Weight loss and Weight Chat Blog

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who also goes by the name “MCA,” has announced that he’s about to undergo treatment for a cancerous tumor in his left parotid gland, which has caused the Beastie Boys to cancel their upcoming concert tour and postpone their new album release. The news has left many people with questions about this type of cancer, its actual location, and, of course, its prognosis. The good news is that it seems the cancer was caught early and should respond well to treatment with a favorable outcome and little or no impact on Yauch’s ability to sing.
First, the parotid gland is the largest of the salivary glands, which are paired organs located around the jaw. The parotid is at the back and bottom of the cheek and is accompanied by the submandibular (under the jaw) and sublingual (under the tongue) salivary glands. You can see their location in […]

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All the recent talk about health care reform has me thinking about an article I read last year about who pays for health care. So let’s begin with a question; namely, who do you think pays for health care? Is it employers? The government? Insurance companies? Individuals? If you’re like most Americans, you probably believe that employers pay the bulk of their workers’ insurance premiums and that governments pay for Medicare and Medicaid (and some will remember to add in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program – SCHIP). Some of you will no doubt believe that insurance companies pay for a lot of our health care since that’s where so many of the bills seem to go. In actuality, according to the article I read in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the answer is that it’s individuals and households who pay for the entire health care bill. Moreover, […]

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Although Diprivan is widely used every day in hospitals and surgery centers across the United States, very few people, outside of medical personnel, were familiar with it or had even heard of it prior to its being found in Michael Jackson’s home after his untimely death. And while we still don’t yet know if it was related in any way to his death, many people want to know more about Diprivan and what its potential effects might have been.
I worked for ICI, now Astra Zeneca, the pharmaceutical company that originally developed Diprivan, in the mid-80s during the time it was being prepared for market launch. I was part of the team helping to train the sales people who would later be selling the product. But Diprivan was unlike any product previously sold by these representatives because it was going to be used by anesthesiologists in the operating room before and […]

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Not really, but I’d imagine that headline caught your eye and grabbed your attention, which is what it was supposed to do. The study on which that claim is based was widely and often quite misleadingly trumpeted across the Internet yesterday (July 6, 2009). Although some responsible sites included in the headline that the tests were done in mice, many concealed this important fact until you were well into the article and had already been exposed to whatever advertising was on the page. I’d already seen several misleading headlines before I realized the studies were in mice and I’m sure that many people didn’t ever get the full story.
The entire webisode was set in motion by the University of South Florida Health’s press release, a slick piece of PR entitled “Caffeine reverses memory impairment in Alzheimer’s mice,” based on research done at that institution. At least they got it right. […]

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Depending on which headlines you’ve seen recently, you may think that some pain relievers are being recalled because they’re dangerous and you might be wondering if you need to clean out the medicine cabinet and throw out any number of these products. I’m going to try to explain this highly complex situation, but the bottom line is that when taken as directed, all of the pain relievers currently on the market, be they prescription or over the counter (OTC), are still considered to be safe and effective and you don’t need to throw them away (and nothing is being recalled at the moment either).
The bottom line problem, however, is that when it comes to pain relievers many people don’t follow directions and wind up taking far more pills than they should. And when those products contain acetaminophen it can lead to toxic levels of that drug, which can and all […]

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On Friday morning, before the first autopsy on Michael Jackson had been completed, I wrote an article in these pages to explain just what an autopsy is, why it’s done, and what we could expect from it  (I’m a former medical examiner and a board-certified forensic pathologist). As I predicted, the initial examination of his body with the naked eye, which is called the “gross” examination, was inconclusive, in part because further tests, which take days to complete under any circumstances, were required. These tests include the microscopic examination of small samples of each of the organs as well as toxicology tests of the stomach contents, blood, bile and urine. The toxicology tests look for the presence or absence any chemicals including prescription drugs, recreational or illegal drugs, toxins such as heavy metals like lead or mercury, or even poisons such as arsenic (these are all simply examples and not […]

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When any person dies suddenly or unexpectedly it becomes the responsibility of the medical examiner to determine the cause of death. Such is the case in the tragic death of Michael Jackson at the all too young age of 50. When I worked as a medical examiner in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s, our policy was to automatically do a full autopsy investigation on anyone 50 or under regardless of their medical history. Over 50 and we might waive the autopsy if there were a clear medical history of illness or disease and there were absolutely no suspicious circumstances, as investigated by the homicide unit of the D.C. police force.
Of course it goes without saying that for someone like Michael Jackson, who died suddenly at age 50 yesterday without any obvious cause, that a full scale investigation will be conducted including a complete autopsy and full toxicology work up. […]

Original post by admin and weightlossopinions.com

When any person dies suddenly or unexpectedly it becomes the responsibility of the medical examiner to determine the cause of death. Such is the case in the tragic death of Michael Jackson at the all too young age of 50. When I worked as a medical examiner in Washington, D.C., in the early 1980s, our policy was to automatically do a full autopsy investigation on anyone 50 or under regardless of their medical history. Over 50 and we might waive the autopsy if there were a clear medical history of illness or disease and there were absolutely no suspicious circumstances, as investigated by the homicide unit of the D.C. police force.
Of course it goes without saying that for someone like Michael Jackson, who died suddenly at age 50 yesterday without any obvious cause, that a full scale investigation will be conducted including a complete autopsy and full toxicology work up. […]

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The other day I was listening to an interview on National Public Radio with Dean Oshler who has just written a book called From Square One: A Meditation, with Digressions, on Crosswords. During the interview I was surprised to hear Mr. Oshler challenge the widely held belief that regularly doing crossword puzzles is good for your brain fitness and can help stave off Alzheimer’s disease. Oshler’s problem with crossword solving is twofold: first, he believes the clinical data showing an advantage for puzzlers is both weak and only observational (”[The researcher] never said that there was a cause-and-effect relationship. He said there was a correlation. Maybe it just so happens that people who are mentally fit have a tendency to want to do crosswords in the first place”); second, we need variety in our mental exercise (”[Crosswords are] kind of the same activity over and over again. But the Alzheimer’s […]

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Although Nestle has recalled some 300,000 cases of its refrigerated Toll House cookie dough from store shelves, as of June 22, 2009, none of their product had actually tested positive for the E. coli that’s caused illness in at least 70 people in 30 states. And since it’s highly unusual for E. coli, an intestinal bacterium of cattle (i.e., it’s in their feces) to be present in something like cookie dough, investigators are so far at a loss to explain exactly what is going on. But, since all of the people who became sick ate the same raw cookie dough product, it seems obvious that it’s the cookie dough that’s to blame. The question is, from where did the E. coli come? If it were inadequately cooked hamburgers that were responsible, it would be easy to link E. coli with beef mishandled during processing.
In fact, according to an article in […]

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