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Health and Medical News
Find information and links about the latest health and medical news here. Dr. Tina Marcantel is a naturopathic doctor in Gilbert, Arizona, who also serves the East Valley cities of Scottsdale, Tempe, Chandler, Mesa, Apache Junction, and Queen Creek.
"Diabetic Amputations on the Rise" according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times (March 22, 2009). The article reports that the rate of foot amputations from complications of diabetes "has soared over the past 15 years, reaching about 100,000 per year in the United States alone" according to studies and government statistics. There are a number of factors that are influencing this trend, but one of the biggest is the growing number of diabetes cases.
Eights percent of Americans have been diagnosed with diabetes, but over the next 10 years that number is expected to DOUBLE as more young people develop the disease due to obesity. As the article points out, "The U.S. health-care system is poorly designed for preventive care. Instead, it doles out money for expensive urgent care such as amputations," according to vascular surgeon Dr. George Andros.
The article goes on to say that "Nationwide, the cost of treating the disease has risen 26 percent, to $116 billion, in the past five years...During that same period, the cost of diabetes-related complications rose a staggering 110 percent, to $40 billion."
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is that the vast majority of new cases of type 2 diabetes are completely preventable! (For much more information on diabetes, including facts and statistics, visit the Diabetes Central area of our website.
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The Associated Press reports that "Fish oil supplements may work slightly better than a popular cholesterol-reducing drug to help patients with chronic heart failure, according to new research released Sunday (August 31, 2008)."
The article goes on to quote Dr. Jose Gonzalez Juanatey, a spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology: "This reinforces the idea that treating patients with heart failure takes more than just drugs."
The study findings were published online in the medical journal The Lancet. In the study, "Italian researchers gave nearly 3,500 patients a daily omega-3 pill, a prescription-formulation pill derived from fish oils, produced by Norway's Pronova BioPharma."
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The FDA's recent approval of the drug Lyrica for the treatment of fibromyalgia has added another dimension to the controversy among medical professionals over how to treat the disease. In fact, the biggest question seems to be whether fibromyalgia should even be labeled as a legitimate medical condition. A recent article in the New York Times (January 14, 2008) points out that "...[some] doctors — including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind — say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them."
(For a good overview of the causes, symptoms, and common treatments for fibromyalgia, click here.)
For those who suffer from the symptoms of the disease, it's often a frustrating experience when dealing with doctors. The article goes on to point out:
"As diagnosed, fibromyalgia primarily affects middle-aged women and is characterized by chronic, widespread pain of unknown origin. Many of its sufferers are afflicted by other similarly nebulous conditions, like irritable bowel syndrome. Because fibromyalgia patients typically do not respond to conventional painkillers like aspirin, drug makers are focusing on medicines like Lyrica that affect the brain and the perception of pain.
"Advocacy groups and doctors who treat fibromyalgia estimate that 2 to 4 percent of adult Americans, as many as 10 million people, suffer from the disorder. Those figures are sharply disputed by those doctors who do not consider fibromyalgia a medically recognizable illness and who say that diagnosing the condition actually worsens suffering by causing patients to obsess over aches that other people simply tolerate. Further, they warn that Lyrica’s side effects, which include severe weight gain, dizziness and edema, are very real, even if fibromyalgia is not."
For Dr. Marcantel's approach to the treatment of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, see her article Fibromyalgia: Getting to the Root of the Problem.
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We know that obesity is linked to numerous health problems including type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Now a new study has been published that confirms the link between being severely overweight and having a greater risk of developing several types of cancer. In a study published this week in The Lancet, scientists at the University of Manchester reported that they had
"analyzed 141 articles involving 282,137 cancer cases and 20 different types of malignancies to determine the cancer risk associated with a 5 kilogram-per-meter-squared increase in BMI, roughly the increase that would bump a person from middle-normal weight into overweight.
In men, such an increase in BMI raised the risk of esophageal adenocarcinoma by 52 percent, thyroid cancer by 33 percent, and colon and kidney cancer by 24 percent each.
In women, the same increase in BMI increased the risk of endometrial and gallbladder cancer by 59 percent each, esophageal adenocarcinoma by 51 percent, and kidney cancer by 34 percent." (For a full article on the study, follow this link to the Washington Post online edition.)
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