When Sonya Shakir’s 12-year-old son Charles developed a raging earache just before bedtime last winter, she decided to bypass the emergency room and head to a community center on Cleveland’s East Side. Within 15 minutes of arriving, Charles was lying in a high-tech pod equipped with a wireless stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, thermometer and other medical instruments, watching his mother chat by video with a doctor in a hospital several miles away.
Both drugs and nutritional supplements have long been used to improve health and the quality of life. But the traditional delivery of these products—normally in the form or tablets or injectables—can be very difficult and inconvenient for many people. The practice of drug delivery has changed dramatically in the last few decades and even greater changes are anticipated in the near future. Biomedical engineers are exploring and doing excellent research.
We are now dealing with an epidemic worldwide problem of metabolic problems such as diabetes mellitus and high cholesterol. At the same time, we are facing a signficant concern about cardiovascular diseases such as coronary artery disease and hypertension. We have learned a lot about these disorders and we have several good therapies available.
For some, the difficulty is severe enough that it prevents them from using pills altogether, which can be problematic if you’re interested in supporting your health with supplements or in the cases where medications are truly necessary.
Sinusitis is almost always preceded by rhinitis, the common cold. Hundreds of cold viruses provoke symptoms of runny nose, sneezing, sore throats and coughing in people. Rhinitis is usually afebrile, of limited duration and antibiotics are of no value in its treatment.
Rhinosinusitis is an infection or inflammation of the nose and sinus. Since the introduction of antibiotics, the incidence of rhinosinusitis has decreased dramatically over the years. With the abuse of antibiotics, using them in cases where they are not indicated, there has been an alarming increase in the appearance of superbugs. The antibiotics that once worked against bacteria of certain infectious diseases no longer work against these superbugs.
If you are complaining of nasal congestion, pain over the sinuses and colored nasal discharge for several days, then you ought to be treated with antibiotics for bacterial sinusitis without the need for image studies.
“I have a miserable sinus headache, Doc. My sinuses are killing me. My teeth hurt, the left side of my face is tender, I can’t breathe through my nose and awful stuff is coming out of my nose.” You’re not alone. Millions of adults (18 years and older) suffer from sinusitis at a cost of billions of dollars. Sinusitis affects about one in eight adults and costs over 11 billion dollars a year to treat.
When participating in weight-loss programs, a helpful physician can improve the chances of success for people with obesity, according to the findings of researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, MD.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a significant cause of stroke. The lack of contractility from the upper chambers of the heart (atria) lead to pooling of the blood with resultant “clot “ (thrombus) formation. Should even small elements of these clots disperse, and embolize to the brain: the result is a stroke. The latter can be a catastrophic event in a patient and their families lives. Most often, patients are left with a loss of function speech, vision, cognitive abilities , ability to use an arm, leg etc.