Tag Archives: health

How To

A cure for simple burns

This is something that my wife told me about, and has worked for me numerous times in the last several years. Want to know what will cure your burns quickly, lessen the pain significantly and immediately, eliminate the bubble of interstitial fluid that forms at the burn site, and minimize tissue scarring?

It’s simple. Dab honey on the burn.

As soon as you’ve burned yourself, take honey (in as natural a state as possible — we like Really Raw Honey, but any quality honey should work) and spread it on the burn site. Keep it there for half an hour to an hour if possible. You’ll notice that the pain will go away within minutes, and that the burn site won’t swell up and form that painful bubble that can burst and leave your flesh raw underneath.

What about if you’ve burned your finger (for example) at work and have no honey available? (This happened to me a few months ago.) That’s okay. Put the burned finger in sugared water and hold it in there for 15 minutes or so.

I took some sugar from the coffee station and put about 4-5 teaspoons’ worth in a half a cup of lukewarm water. I mixed it as well as I could so it would dissolve, then I stuck my finger in there. It didn’t work quite as well as the honey, because I the burn pain continued for a couple of hours, though not at the same levels, but in the end, my finger didn’t swell up, and instead, the healing process began from inside, naturally. Look at the middle finger in this photograph. That’s how it looked a few hours after I’d just burned it severely by accidentally grasping a burned piece of Pop-Tart where the sugar was in the process of carbonizing (past the melting point).

You see nothing wrong with the finger, right? Well, that’s the idea! Other than a small numbness at the site, and pain when pressing on it, my finger was fine. After several days, the dead skin peeled off, again with no pain, revealing the fresh new skin underneath.

I know it’s hard to believe this sort of thing, but trust me, honey is a miracle cure for burns. Try it out when you next burn yourself and see what happens.

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Reviews

Watch "The Future of Food"

If you have not yet heard of a documentary called “The Future of Food” (2004), or haven’t yet watched it, please take the time to do so. It is vital that you know what’s going into the food that you eat, and it’s vital that you know it now, before it’s too late.

What’s been happening over the past 20 years here in the States is that our food supply has been slowly taken over by biotech companies who are interested only in their bottom line. They have used tactics akin to racketeering practices in order to get farmers to use their seeds and only their seeds. They have placed their executives in key government positions, in order to ensure that their policies go through. They have done and are doing everything in their power to get us to eat their genetically modified foods, without regard for safety, common sense, decency or ethics. I’m not saying this by myself. The documentary itself will prove it to you.

All that is bad enough, but what’s really appalling is that they are patenting genes. They have patented plant genes, and now they want to patent animal genes and even human genes. They are trying to get the market in their tight snare, so they can squeeze profits out of everywhere and ensure they control our food supply completely. They have even patented one of the genes involved in breast cancer, then sued researchers who had been doing working on it, to force them to pay exorbitant licensing fees. Needless to say, research on that gene has been significantly curtailed, directly due to their malefic influence. That’s the sort of “work” they engage in.

When I call them racketeers, I have a great frame of reference in mind. It’s a short crime drama made in 1936, entitled “The Public Pays“, which won an Oscar. It depicted a protection racket that preyed on the local milk distribution in one American city, and the people’s successful fight against them. The biotech goons may not beat up people and physically destroy their milk trucks and containers, but they have legal “procedures” which wield the same sort of power and yield the same horrible results. This time, they’re working hand in hand with specially-placed government officials who make sure the biotech rules get enforced and the little guys get screwed royally — not to mention that the consumers, and the marketplace in general, are manipulated to no end as well.

Don’t believe me? Watch the documentary. And if you can find “The Public Pays”, watch that as well and compare the two to see the striking similarities. What’s more, if someone can assure me that “The Public Pays” is now in the public domain, I’ll gladly post it online, either at Google Video or somewhere else.

As you get to the end of the “Future of Food” documentary, you’ll get heartened by the organic farming efforts, which are great, but keep in mind that Whole Foods now sells mostly non-organic fruits and vegetables, and also imports supposedly organic foods from China, whose food supply is so laden with pesticides it’s not even funny. Yet Whole Foods still dares to hold the same high prices on their stuff, which means they’ve cut costs and are pocketing the difference. Lesson learned: don’t shop at Whole Foods. Go to Trader Joe’s or MOM’s, if you have them in your neighborhoods.

Seek REAL organic foods, and make sure to vote with your wallets. Where you buy your food, and what sort of food you buy, determines our food supply’s future. Write to your congressmen and demand that the proposed law (introduced by Dennis Kucinich) to label genetic foods as such be finally approved.

