But four years after his lifesaving procedure, it was not only Mr. Longâs blood that was affected. Swabs of his lips and cheeks contained his DNA â but also that of his donor. Even more surprising to Mr. Long and other colleagues at the crime lab, all of the DNA in his semen belonged to his donor. âI thought that it was pretty incredible that I can disappear and someone else can appear,â he said.
Mr. Long had become a chimera, the technical term for the rare person with two sets of DNA. The word takes its name from a fire-breathing creature in Greek mythology composed of lion, goat and serpent parts. Doctors and forensic scientists have long known that certain medical procedures turn people into chimeras, but where exactly a donorâs DNA shows up â beyond blood â has rarely been studied with criminal applications in mind.
More than 13% of American adults — or about 34 million people — report knowing of at least one friend or family member in the past five years who died after not receiving needed medical treatment because they were unable to pay for it, based on a new study by Gallup and West Health. Nonwhites, those in lower-income households, those younger than 45, and political independents and Democrats are all more likely to know someone who has died under these circumstances.
Health Insurance has morphed into legalized extortion. You were lucky. LizW is right when she says most Americans don't like their insurance company. The only industry I can think of where you pay your money and the company can simply deny or dilute the service you paid for.
i've heard analysts say something like this referring to doctors, hospitals and insurance companies:
broadly speaking, the doctors and hospitals are the bigger profiteers with insurance companies lagging way behind
================================================
however politically insurance companies are very easy targets
health care in this country is highly regulated/controlled/guarded
thanks to technology the fortress walls are in the process of coming down
market innovations are going to enable easy and early diagnosis and treatment
the tools of healthcare are going to be digitized, demonetized and democratized
Lauren Bard opened the hospital bill this month and her body went numb. In bold block letters it said, âAMOUNT DUE: $898,984.57.â
Last fall, Bardâs daughter, Sadie, had arrived about three months prematurely; and as a nurse herself, Bard knew the costs for Sadieâs care would be high. But sheâd assumed the bulk would be covered by the organization that owned the hospital where she worked: Dignity Health, whose marketing motto is âHello humankindness.â
She would be wrong.
Our daughter was born 10 weeks early at 3:15 pm Friday, May 31. Someone casually mentioned it in the hall outside someone's office who shouted out her office door, "excuse me, what?" That woman gathered up papers and literally ran to the recovery room where mom was still coming out of anesthesia and I and the recovery room nurse were sitting quietly. If we didn't get these papers signed and submitted before 5pm, nothing would happen until Monday, the next month, where at the very least we'd have to fight to recover any expenses from May, and I assume might trigger this sort of wholesale rejection of the claim. The woman was calm and efficient but clearly in a panic to get it done, done correctly, and submitted before anyone had a chance to clock out early.
Health Insurance has morphed into legalized extortion. You were lucky. LizW is right when she says most Americans don't like their insurance company. The only industry I can think of where you pay your money and the company can simply deny or dilute the service you paid for.
Lauren Bard opened the hospital bill this month and her body went numb. In bold block letters it said, âAMOUNT DUE: $898,984.57.â
Last fall, Bardâs daughter, Sadie, had arrived about three months prematurely; and as a nurse herself, Bard knew the costs for Sadieâs care would be high. But sheâd assumed the bulk would be covered by the organization that owned the hospital where she worked: Dignity Health, whose marketing motto is âHello humankindness.â
She would be wrong.
Our daughter was born 10 weeks early at 3:15 pm Friday, May 31. Someone casually mentioned it in the hall outside someone's office who shouted out her office door, "excuse me, what?" That woman gathered up papers and literally ran to the recovery room where mom was still coming out of anesthesia and I and the recovery room nurse were sitting quietly. If we didn't get these papers signed and submitted before 5pm, nothing would happen until Monday, the next month, where at the very least we'd have to fight to recover any expenses from May, and I assume might trigger this sort of wholesale rejection of the claim. The woman was calm and efficient but clearly in a panic to get it done, done correctly, and submitted before anyone had a chance to clock out early.
Lauren Bard opened the hospital bill this month and her body went numb. In bold block letters it said, âAMOUNT DUE: $898,984.57.â
Last fall, Bardâs daughter, Sadie, had arrived about three months prematurely; and as a nurse herself, Bard knew the costs for Sadieâs care would be high. But sheâd assumed the bulk would be covered by the organization that owned the hospital where she worked: Dignity Health, whose marketing motto is âHello humankindness.â
25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections
Everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Can you hear that, Congress and the White House?
Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare, and although it has improved access to healthcare for some, tens of millions of Americans still cannot afford basic medical care for their family. No healthcare system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer â full Medicare for all â is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal for all basic and emergency medical and hospital services.
In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index cards!
Below please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system â and the resulting quality of life in Canada â is better than the chaotic, wasteful and often cruel U.S. system.
Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Hear that, Congress and the White House!
Number 25:
In Canada, everyone is covered automatically at birth â everybody in, nobody out. A human right.
In the United States, under Obamacare, 28 million Americans (9 percent) are still uninsured and 85 million Americans (26 percent) are underinsured. Obamacare is made even worse by Trumpcare restrictions. (See Trumpcare by John Geyman MD (2019)).
"In today's world we’re investing 5 times more money in male virility pills and women breasts implants than to find a cure for Alzheimer's. In a few years we‘ll have old women with big tits, and old men with hard penises, but none of them will remember what they are for." - D. Varella
"In today's world weâre investing 5 times more money in male virility pills and women breasts implants than to find a cure for Alzheimer's. In a few years weâll have old women with big tits, and old men with hard penises, but none of them will remember what they are for." - D. Varella
In March of this year, a judge found United Behavioral Health liable for breaching fiduciary duty and denying benefits, saying the insurer considered its bottom line âas much or moreâ than the well-being of its members in developing coverage guidelines.
