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Online symptom-checkers are often wrong

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By By Lisa Rapaport | Reuters – 10 hours ago

(Reuters Health) – Online symptom checkers often misdiagnose patients’ problems, often encouraging people to seek care for minor issues that don’t need immediate attention and other times incorrectly telling people with true emergencies that treatment can wait, a U.K. study suggests.

Researchers tested 23 online and mobile apps used by millions of people who are trying to find out if their symptoms are serious and what might make them feel better. The apps were imperfect at best, offering the correct diagnosis on the first try only about a third of the time.

For triage – assessing the urgency of the problem – the apps were too cautious in situations requiring only self-care: only 33 percent of the time, on average, were patients appropriately advised not to go to the doctor.

At the other extreme, symptom checkers typically missed the severity of the situation in one of every five cases requiring emergency treatment.

Overall, the computer programs offered accurate triage advice for 57 percent of the standardized scenarios that were used in the researchers’ tests.

“The risk is that people will be told to get care when they didn’t need it and bear the costs and inconvenience, or they will be told not to seek care when they have a life-threatening problem,” senior author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said by email.

Because patients may not get much useful information from a long list of possible diagnoses, the researchers rated the symptom-checkers based on whether the programs spit out the right answer first, or somewhere lower down on a list of up to 20 possible alternative diagnoses.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/online-symptom-checkers-often-wrong-220336492.html

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Has Organized Crime Hijacked our Medical Delivery System?

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Posted by Alieta Eck On July 11, 2015 0 Comment

By Alieta Eck, MD | The Save Jersey Blog

What is organized crime? The dictionary defines it as a means of generating income through bribery and threats of grievous retribution, often buying political patronage for immunity from exposure and prosecution. Perpetrators of organized crime typically use credible front organizations, such as hospitals and charities. These establishments do not tolerate competition and constantly fight for monopolization, or “market share.” When organized crime is involved, goods and services cost more.

So how does this apply to our current medical care delivery “system?” Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there is a concerted effort to put everyone into a highly organized “insurance plan,” despite the fact that the plan costs far more than the free market would dictate. The overpricing ensures a steady flow of revenue to be siphoned off to the administrators and government officials. Campaign or “foundation” coffers are regularly subsidized to ensure favorable treatment by elected officials. And the people pay a huge price for poorer access and diminished quality.

Insurance companies claim to provide “protection” against financial ruin by selling a card that promises access to high quality care whenever it is needed. But the protection is illusion, as the purported savings are often fictitious.

Here are two real life examples:

https://savejersey.com/2015/07/health-care-organized-crime/

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Low-carb diets make you stupid and give you bad breath

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By K. Aleisha Fetters, Women’s Health

July 2, 2015 | 2:52pm

The low-carb craze is going strong. Bread is out. Pasta is overrated. And dieters are experimenting with how low their carb intake can go. But grains are anything but all the same. So whether you are cutting out refined grains, whole grains or carbs in general, the effects can vary widely. Here’s a look at the wide array of things that happen when you ditch the bread bags:

You lose water weight

When you reduce your carb intake, the first thing you notice is how quickly, even magically, the weight falls off. But it’s not fat you’re losing. It’s water. “When carbs are stored in the body in the form of glycogen, each gram of carbohydrate stores three to four times its weight in water,” says dietitian and strength coach Marie Spano, RD, CSCS. So as soon as you cut carbs and start using your glycogen stores, you’ll lose a good amount of water weight.

https://nypost.com/2015/07/02/low-carb-diets-make-you-stupid-and-give-you-bad-breath/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPFacebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow

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How to Prevent Wandering

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July 1,2015
by Vee Cecil

Vee Cecil has a passion for wellness. She channels that passion into her work as a wellness coach, personal trainer, and bootcamp instructor. She also shares her knowledge and findings on her recently-launched blog. She lives in Kentucky with her family.Drowning is a top cause of death for children with autism. Parents and caregivers understand exactly why the number of children with autism who drown
is so tragically high. They recognize that it is directly connected to a characteristic that is common among people with autism—the need to wander.

In fact, the Autism Wandering Awareness Alerts Response and Education (AWAARE) Collaboration notes that 50 percent of children with autism wander.
And because many children with autism are also fascinated by water, their elopement from home can quickly become very dangerous.
With summer getting into full swing, many people are opening up their pools, which can be especially dangerous for children with autism. One of the
best things parents can do to help keep their child safe is to teach them to swim.

This guide on the benefits of aquatic therapy for kids with autism provides great advice on how parents of children with autism can find a swim lesson program
that will meet their child’s needs.

In addition to swimming there are many other wandering prevention measures that parents and caregivers can take. Here is a selection:

Place extra locks on doors. Securing exits is one of the best ways parents can protect children with autism from wandering. AutismSpeaks.org provides advice
on a few options. For example, it suggests using deadbolts that require a key on the outside and inside, connecting doors to alarm systems that will alert you
when the door is opened, installing hook and eye locks that are high enough your child can’t reach them, and more.

Get the neighbors on board. Parents of children with autism can take every possible step to keep them from wandering, but many kids will still find a way out
of the home. And because it’s nearly impossible to make your home 100 percent secure, you should absolutely enlist the help of others to keep your child safe. As
PsychologyToday.com advises, let neighbors and family members know about your child’s autism and their wandering. Be sure neighbors with pools know that
your child might be drawn to the water and ask them to always keep their pool fences and gates secured.

Use signs. Sometimes a helpful reminder can be all it takes to keep a child from wandering. To that effect, WebMD.com recommends posting “Stop” or “Do Not
Enter” signs on or near doors to deter your child from wandering.Track your child. If your child is an especially frequent or adept wanderer, you
might want to consider having them wear a tracking device. SpecialNeeds.com notes that a device can be an “invaluable tool” when a child goes missing, and

FriendshipCircle.org provides a list of tracking devices, along with their features and pricing. While a parent can never fully prevent their child from wandering, taking these steps will help you decrease those opportunities and will make it easier for you to find your child when they develop.

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The age of inactivity: How laziness is killing us

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NICK KNIGHT
Friday 26 June 2015

Two thousand years ago, Hippocrates, the Father of Modern Medicine hit the nail on the head. He said, that if we all had “the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health”. Bingo.

Obviously then, being a species of great intellect, over the next two millennia we took on his sensible advice, integrating exercise into our daily life and cashing in on the rewards for our bodies and minds. Hmm, maybe we didn’t quite all get that memo. Instead something else happened and physical inactivity grew into the fourth largest global killer in the world (according to the World Health Organisation), with some claiming it takes more lives than smoking, diabetes and obesity combined.

Yes, physical inactivity has its price tags. It is linked to the development of chronic health problems like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, depression, dementia and cancer. It can make us feel bad about ourselves, guilty and frustrated, appeased only with the ever alluring reward of inactivity – comfort, rest and stress-free. Our creaking NHS too gets a bill that would make anyone wince reaching for their wallet – somewhere between £8 and £20 billion per year through both the direct and indirect healthcare costs including that on the economy. Ouch.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/the-age-of-inactivity-how-laziness-is-killing-us-10347541.html