My wife just chimed in with some great advice. It turns that while we wait for foods to be properly labeled as GM or not, there’s an easy way to tell already. Fruits and vegetables all have little stickers on them, with numeric codes (4 or 5-digit numbers). It seems that if those numbers start with 4, they’re conventionally-grown, but not genetically modified. If they start with 8, they’re GM — stay away from them! And if they start with 9, they’re organically grown and are safe to eat. Not sure if this is officially true, but she says that’s usually been the case, at least for the organic foods that she buys.

Here’s how you can watch the documentary:

  • Google Video (free, but quality isn’t that great)
  • YouTube (free, but in multiple parts): start here
  • Netflix (instant streaming, DVD quality, but requires subscription)
  • Amazon (you can purchase the DVD)

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Reviews

Google Health is a good thing

When it launched a few weeks ago, Google Health received fairly lackluster reviews. Privacy issues and lack of features were the main complaints. Well, I’m here to tell you those initial views are wrong.

Even if you’re a long-time reader of my site, you may not know what qualifies me to make that statement, so let me tell you a bit about myself.

My background

A few years ago, I was Director of Health Information Systems at a South Florida hospital, where I implemented an electronic medical records system. My job was fairly unique, because I not only wrote the policies and procedures for the system and oversaw its implementation, but I also rolled up my sleeves and built the various screens and forms that made it up. I, along with my staff, also built and maintained the servers and databases that housed it.

As far as my education is concerned, I hold a Master’s Degree in Health Services Administration (basically, hospital administration). I was also admitted to two medical schools. I ended up attending one for almost a year until I realized being a doctor wasn’t for me, and withdrew.

For plenty of years, I’ve been a patient of various doctors and hospitals, as have most, if not all of you, for one reason or another.

Furthermore, my father is a doctor: a psychiatrist. He has a private practice, and also holds a staff job at a hospital. My mother handles his records and files his claims with the insurance companies, using an electronic medical records system. I get to hear plenty of stories about insurance companies, billing ordeals, hospitals and the like.

So you see, I’ve seen what’s involved with medical records and access to said records from pretty much all sides of the equation. Again, I say to you, Google Health is a good thing, and I hope you now find me qualified to make that statement.

The benefit of aggregation

Just why is it such a good thing? Because I wish I could show you your medical records — or rather, their various pieces — but I can’t. That’s because they exist in fragments, on paper and inside computer hard drives, spread around in locked medical records facilities or in your doctors’ offices, all over the place. If you endeavored to assemble your complete medical history, from birth until the present time, I dare say you’d have a very difficult time getting together all of the pieces of paper that make it up — and it might not even be possible. That’s not to mention the cost involved in putting it together.

A few of the problems with healthcare data sharing

Do you know what my doctor’s office charges me per page? 65 cents, plus a 15 cent service fee. For a 32 year old male (that’s me) it would take a lot of pages (provided I could get a hold of all of them) and a lot of money to put my medical record together.

The sad part is that this is MY medical information we’re talking about. It’s information that health services workers obtained from MY body. It’s MY life and MY record, yet I can’t have access to it unless I fill in a special form at every doctor’s office I’ve ever visited, and pay for the privilege. Is that fair? NO. Can something be done about it? YES, and so far, Google Health is the only service I’ve seen that is trying to pull together all of the various pieces that make up my medical record, for my benefit and no one else’s. Sure, the system is in its infancy, and there’s a lot of work to be done to get it up to speed, but that’s not Google’s fault.

I’ve been inside the healthcare system, remember? I know how things work. I know how slowly they work, to put it mildly. I know how much resistance to change is inherent in the system. Just to get medical staff to use an electronic medical records system is still a huge deal. The idea of giving the patient access to the records, even if it involves no effort on the part of the medical staff (but it does, as you’ll see shortly) is yet another big leap.

Let’s also not forget to consider that medical records systems are monsters. Each is built in its own way. There are certain lax standards in place. Certain pieces of information need to be collected on specific forms. The documentation needs to meet certain coding standards as well, or the hospitals or doctors’ offices or pharmacies won’t get reimbursed. There are also certain standards for data sharing between systems, and the newer systems are designed a little better than older ones.

Yet the innards of most medical health systems are ugly, nasty places. If you took the time to look at the tables and field names and views and other such “glamorous” bits inside the databases that store the data, you’d not only find huge variations, but you’d also find that some systems still use archaic, legacy databases that need special software called middleware just so you can take a peek inside them, or form basic data links between them and newer systems. It’s a bewildering patchwork of data, and somehow it all needs to work together to achieve this goal of data sharing.

The government is sort of, kind of, pushing for data sharing. There’s NHIN and the RHIOs. There are people out there who want to see this happen and are working toward it. Unfortunately, they’re bumping up against financial and other barriers every day. Not only are they poorly funded, but most healthcare organizations either do not want or cannot assign more money to either getting good record systems or improving their existing ones to allow data sharing.

