Increase in Surgeries

In hospitals with the robotic surgery equipment the average increase in prostate surgeries was 29 surgeries annually. In contrast, hospitals that didn’t invest in the machines saw a decrease of five surgeries annually. This was suspected based on a variety of reasons including the “cool” factor, marketing campaigns to encourage patients to use the new machine, prompting by doctors and other factors.

Marketing

The thought process behind this is that hospitals with advanced surgical technology can draw patients away from hospitals that lack in technology. In an age of discovery and technology, consumers and patients feel more confident when technology is involved in their medical treatment. The marketing department may also be encouraging doctors to steer patients toward the new technology even if the patient isn’t in dire need of the surgery.

Prostate Removal

Prostate surgery is done to remove the prostate gland to eliminate the risk of cancer spreading. There are risks with the surgery which can result in impotence and incontinence. It hasn’t been determined if traditional or robotic surgery brings a better outcome of these risks. Patients may feel these risks are less important if preformed by robotic surgery, which may not be the case.

Robotic Surgery vs. Other Treatment Methods

When compared to blood loss, recovery time and effectiveness of other cancer treatments, there was nothing conclusive showing robotic surgeries had the advantage. The right treatment method for each patient is the important deciding factor, especially when there is no evidence of a dramatic difference in the new robotic surgical technology over current methods.

Expensive

Surgical robots can run in the $1 million to $2.5 million dollar range, so investing in them is extremely expensive. This is also a reason hospital marketing divisions are pushing the use of them. Additional costs include $1,500-$2,000 per patient in disposable supplies and $140,000 in annual services. These expenses quickly make this a machine the business department of hospitals want to see in action to make up for.

Decision to Surgically Treat

Because technology often brings a confidence and wonder to it, patients may opt for robotic surgery even when they don’t want it which works well into the business interests of the hospital working to make sure the equipment pays for itself. In a comparison of men with prostate cancer across the country, about half opted for surgery regardless of the surgical methods. The rest choose different forms of treatment or to monitor only and forgo treatment.

While technolog is progressing and robots are helping hospitals do more prostate cancer surgery it’s important to always be cautious about new treatment methods, especially when they haven’t been proven to work. Always work with your doctor for the best approach to treating or monitoring your prostate cancer for the best outcome. Do research of your own to make sure you feel confident in your treatment plan. If you ever feel pressured by your doctor to use a specific treatment, get a second opinion to ensure it’s the right choice for your specific situation.

surgery prostate hospitals robotic treatment technology cancer surgeries

Studies have previously shown the correlation between alcohol and drug addiction and genetics and this is merely a step in that same direction with a different substance. The two genes affected and being studied is known as AHR and CYP1A2. The CYP1A2 gene is the one that interacts directly with the caffeine and the AHR gene regulates the activity in the CYP1A2 gene.

Surveys show that 90% of the world’s population consumes caffeine in some form, most through the consumption of caffeine. Even to the tune of eight to ten cups of coffee per day. The development in this genetic research comes from how people drink coffee, not how it’s metabolized. The metabolic of caffeine consumption in relation to the CYP1A2 gene has been known for some time. Instead scientists are now able to look at the connection between cravings and caffeine. The studies that have been done have been detailed in looking at sources of caffeine including coffee, chocolate, tea and carbonated drinks. Also looked at is the behavioral traits, symptoms and withdrawals from caffeine consumers.

The energy use comes from the way the marijuana is grown to optimize the growth and potency of the plants. All medical marijuana plants are grown indoors and utilize high intensity lighting, dehumidification, air conditioning, space heating, and ventilation and irrigation systems to produce the best quality plants. Because the industry has previously lived in the shadows this has gone mostly undetected to the public eye. Now that more and more Americans are becoming more energy conscious and medical marijuana debates are back on the table this energy consumption information may have some real weight.

