Archive for the ‘ Health Programs ’ Category

Popular Diet Programs Can Be Harmful To The Body

We have all seen or heard of the popular diet and weight loss plans that promise a rapid loss of weight, pounds and inches just melting off, and all in record time. These diets are what we call fad diets. The biggest problem with this type of weight loss plan is that their fat reducing effects are only temporary and in most cases the weight is regained as quickly as it left. Most diets that offer a miracle cure to losing weight or a quick fix for obesity are not only harmful to your body but can also be detrimental to your finances as well.

The immense popularity of fad diets has grown even more rapidly as time goes by due to the increase in advanced communication such as television, movies, magazines, tabloids and especially the internet. Our over indulgent life styles that we have all become so addicted to has in many ways been detrimental, especially to our waist lines. Obesity has become a real problem and the desire to lose weight and live a more healthy life often lead to unhealthy methods in our quest to lose unwanted pounds and inches.

One of the biggest problems with these popular, rapid weight loss plans is that they tend to limit our natural food choices, such as diets that cut carbohydrates, and increase other food groups such as fats and proteins. The result of this type of unbalanced diet results in rapid weight loss, with most of the loss being in water passed out of the system, often resulting in dehydration. Since the main source of energy for the body is carbohydrates the body begins to burn fat for energy and the natural response of the body is to store fat to prevent starvation, so we start to crave carbohydrates. Craving often leads to breaking the diet and eventually quitting the diet all together and regaining all the weight lost. Read more

The Future of Medicine

The incorporation of computers into the delivery of healthcare has been an ever evolving process and has now become a necessary part in the treatment of patients. Practically every aspect of the diagnosing process in some way incorporates the help of computers from electronic medical records, medical imagery, lab work and so on. This begs the question will computers someday replace physicians as diagnosticians? According to some the answer is yes, computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) will. CAD will serve as a tool in what is called Evidence-Based Clinical Decision Support.

Due to our lack of understanding of the complexities of the human body we leave the diagnosing to a subject matter expert and trust in their judgment. However what if their judgment is flawed or they do not have the best current evidence to support their claims of the proper treatment options? Many healthcare providers today learned through medical school the proper ways to treat different conditions, but what if what they learned in med school is outdated? What if there is something better that works more efficiently and provides better outcomes? Healthcare providers have busy schedules leaving them little to no time to stay up to date on the best current evidence to support new breakthroughs in the medical field. There is only so much that a physician can know yet we expect them to base their treatment plans on evidence that has been derived from years of experience in treating patients.

Using Evidence-Based Medicine in order to diagnose and treat patients is a very long and demanding process for physician’s and explains why the process of visiting a healthcare provider seems to take so long. When diagnosing and treating a patient it is not as simple as checking their symptoms and then treating those symptoms based on a finite list of options. Patients are more complex than that, one patient complaining of chest pain may have a completely different diagnosis then another complaining of the same thing. Physicians must first learn every aspect of a patient’s health history and combine that information with their current symptomatology. They must then consult their knowledge and experiences based on past cases with similar patients, as well as consult other physicians to determine a diagnosis. Once they have made their final diagnosis they then must do research to determine, based on current evidence, the best treatment options. This process of using evidence to support physician diagnosis and treatment is now the standard protocol for healthcare providers. What if there was a system that incorporated the collective medical experience of millions of healthcare providers, Electronic Medical Record’s, Clinical Trials, Journal Articles and 510K’s, into a single CAD tool and was available to the physician at the point of care? Read more