How organic is your shampoo? There’s no easy way to tell (photo courtesy of Clean Sister)
Catch up with Beacon Urgent Care and our Weekly Health News Digest. Here’s seven selected stories from the world of health news that we shared on our social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and Google+. Make sure to follow us on social media for the best health news on the web!
The meaning of ‘organic’ hazy for nonfood items. From the Associated Press:
According to the Organic Trade Association, sales of nonfood organic products were about $2.8 billion last year, a small share of the overall organic market but growing rapidly. Among the most popular items: household cleaners, cosmetics, gardening products, clothing, sheets and mattresses.
USDA doesn’t regulate any of those items, though, unless they’re made entirely from food or agriculture products overseen by its National Organic Program. That’s when they can carry the familiar “USDA organic” seal or other official USDA certification.
The rules are murkier when the items have ingredients that aren’t regulated by USDA, like chemicals in soaps or makeup. The department doesn’t police the use of the word organic for nonfood items, as it does with food.
“Organic” is one of those loaded terms that can spark controversy when uttered. It does the most damage as a buzzword or when slapped on a label to tap into consumer consciousness for cleaner, healthier products. It’s a real bummer when those products don’t deliver.
This article lists a few frequent offenders of the “organic” buzzword crime, such as personal care products, textiles like clothing, sheets, and mattresses made from organic cotton or other organic fibers, and gardening products. It gets more complicated when a product may contain organic materials and/or be used in organic processes for their intended purposes (like those gardening products), but that doesn’t mean that the product itself is fully or even a large percentage organic. Labeling is the big issue here. A lack of labeling standards hurts the consumer, especially when the labels do contain information but it’s difficult for the average person to read. What’s an organic-conscious consumer to do?
Eye Phone? Your Next Eye Exam Might Be Done With Your Phone. From NPR:
Getting an eye exam typically involves big complicated machines. But eye doctors are trying to get the big and complicated out of the equation by using smart phones and tablets instead. That way, they figure, eye exams can be done just about anywhere — even a village in Nepal.
That’s where Dr. Chris Johnson and his colleagues are using iPads to test people for glaucoma, a disease that often has no symptoms until it has irreversibly damaged eyesight. That’s because it nibbles away at vision at the periphery of the visual field.
Johnson tested an off-the-shelf free app called Visual Fields Easy to screen about 200 patients in Nepal. “I was skeptical at first; we did some tests and calibrated it,” he said.
According to NPR’s report, the app showed strong results for identifying people with moderate to severe eye disease and had less success in screening people with normal vision. Still, it defies expectations for being able to nail down potentially debilitating eye problems at a fraction of the cost, as well as way more portable and accessible to vulnerable populations.
Mobile health devices are a double-edged sword. Privacy and data is always a concern. But when truly cool and innovative stuff like the “Eye Phone” comes down the pike, we have to remember the unbelievable potential of mHealth.
Universities Lag in Concussion Management, Study Says. From the New York Times:
Four years after the NCAA introduced a concussion policy that placed responsibilities on member universities, many have still not implemented all aspects of the program, a new study by researchers at Harvard found.
In a survey of 1,066 NCAA institutions, 907 of which responded, more than 90 percent of the universities said they had introduced a concussion management plan. But the universities must do a better job of educating coaches and athletes on the risks of concussions and of increasing the size of their sports medicine staffs, the study found.
Findings released several weeks after [the Harvard study] was published [show that] three other studies of college football players that showed that for every diagnosed concussion, players also received 21 so-called dings, or smaller hits to the head, that were not reported. Because so many hits went unreported, it was difficult to know precisely how many concussions the players might have sustained.
Concussions are a complicated issue within sports medicine and urgent care. Prevention of head injury is still key to dealing with brain injury, but those measures can only go so far without disrupting the sport or activity. It’s unsettling that the NCAA has taken steps to address the problem and protect athletes but the rules aren’t being enforced. Nobody loses out here except the athletes.
Let’s Play Ball! The Future of Baseball is Tracking Health Data. From HL7 Standards:
Baseball teams, like the San Francisco Giants, employ a slew of data analysts and data tools, but every team is reluctant to share how data is used, and where they derive insights. According to the 2014 SABR Analytics Conference, the new frontier of baseball data is not just about scouting players, but keeping players healthy and injury-free. The new area of research, just in its infancy, is marrying baseball statistics with medical injury research.
Chris Marinak, Sr. Vice President of Major League Baseball, implemented MLB’s switch to electronic medical records, and believes medical injury research will provide new insights over the next five or ten years:
“I actually joined MLB in 2008, and I was shocked to see that we didn’t have a system for tracking injuries or medical information at a de-identified level. We were literally keeping a lot of paper documents and putting them into a filing cabinet. It was time for us to get into the 21st century.”
