Though he did not know what caused it, Charcot was able to write down a full description of the disease. He became increasingly frustrated with the fact that this disease was unresponsive to any treatment he tried. In the later decades of the 19th century it became clearer that the disease was much more common in women than in men, something that still baffles doctors. At this point doctors were able to discern that it was not directly inherited, and that it affects different people in different ways. The only way the Multiple Sclerosis could be diagnosed was examining the spinal fluid of a patient after a painful and dangerous spinal tap.
Unnecessary surgery exposed! Why 60% of all surgeries are medically unjustified and how surgeons exploit patients to generate profits Friday, October 07, 2005 by: Alexis Black Every year millions of Americans go under the knife, but many of them are enduring great pain and shelling out thousands of dollars for surgeries they don't really need. In fact, the only people who seem to really benefit from these unnecessary medical procedures are the medical professionals who stand to make exorbitant amounts of money from performing them. An estimated 7.5 million unnecessary medical and surgical procedures are performed each year, writes Gary Null, PhD., in Death by Medicine. Rather than reverse the problems they purport to fix, these unwarranted procedures can often lead to greater health problems and even death.
Abigail Zuger discusses many topics in “We Love Them. We Have Them. We Take Them.” that probably would be denied by most doctors and unknown by most patients. The topic she covers in her essay though does not usually occur on a major scale (doctors do not usually prescribe Vicodin tablets for minor aches and pains), but does occur almost every day on a minor scale, which is usually routinely done for refills prescribed over the phone or for something as simple as a Cortisone shot for a patient to recover from the flu faster. Given this information prescribing medications for a better patient-physician relationship does not seem as serious as it is made out to be or is it?
Life changes are events in a person’s life that require a significant readjustment in various aspects of a person’s life these can be things like divorce or marriage. Holmes & Rahe are two doctors; they noticed that in many of their patients had experienced some form of stress before they became physically ill. They predicted that life events could lead to illness; to test this they developed the SRRS (Social Readjustment Rating Scale) to measure a person’s level of stress and whether it correlated with physical illness. This questionnaire was based on 43 life event taken from 5000 patient records. In order to establish the stressfulness of each event they enlisted the help of 400 participant and they were asked to score each of the 43 life events with a numerical figure of how much readjustment would be needed, taking marriage as an arbitrary baseline value of 50.
Throughout the centuries, many patients of this deadly disease died without being cured at very young age. However, due to advanced medical treatment in this era, the lifespan of many patients with cystic fibrosis were prolonged and some of them were cured. This paper aims to study the genetic basic of cystic fibrosis, its incidence and its effects on human, in order to have a better understanding on this deadly disease. Thus, it is undeniable that cystic fibrosis is an inherited life-threatening genetic disorder that has high incidence in large Caucasian population countries and detrimental effects on human body systems, however it can protect human being from certain diseases due to selective advantage. Mutation is the main cause of cystic fibrosis.
Atrial fibrillation is associated with 15% of all strokes and with 36% of strokes in patients over the age of 60 (Hobbs 1999). Having a diagnosis of AF increases the risk of stroke five fold. It is an arrhythmia associated with serious morbidity, mortality and health service utilisation. AF and its complications now consume 1% of the United Kingdom National Health Service budget (Watson, Shanstila, and Lip 2007). Despite this it is an area that frequently remains unrecognised in general practices.
(Bliuc, 2009) Both conditions are very common, especially in women, so much so that the United States Surgeon General has estimated that a total of 45 million people in this country suffer from either one of these debilitating conditions. A 10 % loss of bone mass in the vertebrae can double a person’s risk of having a vertebral fracture, and a 10 % loss of bone mass in the hip increases to 2.5 times a greater risk of having a hip fracture. (Klotzbuecher, 2000) Even in today’s enlightened environment up to 80 % of individuals at high risk who have already had at least one Osteoporotic fracture and have been treated fail to follow up with annual BMD tests. (Eisman, 2004) In the past Osteoporosis been traditionally underdiagnosed and undertreated, which can be explained by one of or a combination of factors. To the patient, it has traditionally been considered as a consequence of just getting older and the early symptoms of neck or muscle pain are rarely relayed to the health care professional by the patient until fractures actually develop, so, as such, these symptoms may be overlooked as minor ailments to be tolerated.
Hedge reports that strokes occur every forty-five seconds and more than 300,000 people suffer a permanent disability yearly. Holland et al., (1996), describes aphasia and the effects on the PWA’s intellect, and incapacitated social and family life. This research examines the validity of the treatment of auditory comprehension in persons with Aphasia. Since past research has yet to validate, and substantiate evidence-based practice (EBP) in this particular area, this literature review will illustrate the etiology, characteristics and, if found within the study design, the clinical relevance of treatments considered and provided for the debilitating disorder of AC in PWA. ETIOLOGY According to Hedge (2008), the leading cause of strokes may be due to years of vascular disorders.
Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer, with nearly 90% of patients dying within 2 years of diagnosis, in large part because it tends to be diagnosed late (Gulyn and Youssef, 2010). Signs and Symptoms Initial presentation of lung cancer, regardless of gender, tend to be nonspecific, as a chronic or new cough in 65% to 75% of cases, with 25% or more having a productive cough (Yoder, 2006). Since lung cancer often occurs in central airways it can also present as pneumonia and lymph enlargement; hemoptysis will occur in 20% to 30% of patients. Other symptoms include dyspnea , with 60% of patients developing it early and 65% developing it at some time during their illness (Yoder, 2006). About 50% of patients present initially with chest pain (Yoder, 2006).
Thanks to our good friend, ‘Social Media’, this movement has been a huge hit and continues to be so. ALS short for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis often referred to as, “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. People with this disease will lose all control of their body movements and maybe even have trouble breathing which in turn may lead to death. At this point in time Doctors have only been able to treat patients, causing the disease to slow done, but nonetheless continue.