Interesting article in the New York Times on medical repatriation of acutely ill individuals back to their home country admitted to American Hospitals.

American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.

Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.

Watch the Video on NY Times

My article Tolvaptan - New drug for low sodium in blood” has been recently quoted in an article titled “Content of weblogs written by health professionals” (pdf link) published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine by implying that the post is a product endorsement. The actual quote is:

“Up until now the treatment of this condition involved free water restriction and removal of inciting factors. Now a new drug - Tolvaptan promises to change it all.”

However, the article missed out the remaining post which in the end had my take on Tolvaptan -

“The main problem with the drug is that once approved, most clinicians will prescribe it for for a very long time especially in patients prone to developing and remaining hyponatremic. Since the study duration was only for 30 days, many new side effects may appear when the drug is finally marketed.”

Also my blog post was written in context of describing an article published in New England Journal of medicine and not for drug promotion which the article failed to mention. I should also add that I have no relationship with any pharmaceutical company as the article later implies (although not directly to this website) by writing:

“A recent survey reveals that 29% of blog authors have been approached by public relations professionals to endorse specific products, and 52% of them have written one post endorsing such products in their blog content. These endorsements are not advertisements that appear on the website; they are written into the blog narrative, often without any acknowledgement that they are paid promotions. Although we did find blogs that promoted health care products within their entries, we were unable to determine whether these were paid endorsements, because we found no disclosures indicating authors’ conflicts of interest.”

To all this I should also add that I pursue blogging because I have a passion for computers and technology and believe that we can help ourselves (physicians) as well as our patients by empowering them with the latest information in medicine that they can discuss with their physicians.

Interesting….

When scientists at Stanford University looked around for a good way to grow a cancer vaccine, they realized they could do no better than the plant that has caused more cancers than you can count. They were not trying to develop a cancer vaccine such as Gardasil, which gives the body immunity against an infectious agent (in this case, the papillomavirus) that can trigger cancer (in this case, cervical). That’s all well and good, but the true grail is a therapeutic vaccine, one that would prompt the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells and only cancer cells, or that would consist of antibodies that do so.

Reference: Lab Notes : Tapping Tobacco to Cure Cancer, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

New York Times has an excellent in depth review of anemia which everyone should read.

Thanks to advertisements for the once-popular tonic Geritol, most people of a certain age know about “tired blood,” a disorder more accurately called anemia, involving a shortage of healthy red blood cells to carry oxygen to body tissues and cleanse them of carbon dioxide.

Reference: Anemia - Reporter’s File - ‘Tired Blood’ Warning: Ignore It at Your Peril - NY Times Health

The red blood cells of a person suffering from anemia (right) are a very light pink when stained, and they are often less round and full when viewed under a microscope. The round, plump bodies of normal red blood cells (left), when stained, are a bright pinkish-red. Hemoglobin is the substance that gives normal cells their bright color.

Reference: Anemia | medical health

This presentation gives a brief overview of fever, hyperthermia including infectious and non-infectious causes. This lecture was given by Vanessa Astillero, MD, one my co-residents, as part of intern lecture series at our hospital.

| View | Upload your own

This presentation can be downloaded from here.