Welcome to Your Maximized Life! - Dr. James JUDGE

Health Industry Insights (HII), an IDC Company, recently published a report called “Technology Selection: The Evolving Care Management Model to Address the Healthcare Crisis.” In essence the report looks at how care management technologies must evolve to accommodate the changing market, namely, “the mounting disease burden” brought on by the increase of chronic conditions in our aging population. Among its many worthwhile findings, the report suggests that integrated technologies such as payer-based electronic health records and those that provide a single source of comprehensive patient information are those that will enable health care payers to best meet the demands of their employer customers while also helping payers themselves maintain costs and improve care. I felt the following quote from the study summed things up rather nicely: “The increasing prevalence of chronic conditions and an aging population is driving a more holistic approach that contemplates the whole person and not one specific disease state or acute episode…”

 
The HII report resonated deeply with us here at MEDecision because it validated a philosophy we have held for some time. We have long promoted the notion that the next logical step for health information technology is to create a complete and comprehensive view of the individual patient that each stakeholder can both access and contribute to in real-time. It must provide actionable data with up-to-date clinical decision support and gaps in care information to furnish users with a streamlined and simplified resource for managing both populations and individual patients. And it must interface easily with existing systems so the best possible clinical information can get into the hands of those who need it, when they need it and in the format that best suits them.

 
This is precisely what we have designed our Alineo™ and Nexalign™ products to do, so the HII report indeed corroborates our vision for the future of the industry. It’s no wonder that these products gained so much attention and enthusiasm when we showcased them at the recent AHIP Institute and HIMSS conference. Potential partners and potential users alike have begun to see the value in technologies that can integrate, automate and collaborate. With health care reform poised to kick into high gear in the coming months and the patient centered medical home model continuously gaining traction, I think we’ll see what we once considered the future of health IT become reality a lot sooner than we once anticipated.

Health Health, IT, and the, Evolving Health Care Market

Nausea
Nausea is a word derived from Latin word ‘nausea’ and from Greek ‘nausie’. It is a feeling related with stomach content. It can be described as a sensation of uneasy and discomfort in the upper portion of the stomach.

It always has a tendency of urgency to vomit. Qualm is the term to explain an attack of nausea. The most common cause of nausea is in pregnancy and gastroenteritis or food poisoning.

Some causes are unknown so far and it is believed that as many as seven hundred causes are identified so far. But often it occurs as a result of side effect of certain medications. Generally  several medications are available to improve the symptoms of nausea.

Commonly metoclopramide, ondansetron and dimenhydrinate are used to improve this condition. The above explanations some times not applicable and in some cases the condition of nausea may have real vomiting.

This type of nausea is always related with early stage of pregnancy in which the vomiting occurs after having the urge to vomit. In pregnancy it is called morning sickness and this condition in pregnancy arises because of the increased level of hormones. However this nausea is not at all a disease always. It is a warning symptom for several underlying conditions. It appears in almost in all diseases including organic and functional diseases and in infectious diseases also. Good examples are: pregnancy, intestinal diseases including infectious and obstructive diseases, travel related diseases, food allergy and poisoning, brain diseases including tumors and cancers.

In some occasions it appears to be a natural mechanism to relieve the unwanted conditions. Example is over eating. When a person over eats, nausea resulting in vomiting to relieve the discomfort of overload to stomach. Nausea may result in vomiting or it may urge to vomit and eventually there is no vomiting at all. Nausea may be short lived or prolonged. In prolonged instances it is a debilitating health symptom. The origin of nausea may by physical or psychological.

In food poisoning symptom appears within one to six hours after the contaminated food is taken to stomach and the toxins are responsible which are produced by the bacteria.

This nausea long lasts for one to two days. Medications are able to potentially cause nausea. Chemotherapy and anesthetic drugs are most common medications that cause nausea. Almost 80 percent of the pregnant women experience to have nausea in their early stage or in first trimester of pregnancy and some women with severe form requires treatment with medicines like ondansetron.

Most of the conditions that causes nausea are mild and it requires no treatment and some conditions that causes nausea are potentially very serious. Example diabetic ketoacidosis, appendicitis, hepatitis and bowel obstructive diseases. Often nausea requires no investigation except in chronic or prolonged type of nausea like in obstructive intestinal or brain tumors.

The serious complication of nausea is dehydration and it commonly occurs in conditions like diarrhea. In these cases oral rehydration salts are administered or in severe cases rehydration is done by intravenous rehydration salts. Several medications are available to treat these conditions and the drugs include: Ondansetron, metoclopramide, dimenhydrinate and pyridoxine.?

Health cause of nausea, nausea, health

Almost no one knows what the definition of health really is. Therefore that which they believe about health cannot be true.
- Dr. Ian Grassam

To have a true wellness revolution, you must first answer the question: What is wellness? The term has been badly abused. Clinics offering abortion often call themselves Women’s Wellness Centers, and doctors and hospitals offer “wellness visits” through which they provide expensive exams and tests in an effort to create “early detection” of disease. Unfortunately, “early” is still after the fact, and the treatments involve more prescriptions and surgery. Injectable drugs and prescriptions are given even to children and the elderly in the name of “wellness.”

To know what real wellness is, you have to first define what health really is. Most people would say they’re healthy when they have no pain, no runny nose, no headache. In other words: I’m healthy when I feel good. In today’s fad-diet-and-home-exercise-infomercial world, health has also come to mean losing weight or looking good.

There are three problems with this. First, when you think health is feeling good, what do you usually do when you feel bad? You take a drug to feel good and then assume you’re healthy. Yet, as you now know, you do not automatically become healthy when a drug eliminates your symptoms, and in fact, you may be even sicker.

Second, when my father died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two, he died without prior symptoms of heart disease and had passed previous medical evaluation. His doctor told us that in more than two-thirds of people who have a heart problem, the first sign is a heart attack. Then, in two-thirds of those, the people die.  Or, for the majority of people, the first sign that you have a heart problem is that you are dead. As my family discovered, that’s a little late to begin looking into it.

I could go on with story after story of people I’ve seen in my clinics who chose to not follow through with care based on the fact that they felt fine, only later to discover disease that was so far along by the time they discovered it, it was too late. By the time you actually know you have cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and other physical problems, these conditions have typically been ravaging your body for years. The same is true even for spine and extremity pain. By the time it hurts, MRIs and x-rays often show massive arthritic degeneration and/or disc damage that’s been developing for years.

Third, there’s the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” myth. Thinking If I have no symptoms of a disease, then I don’t have to worry about disease is one of the most colossal errors in judgment you could ever make concerning your health. You might not have a diagnosed disease, but dis-ease can go on for years without warning before being discovered as disease. This type of thinking will, without argument, eventually shorten your life.

The following is a list from the Merck Manual of Medical Diagnosis.  These are some of the most common diseases we face today and are all present in the body without any signs or symptoms noticeable to the victim:

Seeking freedom from symptoms is easy to do and may even guarantee those results. The only thing it can never bring you, however, is health. In fact, as the Merck Manual shows us, being free from symptoms may just cover up signs of dis-ease and keep you ignorant of your perilous predicament.
 

Health heart, attack, Health, wellness