Come on med schools, pick up the slack

Until recently, most medical schools provided little information on financial factors, like how the insurance system works and how treatment costs affect patients’ behavior.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/health/04cost.html

Nanofoods - coming soon to a grocery store near you

Dangerous tampering of the fruits of nature or the solution to ending world hunger? My-oh-my, what a future debate this is going to be.

http://food.change.org/blog/view/are_nanofoods_sustainable

Primary care doctors - an endangered species

An excellent interview with a geriatric doctor regarding the problems of the current primary care model and how changes can make it not only financially viable but also beneficial for the patient's health and wellness.

HEALTH

Delivering Better Primary Care

By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.

Published: May 13, 2010

Can a patient-centered medical practice help ease the crisis in primary care?

World's Most Useful Tree

• ~1 billion people worldwide drink untreated surface water
• 2 million of this population (mostly children <5 yrs old) die from disease caused by contaminated water.

• Moringa oleifera is a vegetable tree commonly grown in the developing world.
• "One of the world's most useful trees"
• Drought resistant
• Provides oil for cooking & lighting
• Soil fertilizer
• Pods, leaves, seeds, & flowers are edible and highly nutritious
• *Simple, low-cost, natural water treatment uses seeds from the tree*
• Reduces water-borne bacteria by 90-99%
• Reduces water turbidity (cloudiness due to suspended debris) by 80-99.5%
• The most significant part of this is not the purification technique itself, but the public access granted by the researchers at Clearinghouse. http://www.currentprotocols.com/protocol/mc01g02

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100303082804.htm

Want to get smarter? Then take a nap

• A midday nap could refresh the mind and actually make you smarter.
• A simple experiment showed that young adults who took a nap in the early afternoon after a rigorous study session improved their learning capacity in the early evening during another study sesh compared to those who didn’t nap and got worse at learning.
• "It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact emails, you're not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder," said Matthew Walker, assistant professor of psychology and lead investigator at UC Berkeley.
• Many would argue that napping for such a short period of time doesn’t actually help because you never enter REM sleep.
• However, this study backs the notion that Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which occurs after deep sleep (non-REM) but before the dream state (REM), is vital for memory capacity.
• After all, we spend 50% of the night in this Stage 2 transition stage so it makes perfect sense that it plays a crucial role in a healthy mindset.

http://www.physorg.com/news185948338.html