Knowing the potential for misuse of these medications, and facing an increase in opioid-related deaths in this country, we wanted a deeper understanding of how patients in the U.S. are using these medications so we can identify additional ways to protect them from the risks associated with their use.
However, the research uncovered some concerning increases in the amount of prescription opioid medications Americans use, and the frequency in which these medications are used in dangerously high doses and in risky combinations with other medications.
Wednesday, April 5th, 2017
David Squires and David Blumenthal, M.D., - The Commonwealth Fund
Stephan: Here is another proof that we have an illness profit system instead of true healthcare in the U.S.. A recent survey of patients with Cystic Fibrosis concluded, "The results are disturbing: on average, Canadian patients live 10 years longer than American patients. And the gap has been widening for the past two decades."
Think about that for a moment: Many CF patients die in childhood. Those who reach adulthood, in the U.S., live to an average age of 37. If you are in Canada on average your child will have 10 years more years of life than a child in the U.S. How do you feel about that?
Note also that a profit making insurance industry such as we have in the U.S. not only imposes vastly greater costs, but produces inferior social outcomes.
What needs to happen isn't going to happen until we make wellbeing not profit the first priority. Every other country in the developed world has figured this out. Why can't the United States?
Median Age of Survival for Patients with Cystic Fibrosis over Time — Median age of survival (years)
U.S. health care has many well-documented shortcomings. However, it is often assumed that, because we invest so heavily in technology and specialists, our health care system performs well for patients who have rare or complex diseases.
New research shows that we should be skeptical of that assumption. A recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine compares the health outcomes of U.S. and Canadian patients with cystic fibrosis, an incurable, genetic disease that affects about one in 10,000 people in both countries. The results are disturbing: on average, Canadian patients live 10 years longer than American patients. And the gap has been widening for the past two decades (see exhibit).
The researchers suggest the likely culprit is the significant gaps in health insurance coverage among U.S. children and adults under age 65. Uninsured patients with cystic fibrosis, they find, face a much greater risk of early death than their insured peers. Of particular […]
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Wednesday, April 5th, 2017
David R. Montgomery, Professor of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Washington - The Conversation
Stephan: In 1989, two friends of mine, Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins, who had written the 1970s mega-bestseller, The Secret Life of Plants, followed it with Secrets of the Soil. Their basic argument in the second book, which they had learned doing the research for the first, was that all wellness based agriculture starts with the soil.
They presented an argument that the chemical industrial mono-culture would ultimately implode precisely because the soil was seen mostly as just a medium in which plants grew, and its condition was of only secondary importance. We can now see that Tompkins, Bird, Rudolf Steiner, Alan Chadwick, Hugh Lovell, and others were correct and the chemical companies were wrong.
Here is the latest from a professor at University of Washington.
One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.
When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils. In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.
Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in rebuilding healthy, […]
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Wednesday, April 5th, 2017
, - University of Cambridge (U.K.)
Stephan: Have you wondered where did language start? Where did languages come from? Here is some recent research.
T
he sounds of languages that died thousands of years ago have been brought to life again through technology that uses statistics in a revolutionary new way.
As a word is uttered it vibrates air, and the shape of this soundwave can be measured and turned into a series of numbers
John Aston
No matter whether you speak English or Urdu, Waloon or Waziri, Portuguese or Persian, the roots of your language are the same. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the mother tongue – shared by several hundred contemporary languages, as well as many now extinct, and spoken by people who lived from about 6,000 to 3,500 BC on the steppes to the north of the Caspian Sea.
They left no written texts and although historical linguists have, since the 19th century, painstakingly reconstructed the language from daughter languages, the question of how it actually sounded was assumed to be permanently out of reach.
Now, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have developed a sound-based method to move back through […]
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