Add to this gloriously optimistic mix the lack of educated data management decisions made in various places — you know the kind of decisions that bring in crappy systems that cost lots of money, so now people have to use them just because they were bought — and you have a true mess.

Oh, let’s also not forget HIPAA, the acronym that no one can properly spell out: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The significant words here are Insurance and Accountability. That’s government-speak for “CYA, health organizations, or else!” There’s not much Portability involved with HIPAA. In most places, HIPAA compliance is reduced to signing a small sticker assigned to a medical records folder, then promptly forgetting that you did so. Your records will still be unavailable to you unless you pay to get them. Portability my foot…

Benefits trump privacy concerns

Alright, so if you haven’t fallen asleep by now, I think you’ve gotten a good overview of what’s out there, and of what’s involved when you want to put together a system like Google Health, whose aim is to pull together all the disparate bits of information that you want to pull together about yourself. Personally, I do not have privacy concerns when it comes to Google Health. There are more interesting things you could find about me by rummaging through my email archives than you could if you went through my health records. If I’m going to trust them with my email, then I have no problems trusting them with my health information, especially if they’re going to help me keep it all together.

Not sure if you’ve used Google Analytics (it’s a stats tool for websites). Not only is it incredibly detailed, but it’s also free, and it makes it incredibly easy to share that information with others — should you want to do it. You simply type in someone’s email address in there, and you grant them reader or admin privileges to your stats accounts. Instantly, they can examine your stats. Should you prefer not to do that, you can quickly export your stats data in PDF or spreadsheet format, so you can attach it to an email or print it out, and share the information that way.

I envision Google Health working the same way. Once you’ve got your information together, you can quickly grant a new doctor access to your record, so they can look at all your medical history or lab results. You’ll be able to easily print out immunization records for your children, or just email them to their school so they can enroll in classes. A system like this is priceless in my opinion, because it’ll make it easy to keep track of one’s health information. Remember, it’s YOUR information, and it should NOT stay locked away in some hospital’s records room somewhere. You should have ready access to it at any time.

Notice I said “whose aim is to pull together all the disparate bits of information you WANT to pull together” a couple of paragraphs above. That’s because you can readily delete any conditions, medications or procedures you’d rather keep completely private from Google Health. Should you import certain things into it that you don’t feel safe storing online, just delete that specific thing, and keep only the information you’d be comfortable sharing with others. It’s easy; try it and see.

Lots of work has already been done

Another concern voiced by others is that there isn’t much to do with Google Health at the moment — there isn’t much functionality, they say. I disagree with this as well. Knowing how hard it is to get health systems talking to each others, and knowing how hard it is to forge the partnerships that allow data sharing to occur, I appreciate the significant efforts that went on behind the scenes at Google Health to bring about the ability to import medical data from the current 8 systems (Beth Israel Deaconess, Cleveland Clinic, Longs, Medco, CVS MinuteClinic, Quest, RxAmerica and Walgreens).

What’s important to consider is that Google needed to have the infrastructure in place (servers, databases) ready to receive all of the data from these systems. That means Google Health is ready to grow as more partnerships are forged with more health systems.

In order to illustrate how hard it is to get other companies to share data with Google Health, and why it’s important to get their staff on board with this new development in medical records maintenance, I want to tell you about my experience linking Quest Diagnostics with Google Health.

Quest is one of the companies listed at Google Health as having the ability to export/share their data with my Google Health account. What’s needed is a PIN, a last name and a date of birth. The latter two are easy. The PIN is the hard part. While the Quest Diagnostics websites has a page dedicated to Google Health, where they describe the various benefits and how to get started, they ask people to contact their doctors in order to obtain a PIN. I tried doing that. My doctor knew nothing about it. Apparently it’s not the same PIN given to me when I had my blood drawn — by the way, that one didn’t work on Quest’s own phone system when I wanted to check my lab results that way…

Quest Diagnostics lists various phone numbers on their site, including a number for the local office where I went to get my bloodwork done, but all of the phone numbers lead to automated phone systems that have no human contact whatsoever. So Quest makes it nearly impossible to get in touch with a human employee and get the PIN. Several days later, in spite of the fact that I’ve written to them using a web form they provided, I still don’t have my PIN and can’t import my Quest Diagnostics lab results into my Google Health account.

➡ Updated 5/27/08: Make sure to read Jack’s comment below, where he explains why things have to work this way with Quest — for now at least.

That is just one example of how maddening it is to try and interact with healthcare organizations, so let me tell you, it’s a real feat that Google managed to get eight of them to sign up for data sharing with Google Health. It’s also a real computer engineering feat to write the code needed to interact with all those various systems. I’m sure Google is working on more data sharing alliances as I write this, so Google Health will soon prove itself even more useful.