Interesting comparisons can be made to help the public realize exactly what the impact of this massive energy consumption is. One example is a single smoked joint represents the energy of a 100-watt light bulb left on for seventeen hours straight. So think of the time spent when a group of friends gather around a bong and smoke for hours. How about the energy consumption of a road trip? For each kilo of marijuana the carbon footprint is equal to that of taking a 44mpg trip across the country five times.

It sounds like outdoor growing is the solution and some are pushing for this as a reason to legalize marijuana. Whether that’s a solution or even option or not has yet to be determined. What we can be sure of is with the medical marijuana industry set to explode to the tune of $8.9 billion over the next five years, changes need to be made.

Arthritis can make it difficult to perform physical activities. Even the simple ones as turning your head required for driving such and neck to check for traffic, reaching the brake pedal quickly in an emergency, and adjusting rear and side mirrors. If you’re not sure about whether you can move fast enough in an emergency, see your doctor and consider having a driving evaluation at an outpatient rehabilitation center.
Vision

One of the most important requirements for safe driving is good vision. For an unrestricted license, you must have at least 20/40 with glasses) and 120 vision in one eye (even degrees peripheral vision. If you have 20/50, 20/60, or 20/70 vision and 120 degrees still obtain a driver’s peripheral vision, you can still obtain a drivers license that allows you to drive during the day. If you wear a telescopicspecial lens, special rules may apply.
Hearing

Hearing loss, by itself, does not impair a person’s ability to drive. If your family members or doctor tell you change in your hearing that they’ve noticed a it’s important to take note of these warnings. Check with your doctor about any concerns you might have.
Loss of Consciousness

Many medical conditions can cause a person to lose consciousness or pass out without warning. Heart conditions, breathing ure disorders and sleep problems, diabetes, seiz disturbances can affect mental alertness. If you’ve suffered a loss of consciousness or an episode of altered consciousness (such as low blood sugar, lightheadedness, or ST turn in your disorientation) you MU driver’s license for at least six (6) months. The RMV will provide you with a free Mass I.D. e. If, after six (6) to use during that tim months, your doctor certifies that you have been episode free, you can regain your driving privileges. The RMV will provide you with a new license free of charge.
Mental Abilities

Several medical conditions can effect mental alertness and clear thinking without causing the driver to pass out. Trouble remembering things, confusion, stress, depression and anxiety are all conditions that can affect your ability to drive. Many conditions are temporary refrain from driving and you may only have to during a brief adjustment period.
Drugs and Alcohol

Some prescription medications can cause serious side effects (for example, drowsiness). Massachusetts’s law forbids driving while under the influence of narcotic drugs, even with a valid prescription. Always check with your doctor before driving. Prescription medicine may also worsen the effects of alcohol. Also, elderly drivers may find that re now then it did in alcohol affects them mo their youth. Never drink and drive

In response, we received the following feedback from readers; identifying information has been removed. (Note: These views may not necessarily reflect those of the AMA.)

At our state university, we would see the ideal high school science program as one that produces basic math competency. All of our basic science course have shown that math preparation as measured by the ACT subscores is the main predictor of success, and our data indicate that students who are not fairly well prepared in math rarely even take the MCAT and uniformly do poorly if they do.

Of course in my other life as a community college remedial math instructor I find that the premature introduction of calculators (which apparently now occurs somewhere in early/middle elementary school) results in a body of students that have no sense if results are close and no idea about the mechanics of solving basic problems and therefore no basis to begin learning algebraic manipulations.

For physics I would like to make sure that conceptual ideas are conveyed rather than just “plug and chug” mathematical questions. That would certainly be better for the MCAT.

I would suggest bioethics. It would be good for high school students to grapple with the questions about the ethics of health science technology. I’m working to introduce palliative care/end of life discussions to young students in college and am finding that they’ve never thought of the importance of deciding not to turn to technology in end-of-life care.

I believe 16 year olds who say they want to go into health care need exposure to the realities and many different career options in the health sciences. To address this, I teach a health sciences exploration course.

