells to die. You also have to genetically modify T-cells to attack the tumor's genetic vulnerabilities—and you have to do that on a massive scale. From what I've read, you have to create a replacement number of modified T-cells and then wipe out the patient's immune system through chemo or radiation. You then introduce the modified T-cells so that they can attack the tumor cells. Even then this approach is applicable in about 30-40% of cancer cases.
Right now AFAIK this approach still cannot be used on solid tumors although researchers are trying to adapt it for such cases. I came across an article about this treatment in technologyreview.com around 3:30 am one night and spent the next 90 minutes trying to get a quick grasp of it with links to more technical articles for an email to send to my brother, whose wife was dealing with a rare and aggressive solid-tumor cancer in advanced stage. He talked to his wife's oncologist, who felt that the treatment couldn't help Catherine in part because solid tumors often have more than one genetic code in their mass, thus requiring a search for more than one set of vulnerabilities. Solid tumors also are effective at resisting penetration by therapeutic agents.
This therapy is very expensive and dangerous even if the patient is a good candidate. I don't know how you can create a relatively inexpensive and safe way of wiping out people's immune systems. Hopefully cancer research can find a less destructive and dangerous way of genetically altering people's T-cells.
that gadget is more of a quick diagnostic tool
here's another article that shines a little light on potential use(s)
The device could make genetic testing easier and more accessible.
Standardized Testing
To help make genetic screening easier and more accessible, scientists built a handheld device that uses CRISPR gene-editing technology to scan for mutations much more easily than existing labs can.
The device, which Keck Graduate Institute bioengineer Kiana Aran told Futurism looks a bit like a blood glucose monitor, can analyze a purified DNA sample for signs of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in a matter of 15 minutes — a major improvement compared to conventional wait times of several weeks.
(Reuters Health) - Using an ultrasensitive scanning technique, researchers can detect signs of Alzheimer's disease in the tiny blood vessels at the back of the eye, according to a new report.
Duke University researchers found that these small retinal blood vessels were altered in patients with Alzheimer's disease, but in not in those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or those with no signs of mental decline.
"Among the folks who had Alzheimer's there was a significant reduction in the density of the blood vessels in the superficial layer of the retina compared to controls and those with mild cognitive impairment," said Dr. Dilraj Grewal, an associate professor of ophthalmology at the Duke Eye Center. "We also found a reduction in the thickness of (of a specific layer of the retina) in Alzheimer's patients compared to controls and those with mild cognitive impairment."
The findings were reported March 11 online in Ophthalmology Retina, a publication of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
This is really cool. The eye is hard wired directly to the brain and thus reveals many clues to our physical condition. The eye works in both directions. It is not an input only device.
