Will California Lead the Nation?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking on just about every major interest group in California in his audacious effort to bring universal health care to the nation's biggest state: unions, small business, doctors, hospitals, insurance companies, conservatives.

Whether the former Hollywood action hero can prevail and get it passed _ or get it passed in still-recognizable form _ is far from clear.

"I think it's very difficult in its present form," said Bill Carrick, a Democratic strategist. "He's got universal Republican opposition to it and the stakeholders are all going to get hit with a tax _ doctors, hospitals and employers _ so they're clearly going to be opposed to that."

The Republican governor unveiled a $12 billion-a-year plan on Monday to extend health care coverage to most of California's 6.5 million uninsured and make it the second state, behind Massachusetts, to require everyone to carry insurance. Coverage for the poorest of the poor would be free; for many others, it would be heavily subsidized.

I'm having trouble getting past the 2% tax on doctors. We already take care of the uninsured, often with no compensation, and now we have to endure a special tax on top of it? Somehow, this really is way beyond unfair and into ridiculous...

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Artificial Skin 2.0

A patient's skin cells, genetically modified and grown in a test tube, could provide the next generation of artificial skin. As a first step in creating such replacement skin, scientists in Cincinnati have engineered bacteria-resistant skin cells in the lab and are now testing them in animals. Ultimately, they hope to produce a type of artificial skin that can sweat, tan, and fight off infection.

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No Fingerprints?

Imagine touching glass and not leaving a mark — virtually no trace of the complex lines and ridges that make up each individual fingerprint. Most of us take these identifying traits for granted. After all, everyone has fingerprints, right?

Wrong.

Learn something new every day...

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Medical Image of the Week

You're looking at an image of an aortocaval fistula. Thankfully, this doesn't happen too often! The aortic aneurysm measured 8.3 cm in the maximal dimension, and was infrarenal.
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Learning Obstetrics From a Robot

Kyunghee University Medical Center in Seoul is the first institution in South Korea to use Noelle, a life-size robot, and her "newborn" to give obstetric students experience.

"With this simulator training tool, we can conduct not only normal deliveries, but also complicated deliveries such as breech births, Caesarean deliveries," Professor Jung Eui told Reuters Television. "Students can practice in a very realistic situation with this mannequin."

Students regularly crowd around Noelle as she gives "birth." They take turns at monitoring her vital signs and at pulling the "baby" out of her body.

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Magazine headlines entice teenage girls with promises: "Get the body you want" and "Hit your dream weight now!" But a new study suggests reading articles about diet and weight loss could have unhealthy consequences later.

Teenage girls who frequently read magazine articles about dieting were more likely five years later to practice extreme weight-loss measures such as vomiting than girls who never read such articles, the University of Minnesota study found.

It didn't seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behavior.

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Laptop EKG

All the same, there ain't much wrong with this HATO NB electrocardiogram doohicky that MSI slapped onto its latest laptop. The included electrodes can be hooked up to your aesthetically pleasing lady friend, allowing the laptop to record her vitals or even allowing a doctor to remotely examine the patient. You can also print out information the gadget gathers, or place the data on an SD card for doctor perusal.

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Electronic Exercise

Children who play video games requiring them to jump, dance and move around burn more calories than those slouched on the couch with a controller in hand, according to a new study by the Mayo Clinic.

So, why not make more video games that require kids to be active, asks the study published in the current issue of the medical journal Pediatrics?

"The point is that children - very focused on screen games - can be made healthier if activity is a required part of the game," said Lorraine Lanningham-Foster, obesity researcher and study leader.

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Doctors Use YouTube

From BBC News:

A GPs' surgery in mid Wales has launched a series of health education films on YouTube, better known as a website featuring home videos.

Advice about flu vaccination and cervical screening are two of the topics covered by Builth and Llanwrtyd Medical Practice in Powys.

Doctors said they wanted to help educate their 7,700 patients and a wider global audience.

Now if the patients would just watch a YouTube Video rather than appearing in the ED at 2 AM, maybe we'd really have something here!

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Battlefield Medicine In Iraq

The men of Charlie 2-4 fly Black Hawks over a landscape too dangerous, too wrecked for road travel. They fly into the hot, violent cities, the mud-brick towns, the nowhere stretches of desert, picking up American and Iraqi soldiers, civilians, and, sometimes, enemy fighters. For medevac crews, there are missions, and the space in between. Earlier today, Charlie 2-4 rescued three Iraqi boys wounded in a bomb blast in a rural field. Blood and mud caked their bodies, stubs of straw clung to their bare backs like a pelt. The mission reset the clock, the psychic countdown. Now comes a rush of static and an anxious, tinny voice on the radio: Insurgents have attacked a U.S. Army patrol somewhere on a highway south of Baghdad. One of the soldiers is badly wounded.

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My hat is really off to these soldier-health care providers. I don't know how they truly can do the job they do. I get annoyed when we run out of something in the supply room on the floor, and yet they can function on a battlefield.

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On the Speed of Surgery

Above all, interns love the fast surgeons. The longer an operation takes, the less time to do your work when finally released from the tiled temple. A whole OR day with a plodder guarantees a night without sleep. There are other reasons to appreciate fast surgery, and to consider why some surgeons are so much faster than others. But before doing so, let this be made clear: speed, per se, is not a sine qua non (or even the sine qua not much) of good surgery. Doing it right is paramount; a slow and careful surgeon is better than a fast and sloppy one.

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Housework Is Good For You

A study of 200,000 European women has found that doing housework is more likely to protect you against breast cancer than job- or leisure-based physical activity.

The study is published in Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.

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The results suggest that total physical activity reduces risk of breast cancer only in postmenopausal women. However, and perhaps more surprisingly, housework on its own reduces breast cancer risk in both pre- and postmenopausal women - the former by 19 per cent and the latter by 29 per cent. The study found no significant link between reduced breast cancer risk and either leisure or work-related physical activity.

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Get the Fat Out! Trans That Is...

The Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood earned positive publicity after the menu changed on Christmas Eve to cut artery clogging trans fats from many popular junk foods, The Associate Press reported Dec. 27.

Universal Parks & Resorts has begun serving many items that are free of artificial trans fats at its three domestic attractions in California and Florida.

Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure in Florida and Universal Hollywood got rid of trans fat from over 90 percent of food served last week.

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Cutting Down On Infection

Hospitals in Michigan nearly eliminated often-deadly infections involving tubes that deliver fluids and medicine to patients by stressing better hygiene and other preventive steps, a U.S. study showed.

The catheters cause about 80,000 bloodstream infections per year in the United States, infections so serious that up to 28,000 of the patients die. Fighting the infections costs about $2.3 billion annually.

Hoping to reverse that trend, 108 intensive care units in the state of Michigan joined a project launched in October 2003 that included procedures designed to reduce infection -- from better hand-washing to special cleaning and insertion procedures to removing unnecessary catheters when possible.

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Movie Review: Side Effects

Side Effects is a comedy that comments on the current state of physician advertising via the so called pharmaceutical reps. While far from a documentary, it does impart a fair amount of information along the way, like that there is one pharmaceutical rep for every four doctors in the country.

I think every doctor should watch this film and think about it when they are holding their prescription pad.

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