RedScrubs
The Resource for Medical Professionals

You would think that anyone could have guessed that children who play video games that involve jogging, swinging, and kickboxing would burn more calories than those children who played games while seated. Well, it took a real-life research study to prove that those active video games that require kids to move around help them to exercise and to burn calories.
In this study, lead researcher Alison M. McManus from the University of Hong Kong’s Institute of Human Performance counted the calories burned by kids playing a variety of video games, and found that kids can burn up to 451 percent more calories per minute playing action and running games. That’s a significant amount of calories that would not have been expended had the child sat in front of the television screen. In addition, playing video games while seated also gives children the opportunity to snack on greasy chips and drink sugar-laden soda. That’s hard to do when you’re jumping around.
Despite these findings, parents need to have rules about how many hours a day children can play video games and watch television. Just because you give a kid an active video game set-up, he or she still needs to socialize, to do homework, to read, to go to public events, to eat healthful foods, and to sleep in order to grow into a positive contributor to our society.

Because the rate of diabetes is increasing so rapidly, the need for education exceeds the number of health professionals available to provide such education. In response to this need, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has implemented a website that provides curriculum for both Type I and Type II diabetics. This website is similar to the highly successful American Diabetes Association (ADA) accredited teaching program curriculum presented to thousands of patients at UCSF over the past 30 years.

The science and art of feeding patients through their blood vessels has become a life saving part of critical care medicine. Many patients cannot eat but must be fed to get better, so total parenteral nutrition (TPN) emerged to meet that need and continues to be a refined science of feeding those who cannot use their alimentary tract.

Information technology (IT) specific to healthcare has become a hot item on a national scale as well as in the international healthcare community. It is safe to say I think that the electronic medical record (EMR) has come of age and before long all healthcare organizations will be utilizing various software platforms to document clinical findings, patient hospitalization courses, and a host of other patient related items that are now done with ink and paper. Healthcare IT will clearly ensure software engineers job security well into the future and will open several doors for clinicians desiring to make the transition from the bedside to a desk.

Hospital rooms of today in many healthcare facilities are inadequate. Their design is outdated; they do not meet the needs of most patient populations, they diminish the quality of care, and in many cases impede patient safety. In some instances hospital rooms actually increase the risk of preventable injury to patients.