More work lies ahead

I do hope that Google is in it for the long run though, because they’ll need to lead data sharing advocacy efforts for the next decade or so in order to truly get the word out to patients, healthcare organizations and providers about the benefits of data sharing and Google Health.

For now, Google Health is a great starting point, with the infrastructure already in place and ready to receive more data. I’m sure that as the system grows, Google will build more reporting and data export capabilities from Google Health to various formats like PDF, as mentioned several paragraphs above, and then the system will really begin to shine. I can’t stress enough what a good thing this is, because just like with web search, it puts our own medical information at our fingertips, and that’s an invaluable benefit for all.

Join me for a short screencast where I show you Google Health. You can download it below.

➡ Download Google Health Screencast

(6 min 28 sec, 720p HD, MOV, 39.8MB)

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Thoughts

Wondering why I write less these days?

I came to the realization that too much work around the clock is not a sustainable lifestyle. When you hold down a full-time job, write on two websites, have a consulting practice and you’re also a photographer, there’s little time to decompress. And I’m determined to carve out more time for relaxation. I have to. It’s not really a choice. My body is telling me so.

It’s nice to see that a few weeks after I started writing less, other, more authoritative sources, have chimed in with their findings, validating my own thoughts. It’s not like this stuff is new. People have been saying for decades that our American lifestyle moves too fast. And I noticed the effects of too much work on my own body back in December of 2006, but failed to take proper action.

Now I’ve done something about it. I’ve rearranged my schedule so that my wife and I spend more time together. I work from 11 to 7 instead of the usual 9 to 5. Just one of the benefits is not having to deal with rush hour traffic during my commute. In return, Ligia and I use some of our free time to exercise, or just spend time at home. I write less, and I publish less photos. And I’ve cut back on my consulting work.

Sure, I miss not being able to say everything I want to say and giving full outlet to my creative side, but my health is more important than a few paragraphs or photos. There are real, tangible benefits to be gained from slowing down. Life gets more manageable, more enjoyable. I realized that in the end, I’m the one that sets the pace, and if I don’t take the initiative, I’ll keep going full tilt till I crash. I don’t want that to happen.

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Reviews

Awakenings (1990)

Awakenings (1990)

We watched Awakenings (1990) tonight, and I was left with a newly found appreciation for life. This movie drives home the following point very well: you don’t know what you have till you’ve lost it.

Imagine watching your life, as you know it, become unavailable to you, which is what happens to people who suffer from neurological diseases. Imagine sitting there, trying to fight it, but knowing there really isn’t anything that can be done, while you slowly lose your coordination, balance, speech, senses, and become a catatonic mass, a vegetable, a ghost of what you once were. Through it all (and this point is debatable) you are aware of what happens around you, of what others are trying to communicate to you, but you cannot respond in any way. As one character in the movie puts it, it is “unthinkable”.

As I sat there, taking it all in, a photo of Ligia and I stood by the screen, and my eyes kept jumping to it. What we have is so precious. Much more precious than anything else out there. We not only have life, but we have love. We have so much. So much more than many others. And even if I didn’t have her, I’d still have my life and my health. These are both amazingly precious, and I always fail to realize it until either of them is in danger. Only then do I begin to see all of the things I take for granted.

I can’t put this into words properly. Every once in a while, I get a glimpse of my life from an outside perspective, and then it hits me: I’m a fortunate person. I should stop worrying about the little things. I should be happy. All the time. I have so much. The other things: gadgets, technology, computers, income — these are all insignificant without love, life and health.

Let’s face it, computers may have made our lives a little better, but they’ve also made them more miserable, busier, and more complicated. Gadgets are cool, but we don’t really need them. Technology is nice, but without human interaction and common sense, it only makes things worse. Income is nothing more than an enabler, something that lets you have a place to live and buy food and other things. When you start seeing it as something else, you’ve got problems.

What really matters is life — experiencing it to the fullest, gaining the realization of the gift that it is and being thankful for being alive. It’s so easy to get caught in the busy-ness of life that we lose our self-consciousness, that child-like sense of wonder at the things around us. I know I do that, and I shouldn’t. Every time I get caught up in pointless things, I waste precious time, which adds up. Life is so short… too short.

There was a scene in the movie which was telling for me. It was at the end. Dr. Sayer was typing an article, and the nurse, Eleanor, got ready to head home for the night, but lingered, hoping he might ask her out. He continued working, so she left, quietly. As soon as she closed the door to his office, he fidgeted nervously, knowing what he should have done. Then he jumped up, opened the window, called out to her, and ran out to invite her for coffee. But this wasn’t what struck me. After all, this was what we, as an audience, expected him to do. No, what I found interesting was the way he saved his work. He simply stopped typing, got up and left…

Think about that for a moment.

More information

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