Baseball is a data driven sport. It’s also the sport that relies most on statistics and numbers. Baseball and EHRs seem like the divine matchup based on those standards. It all started in the 2010 MLB season on Marinak’s watch:
“So starting in the 2010 season, we rolled out an electronic medical records system working with the players’ association that allows our medical staff to enter in medical information on every single player injury and the treatments that those players get. And then that information is all stored in one place, so that when you go from one team to the next, it flows along with you.”
The most exciting functionality (from a health care standpoint, anyway), is the new injury tracking system that can track trends in the industry, such as the most common injuries, the number of collisions occur at home plate, the number of concussions, and the rate of ulnar collateral ligament surgeries (known as Tommy John surgery in baseball, a very common procedure among pitchers). MLB could lead the way for injury response and medical innovation for its players, something that is sorely needed in sports medicine.
(P.S. Go Giants)
Experts: October perfect time to get flu vaccine. From the Detroit News:
Influenza strikes as many as 20 percent of Americans each flu season, and the virus can be life threatening or fatal, according to the CDC. Typically, seasonal flu in the U.S. peaks between December and February. However, the virus’s season starts in October and can last through May, according to health officials.
The agency recommends people get vaccinated by the end of October to ensure they’re protected before the season shifts into high gear. It takes a couple of weeks after vaccination for the body to develop antibodies and provide a defense against the flu.
Typically, pregnant women, the elderly and the very young have the highest risk of serious complications or death from the flu. But there’s also a high risk for young, healthy college students who are especially susceptible because they’re in close contact with each other in dorms and classrooms.
The flu isn’t getting a lot of attention this month (thanks, Ebola) but October is in fact a key month for flu prevention and immunization. Last year’s flu season was pretty rough and there’s no reason to think the upcoming season will be easier. Stay ahead of the curve and get your flu shot before the virus hits your community. Don’t forget that Beacon Urgent Care offers the quadrivalent flu shot for just $15!
Living With a Smoker Like Living in Polluted City. From WebMD:
Nonsmokers who live with smokers are exposed to triple the World Health Organization’s recommended safe levels of harmful air particles, a new study warns.
That means that air-particle levels in a home with a smoker are similar to that of the air in large, polluted cities, the study found. Living in smoke-free homes could offer major health benefits to nonsmokers, according to the authors of the study published online Oct. 20 in the journal Tobacco Control.
The study, conducted in the U.K. compared 100 homes with smokers to 20 nonsmoking homes and found that average concentrations of fine particulate matter were about 10 times higher in the homes with smokers than in the nonsmoking homes. On average, nonsmokers who lived with smokers were exposed to levels of fine particulate matter three times higher than the WHO’s yearly exposure limit. Finally, the researchers concluded that if a smoking household became smoke-free, nonsmokers would inhale about 70 percent less fine particulate matter per day, plus those reductions would be most significant for very young children and seniors.
That’s pretty stark evidence of how dangerous second hand smoke is to non-smokers. It’s also a strong case for stricter laws on smoking in shared housing units and other enclosed spaces shared by many people. It’s hard to keep your lungs healthy these days even if you don’t smoke or you’ve quit, and it shouldn’t have to be that difficult.
Microsoft Plans To Launch A Wearable Device Within Weeks. From Forbes:
Microsoft is gearing up to launch a wearable device within the next few weeks. The gadget is a smart watch that will passively track a wearer’s heart rate and work across different mobile platforms. It will also boast a battery life of more than two days of regular use, sources close to the project say. The wearable will hit stores soon after launch in a bid to capture the lucrative holiday season, a timeline Apple was reportedly targeting before it delayed its own Watch to early 2015.
Welcome to the new frontier of mHealth: the wearable wars. The latest entrant, Microsoft, is poised to shake up the landscape if only for its swift deployment. Sure, people will still wait with baited breath for the Apple Watch, but the short timeline proposed by Microsoft from announcement to launch is impressive.
Right now the new device from Microsoft doesn’t have many details concerning price or health functionality, but it’s hard to doubt that the wearable would include cutting edge mHealth applications. Forbes offers its own conjecture for the device: “The company could, for example, promote its wearable gadget and any accompanying cloud-based software as a service for helping to cut healthcare costs, by tracking and incentivizing healthy behavior among workers.”
The post Beacon Urgent Care’s Weekly Health News Digest: October 24, 2014 appeared first on Beacon Urgent Care.