A number of my students point to clinical rotations classes they took in high school as formative experiences in their pre-med journeys. Virtually all who took such classes seemed to get a lot out of them. Of course, it may be that only students with pre-med leanings ever take such classes, and of course I don’t hear from students who took those classes and then decided not to pursue medicine.
Still, I’m fully in favor of high school clinical classes. Without them, many students will be a year or two into college medical preparation before they step foot in a hospital or clinic to see how medicine is actually practiced.

I took AP Biology and Chemistry in high school (scoring 3 on both AP tests—I wasn’t a stellar student), 10 years ago, and haven’t taken a hard science class since. In college, I studied psych, literature, and education. I’ve always tended to be “nerdy”—I still read Discover and the Sci/Tech news articles—but I otherwise have no background in advanced bioscience.

I took a practice MCAT this year, from the AAMC web site, just to experience the test and offer better advising to students. I only scored in the 20th percentile on biological sciences. However, that score means that 20% of MCAT takers—mostly junior bioscience majors, I presume—scored lower than I did, based on my high school AP classes from 10 years ago.

Accordingly, I would not hesitate to recommend any number of AP or IB classes to pre-health students.

Gaps in science preparation are a huge problem in college and in medical school.

From my read on the ACT 2007 report, including state data:

* Each tough science course taken in high school raises the ACT science component score 1-2 points
* Only about three percent to 10 percent of Native American and African American students are prepared to make an A or B in a college biology course, compared to about 30 percent for white or Asian students.
* Students not taking tougher science courses (and math) are going to be behind and have lower grades in freshman and sophomore years

Sadly, these students with slightly lower scores and then lower grades are going to be funneled away from medical school paths by a number of internal and external mechanisms.

Science preparation must begin early, in elementary school–and we have to pay attention to birth to age 6 child development as well, which is the real factor behind top standardized test scores that set all of one’s future in motion.

Over the years I have had several students who participated in a high school health occupations program run by the county public school system. The program included a shadowing/internship experience, such that students consistently had a very realistic understanding of the career that they wanted to follow and had been encouraged to think outside the box–as illustrated most dramatically by the student who said as a freshman that she wanted to be a manager of medical research lab. She went on to get a master’s degree and has been working as a lab manager for several years.

To begin with, I suggest we clearly differentiate between “vocational” programs (eg LPN) and “pre-professional” programs that require undergraduate, and even graduate, education.

I am not happy with either of the above labels. Brain surgery is a vocation, but most people think of “vocational” as training that prepares students to enter the workforce at age 18. An LPN is a professional, too, but the training given to LPNs does not typically prepare them well for college classwork. I assume that most people on this list would be involved with “pre-professional” education rather than “vocational” education.

If I could deliver a message to high school students whose goals are to attend college and there prepare for health careers ranging from occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant, medical technology, and nursing to pharmacy, medicine, dentistry, etc, that message would include:

* Study as many different sciences as you can (a year each of biology, chemistry, physics and geology)
* Take as much mathematics as you can
* Study a foreign language as many years as you can
* Develop as many computer skills as you can

At least here in Ohio, the most neglected math discipline is trigonometry, with some high schools not teaching it at all, and some schools folding it in as a small component of “advanced math.” Over half of the “pre-med” and “pre-allied health” students we accept end up having to take remedial trig in college.

We use a self-paced modular format to teach our medical assisting and associated programs. Small groups, one-on-one teaching, hands-on as well as online courses. We use multiple techniques including technology to reach all learning styles.

Teaching a student to become a life-long independent learner, with intense support and encouragement in a nontraditional format, increases success–especially for those who were less successful in the traditional high school educational format, where one must fit the square peg in a round hole, so to speak.

For a course in high school dealing with health care, the student should be knowledgeable in the following:

*
First aid and preventive medicine (for adults and children)
*
Understanding of basic lab tests and what is normal, including Hgb, HCT, WBC, and cholesterol (HDL, LDL and Triglycerides)
*
Know how to give a shot, how to take blood pressure, and (since home care is becoming so important in the US now) how to change IV bags

Even if the student does not pursue a career in health care, these skills will help them better handle situations that life may present.

