RedScrubs
The Resource for Medical Professionals

In a precedent setting case, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is being sued by Native Essence Herb Company and its owners, Mark and Marianne Hershieser. A New Mexico herb company, Native Essence, says that the First Amendment gives it the right to tell customers the historical use of herbs in treating serious diseases. The FTC states that this practice violates its guidelines.

The issue is now headed toward court according to attorney Richard Jaffe, Esq., a leading health care attorney who is also the author of “Galileo’s Lawyer”, an insider’s look into the battles between the government and complementary medicine.

The company owner, Mark Hershieser, wants to post historical use information on his website and he wants the courts to allow that right. Most of the information posted has been taken from federal government websites, ironically.

Almost all of the patients over 70 residing in a Melbourne Australia teaching hospital were either malnourished or at risk of becoming malnourished a recent 2008 study showed. Malnutrition in hospitals is not a new entity. Looking at data from 1996, an article was published on the problem at hand in the United States where the study cited a prevalence of malnutrition to be 40-55% of the patients studied in the survey. Over 1,000 patients participated in this 1996 study in the U.S.

In the Melbourne study, 100 patients over the age of 70 were reviewed and 1/3 of them were found to be malnourished and 2/3 were found to be at risk for malnutrition.

Well, it’s falling a flood outside my office today and the electricity decided to take a vacation - hopefully not a very long one. Instead of taking a nap in my chair and waking up groggy, I decided to check my MedReader and get a little bloggy! (I know, I know…I won’t be winning any prizes for my poetry anytime soon…)

Now seriously, there’s been some really great posts out there in the blogosphere this week along with some excellent submissions to Redscrubs. As for the Scrubby Award Winner and the Runners-Up, you have my permission to continue reading after the drumroll:

—Dr. Incognito

I announce it all the time. It has become my slogan for disease prevention, for active aging, and for maintaining a good quality of life: Exercise is not an option!

Everyone must exercise. The frail, the strong, the overweight, the underweight, the rich, and the poor, everyone must exercise. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the American Heart Association (AHA) released updated guidelines for exercise last year. Together, the ACSM and the AHA recommend 30 minutes of moderate exercise 5 days a week or 20 minutes of vigorous exercise 3 days a week to reap the health benefits associated with exercise: lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol levels, weight reduction, better sleep, less depression, and a reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, osteoporosis, and diabetes. And, the list goes on. It is especially important for older individuals to exercise because regular aerobic exercise combined with strength, flexibility, and balance training can help to delay the inevitable declinations associated with aging.

A wide range of products claiming to lower blood sugar are marketed to the public. Individuals with diabetes are 1.6 times more likely to use complementary and alternative medicine than those without diabetes according to a recent study published in the April, 2008 supplement to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association (JADA). Reasons for using alternative medicine have been reported to include:
• Troublesome side-effects from conventional drug therapy
• A need for more personal control over one’s care plan
• The increasing cost of prescription drugs
• Dissatisfaction with conventional health care providers
• The ability to spend quality time with alternative practitioners, i.e. doctors do not spend enough time educating and talking to their patients so patients choose to go to those who will spend the time.
Several problematic areas may come up with the use of alternative therapies and pharmacists and Registered Dietitians are uniquely poised to address issues such as potential side-effects, drug interactions, lack of product standardization and the need for evidence-based information on the supplements being used.

Pycnogenol, an extract from the bark of a French maritime pine tree, was found to lower the blood sugar in those individuals who had diabetes and allowed them to lower their antihypertensive medication thus lowering their cardiovascular risk profile. This study, published in the May 2008 journal of Nutrition Research, indicates that Pycnogenol might serve as an important complementary therapy when used with conventional medicine. According to this study, there are approximately 20 million people living in the U.S. that might benefit from this adjunctive therapy.

“Half of the people with diabetes experience high blood pressure and many have problems with cholesterol, and now it has been documented that Pycnogenol mediates a number of beneficial effects on both people with diabetes and healthy individuals” according to Dr. Watson, the lead researcher of the study. This is a landmark study because it is the “first study to suggest that Pycnogenol might also be beneficial in protecting kidney function in diabetics” stated Dr. Watson.

The FDA has approved a Humanitarian Device Exemption (HDE) for the AbioCor replacement heart system. The AbioCor is the first FDA approved completely self-contained artificial organ and may be the most sophisticated medical device ever designed.

With not enough natural hearts available for transplant, this new medical breakthrough is offering hope to people who suffer from heart failure. The AbioCor’s bio-compatible pump is able to mimic the function of a human heart. Just as remarkable, it allows the blood to circulate through it and not get rejected. The mechanism gives the body a pulse and propels blood throughout the body in a fashion that is identical to the human body.

Evaluation of the lipid profile has become routine practice to determine one’s risk for heart disease. Routinely, health professionals generally agree that low overall and LDL-cholesterol readings and high HDL readings along with low serum triglyceride levels reflect a low risk for disease.

This time marketing a pill as a supplement has gone too far. A pill called Obecalp (placebo spelled backwards) was released in March of this year targeted at our smallest generation, our children. It is designed to “treat the pain children have when medicine is not really needed”, but the idea that children put in their heads is that mommy is giving them a “pill” to make them feel better. The pill is essentially a placebo and is not designed to do anything at all at $6.00 a bottle for 50 pills.