Seamless Care

     This week’s First To Know is sponsored by Gist, a Seattle-based company I recently learned about which helps you build stronger professional relationships by bringing together information from across the web for all your contacts and their companies, giving you the right information at the right moment to get a first meeting, deliver an amazing pitch, or just find a better way to make a connection. I find it very interesting and think you will, too. Click here to learn more and sign up for free.

     Watch our Medical Headline Videos:

• “Dangerous Deliveries: Keeping Mom and Baby Together” shows a special delivery room at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia which is specifically designed to provide seamless care (“from the womb to the bassinette”) for women carrying babies with known birth defects. Here the mother gives birth and can stay near the baby – a great advance since the days of whisking high-risk babies away from their moms.

• Ranked among the 10 most common chronic medical conditions, overactive bladder is the topic of “Botox for Bladders” where doctors from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine are finding that 75-percent of their patients are reporting significant improvement in symptoms and in their quality of life from having Botox injected directly into their bladders.

• Our story from the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, “Prostate Cancer: Switching on Chemo,” is about Dr. Rakesh Singal’s discovery of a gene which is in clinical trials for helping chemotherapy work in prostate cancer patients. Apparently a number of people who get chemo aren’t benefitted by it, which makes Dr. Singal’s work very compelling. It’s particularly interesting to us since we’re in the middle of researching a three-part series in personalized medicine which many in medical research think is the most exciting thing about the future of medicine.

     Tracking down the spread of cancer for the two and a half million Americans living with breast cancer may have gotten faster and easier. Take a look at our story from Moores UCSD Cancer Center in San Diego about a radioactive particle that targets the lymph nodes more quickly and exactly than traditional techniques, shows if the cancer has moved on to other areas, and may lessen the chance for extensive treatments.

     Make sure you also see our interesting In-Depth Doctor’s Interview with George Geils, Jr., at Roper St. Francis Healthcare in Charleston who talks about using stem cells to treat ischemic limb disease, and our story from Cedar-Sinai on how Dr. Amir Steinberg went from being a patient to a doctor after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. As a cancer survivor, Dr. Steinberg poetically advises all his patients: “Live life as if the cancer is not around. Live as normally as you can, as if it was never found.”

     In case you missed them, you may want to check our past reports, Premium Content in Archives Low-Carb Diet Reduces Blood Pressure or Premium Content in Archives Surgery Free Knee Repair. Premium Content in the Archives may be purchased for as little as $9 for 24-hour, unlimited access. If you would like to access Premium Content for the first time click here.

     Finally, a DVD movie recommendation from everyone at Ivanhoe is “Damaged Care,” starring Laura Dern. Though made in 2002, it’s still on point concerning what we all fear about managed care. Yet another reason to reform our health care system...and do it today, not next decade!