Many high school health care career hopefuls are focused mainly on becoming pediatricians or nurses, and the allied health occupations are not within their interest levels. High school instructors would be advised to offer an objective overview of all opportunities in health care, rather than just emphasizing physicians and nurses.

Also, the service learning component is a splendid way for students to capture real-life experiences. My students are required to perform 97 hours of service learning during their 12-month program. Responses are very positive.

For more information on high school health science curricula, educators should check out the National Consortium on Health Sciences and Technology Education. This very active group of high school educators has developed national foundation standards for high school health science education.

What we find to be the most helpful asset in applicants for our graduate programs in school counseling, school psychology, and community mental health counseling is experience. Any and allrelated experience that an applicant has, whether volunteer or paid, part time or full time, helps us to know that the applicant has taken the time to fully explore the field and is knowledgeable about the career choice being made.

In addition, we love to see that our applicants have spent time interviewing and shadowing some professionals in their field of interest: For example, spending a day with a school counselor at the middle school level and then another day with either a high school or elementary school counselor. We like them to be able to tell us what a typical day for a person in this profession is and why that fits with who they are and their future goals.

On the flip side, nothing decreases our interest faster than applicants who tell us that they will work really hard because they really want this job because they want to help people and yet they can tell us nothing about what a person in their field of interest actually does, and they have never taken the time to find out.

Speaking as faculty director of a health professions advising office, we need students who have been exposed to the myriad variety of professions in the health care field. Too many are only familiar with the physician and nurse as career opportunities. As a result, the nursing department is inundated, and those who are pre-med are not aware of viable alternative careers.

Many of the minorities who we would like to recruit into medical careers see the sciences as too difficult and do not have adequate skills in basic math and English. To help solve this issue, we work closely with community college advisors and collaborate with a health careers charter school and local high school health career clubs. However, time, money, and student motivation are persistent issues.

Although we are behind in this effort compared to most states, we are working in Texas to develop dual college-high school credit courses and implement Tech Prep models into programs of study under the US Department of Education health cluster. We have also developed new high school exit outcomes, which are posted on the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Web site.

One mechanism we use in our state is Marketable Skills Achievement Awards, such as EMT-Basic, certified nurse aide, medical office assistant, and central processing tech, which can be started in high school and completed during the summer after graduation from high school. These awards are 7 to 14 semester credit hours and afford the student workforce skills. The students can work part-time and continue college work on an associate degree.

Our health science and emergency services programs are using simulation with high-tech mannequins in campus labs in which students must employ critical thinking to care for a patient in a specific case scenario. Debriefing after the exercise is the most important part. Since we are a community college and don’t have physician assistant or medical education, we encourage our program medical directors to come in and play the physician part when ever they can. We film the simulation and pipe it into a classroom nearby or can it for online use.

We have also found that interdisciplinary simulations involving students from multiple programs (such as nursing, paramedic, and respiratory therapy) provide more benefits to learning, and we hope such education will help to break down the silos within the health care teams with which our graduates will work.

Finally, I would mention the Institute of Medicine’s Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality (2003), which recommends five core competencies for all health professions, one of which is high-performance work teams. The report also recommends moving away from didactic lectures and instituting more interactive teaching strategies, such as problem-based learning.

The single most important step we can take is to encourage middle-school students to enroll in rigorous math and science courses. Students who take only the minimum requirements in middle- and high school have seriously limited their options for careers in the health professions.

Our youth need more opportunities to explore the many careers in health care as part of their regular school day. Some places are doing just that, but teachers have so many objectives to meet that exposing kids to careers in science, health, and even medicine may be given less attention.

When children are exposed to science through gross human anatomy, it stimulates interest in the microanatomy, (biology, histology, and chemistry, to name a few). Children are intimidated by the details of any subject matter, and if they are not “gifted or talented” they may not be encouraged to challenge themselves. After all, the smartest and brightest typically get the attention of educators. But there are students in the other 80 percent that have enough interest, desire, and curiosity to become a member of our future health care workforce.