25 Ways the Canadian Health Care System is Better than Obamacare for the 2020 Elections
Everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Can you hear that, Congress and the White House?
Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare, and although it has improved access to healthcare for some, tens of millions of Americans still cannot afford basic medical care for their family. No healthcare system is without problems but Canadian-style single-payer â full Medicare for all â is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal for all basic and emergency medical and hospital services.
In the mid-1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index cards!
Below please find 25 ways the Canadian health care system â and the resulting quality of life in Canada â is better than the chaotic, wasteful and often cruel U.S. system.
Replace it with the much more efficient Medicare-for-all: everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital. It will produce far less anxiety, dread, and fear. Hear that, Congress and the White House!
Number 25:
In Canada, everyone is covered automatically at birth â everybody in, nobody out. A human right.
In the United States, under Obamacare, 28 million Americans (9 percent) are still uninsured and 85 million Americans (26 percent) are underinsured. Obamacare is made even worse by Trumpcare restrictions. (See Trumpcare by John Geyman MD (2019)).
A gene called Lipocalin 2 is a major culprit in triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease for which there are few effective, targeted treatments. A team of researchers at Boston Children's Hospital has developed an innovative way to knock out the gene using the editing system CRISPR and has shown its potential for treating triple-negative breast tumors in mice.
But to make CRISPR work in breast tumors, the researchers had to figure out a way to deliver the technology into breast cancer cells without using a virus or something else that might cause off-target side effects. So they encapsulated it in nanoparticles and targeted it at ICAM-1, a molecule expressed on breast cancer cells.
The encapsulated CRISPR system knocked out Lipocalin 2 with 81% efficiency in tumor samples, and when injected into mouse models of triple-negative breast cancer, it slowed tumor growth by 77%. The researchers reported the results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is one of the clearest descriptions of advanced genome engineering toolmaking I’ve heard yet, and the potential for treating human disease is massive. Well worth watching.
Big #cancer news. #CRISPR therapies are incredible because they can be so targeted (to the sequence level) plus developed fast and inexpensively. Result is ultraprecision medicine, personalized to the individual. So necessary to beat cancer.
The gene-editing tool has been used in a trial to enhance the blood cells of two patients with cancer.
The trial: The experimental research, under way at the University of Pennsylvania, involves genetically altering a person’s T cells so that they attack and destroy cancer. A university spokesman confirmed it has treated the first patients, one with sarcoma and one with multiple myeloma.
Slow start: Plans for the pioneering study were first reported in 2016, but it was slow to get started. Chinese hospitals, meanwhile, have launched a score of similar efforts. Carl June, the famed University of Pennsylvania cancer doctor, has compared the Chinese lead in employing CRISPR to a genetic Sputnik.
Ex vivo: It’s safer and easier to employ the CRISPR technique on cells removed from a patient’s body. That’s the case in the new cancer study, in which doctors collected blood from patients and then genetically engineered the immune cells present in it before returning the cells to the patients.
The edit: Researchers added one gene to make the T cells attack cancer, but they also used CRISPR to delete a different gene, called PD-1, which can act as a brake on the immune system’s defenses.
Pharmaceutical drugs that inhibit PD-1, known as immunotherapies, have been dramatically effective in treating a few cancers. Now the idea is to install the same capacity directly into the DNA of T cells.
CRISPR wave: The Pennsylvania cancer study is just one of many tests of medical treatments using CRISPR that are on the way. This year, for example, a patient in Europe became the first person to be treated with CRISPR for an inherited disease, beta thalassemia.
Funding: The Penn study is funded by the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, an organization started by Napster cofounder and early Facebook investor Sean Parker, as well as by a startup firm, Tmunity. Parker has likened T cells to “little computers” that can be reprogrammed.
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For the past quarter century, scientists battled Alzheimer’s disease under a single guiding principle: that protein clumps—beta-amyloid—deposited outside sensitive brain cells gradually damage neuronal functions and trigger memory loss. The solution seems simple: remove junk amyloid, protect the brain.
They could be completely wrong.
Last month, Alzheimer’s disease defeated another promising near-market drug that tried to prevent or remove amyloid deposits, adding to the disease’s therapeutic “graveyard of dreams.” Although the drug removed toxic amyloid, the patients didn’t get better. The failure is once again spurring scientists to confront an uncomfortable truth: targeting amyloid clumps when patients already show memory symptoms doesn’t work. Wiping out soluble amyloid—fragments of proteins before they aggregate into junk—also dead ends.
It’s time to think outside the box.
Last week in Nature Neuroscience, Dr. Mark Mattson’s team at the National Institute on Aging Intramural Research Program added substantial proof that senolytics, the golden child of anti-aging drugs, rescue memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease, at least in mice genetically engineered to accumulate amyloid clumps in their brains.
Oh, a little word of caution about those so-called 'stand-alone emergency rooms' popping up everywhere. It's a racket. I know, you're shocked.
They are not 'Urgent Care' clinics like Minute Clinic or whatever. Those are great for colds, flu, etc. These 'emergency rooms' are equipped and staffed like, well, an emergency room. Sounds good so far, right? Well, all that really means is they can charge emergency room rates! And it's not usually covered by insurance or Medi-anything. It's a racket designed to gouge people when they're desperate.
If you're seriously injured, the ambulance will not take you to one of those, it'll go to a real emergency room affiliated with a hospital system. That is, until these 'emergency rooms' get into the ambulance business, which I expect any day now... c.
The oncology practice where P's was treated was bought by a hospital group. They made a bunch of upgrades to the facility that resulted in it actually being re-classified as a hospital. This enabled them to charge hospital rates. Her doc bailed after a few months and started his own practice.
