5 Data-Driven Ideas To Combat Diabetes

The Data Design Diabetes Challenge offers $100,000 to startups that are finding innovative ways to combat the diabetes epidemic, from better meals determined by algorithm to predicting which patients won’t take their medication.

No matter how much technology we throw at it, the diabetes epidemic just won’t budge. Today, 8.3% of the U.S. population has the disease–a problem that cost the country $245 billion in 2012 alone. That hasn’t stopped individuals and organizations from imagining solutions.

For the past few years, drugmaker Sanofi US has run the $100,000 Data Design Diabetes challenge, a call for entrants to design data-driven diabetes solutions. This isn’t a challenge for flash in the pan ideas that disappear soon after winning. Past competitions have yielded successful initiatives like Ginger.io, a behavioral health analytics startup that recently raised $6.5 million.

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5 Data-Driven Ideas To Combat Diabetes

American Epidemic: Rise In Diabetes tarief is het “Main Driver ‘Of Verhoogde Amerikaanse Medische Kosten

The reality of America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics and their resulting effects on national health care costs have been well-established — and on Thursday, a new report revealed that the public health crisis has gotten even worse in the last decade.

According to the report by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), direct and indirect health care costs associated with diabetes rose from $174 billion in 2007 to $245 billion in 2012 — an increase of 41 percent over 5 years. Only a little bit of that can be attributable to general medical inflation, which has actually been slowing down in the last couple of years. The sheer scope of the increase indicates that more and more Americans are falling prey to the disease — and it’s taking a clear toll on U.S. health care spending:

“As the number of people with diabetes grows, so does the economic burden it places on this country,” [said ADA's Chief Scientific & Medical Officer, Robert Ratner, in a statement.]

The study finds that medical expenditure for people with diabetes is about 2.3 times higher than for people who don’t have the disease and that the main driver of the increased overall financial burden on the country is the rise in proportion of the population that has the disease.

“The cost of diabetes is rising at a rate higher than overall medical costs with more than one in 10 health care dollars in the country being spent directly on diabetes and its complications, and more than one in five health care dollars in the US going to the care of people with diagnosed diabetes,” says Ratner.

Diabetes and obesity-related illnesses tend to disproportionately affect populations that are also on government-subsidized health programs — especially low-income Americans — and made up anywhere between 10 and 12 percent of all health insurance spending back in 2006. Considering the new report’s findings, that number has probably ballooned further. The study found that 64 percent of diabetes-related care, specifically, was funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and military health care programs.

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American Epidemic: Rise In Diabetes tarief is het “Main Driver ‘Of Verhoogde Amerikaanse Medische Kosten

Diabetes Drugs Spark Review

FDA Opens Safety Review of Diabetes Drugs

Read More…

American Epidemic: Rise In Diabetes Rate Is The ‘Main Driver’ Of Increased U.S. Medical Costs

The reality of America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics and their resulting effects on national health care costs have been well-established — and on Thursday, a new report revealed that the public health crisis has gotten even worse in the last decade.

According to the report by the American Diabetes Association (ADA), direct and indirect health care costs associated with diabetes rose from $174 billion in 2007 to $245 billion in 2012 — an increase of 41 percent over 5 years. Only a little bit of that can be attributable to general medical inflation, which has actually been slowing down in the last couple of years. The sheer scope of the increase indicates that more and more Americans are falling prey to the disease — and it’s taking a clear toll on U.S. health care spending:

“As the number of people with diabetes grows, so does the economic burden it places on this country,” [said ADA's Chief Scientific & Medical Officer, Robert Ratner, in a statement.]

The study finds that medical expenditure for people with diabetes is about 2.3 times higher than for people who don’t have the disease and that the main driver of the increased overall financial burden on the country is the rise in proportion of the population that has the disease.

“The cost of diabetes is rising at a rate higher than overall medical costs with more than one in 10 health care dollars in the country being spent directly on diabetes and its complications, and more than one in five health care dollars in the US going to the care of people with diagnosed diabetes,” says Ratner.

Diabetes and obesity-related illnesses tend to disproportionately affect populations that are also on government-subsidized health programs — especially low-income Americans — and made up anywhere between 10 and 12 percent of all health insurance spending back in 2006. Considering the new report’s findings, that number has probably ballooned further. The study found that 64 percent of diabetes-related care, specifically, was funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and military health care programs.

Read More…

American Epidemic: Rise In Diabetes Rate Is The ‘Main Driver’ Of Increased U.S. Medical Costs

The New Power of Memory

Memory allows for a kind of mental time travel, a way for us to picture not just the past but also a version of the future, according to a growing body of research.

The studies suggest that the purpose of memory is far more extensive than simply helping us store and recall information about what has already happened.

Researchers from University College London and Harvard University have made strides charting how memory helps us draw a mental sketch of someone’s personality and imagine how that person might behave in a future social situation. They detailed their latest findings in work published in the journal Cerebral Cortex last week.

What the scientists showed could have implications not just for those who suffer memory loss, like the elderly, but young adults and their ability to plan and socialize. The researchers are also following up what they’ve found by trying to see whether the ability to recall past events may be related to creativity and imagination.

The body of work is “broadening out our view of how we use memory,” says Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard.

This ability to imagine or anticipate what may come is important to our ability to plan and problem-solve and helps us make better decisions in social situations. The researchers also hope to uncover new ways of improving human memory.

“Using past experiences to anticipate possible future happenings” lets people weigh approaches to a coming situation without needing to try out the actual behaviors, Dr. Schacter says.

Little is known about why some people might naturally have better abilities to recall experiences or imagine future ones.

Many techniques purported to improve memory or delay cognitive decline, like word games or brain teasers, are focused on working memory, the information we hold in our head at any time. There is mixed evidence about whether they do more than improve the ability to complete a specific task.

Dr. Schacter’s group is focused on a targeted intervention for recalling past experiences, known as episodic memory, and increasing recall of details, not on improving overall memory. The initial experiment is expected to be completed this summer.

Talking to amnesiacs first hinted to researchers that recalling past experiences might be crucial for mental time travel. Along with memory loss, the patients appeared to struggle with planning.

For example, when patient K.C., whom Dr. Schacter and his graduate-school adviser, Endel Tulving, observed in the 1980s, was asked what he would do the next day, he couldn’t come up with specifics. He might say something like, “I think I’ll have breakfast,” but failed to provide any details about what he might have or where he would go, according to Dr. Schacter.

In 2007, Demis Hassabis, a research fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, and his colleagues published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing in five amnesiac patients an impoverished ability to imagine and describe future events. The finding generated much excitement in the field and has spurred more research.

Scientists have conducted many studies in the lab since showing that young, healthy adults are much better at imagining future scenarios than older people whose memories have deteriorated. Schizophrenics, who are known to have problems with memory recall, also have trouble imagining the future.

In the studies by Dr. Schacter and his colleagues, when subjects in their early-to-mid 70s were asked about past experiences or future ones, they tended to provide fewer details about people and exactly what happened. Instead, they provided more commentary and reflection, Dr. Schacter says.

For instance, when young people were asked about a shopping trip, they would say who was there and what the store looked like. Older people would say they were interested in buying a vase and why vases are nice to have in the house.

Brain-imaging studies have demonstrated that when people are asked to imagine the future as they recall past experiences, many of the same regions of the brain—the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex—show increased activity. These are also the regions that tend to show changes in aging.

The capacity to come up with detailed simulations appears to have many uses. It contributes to planning by modeling different possibilities without committing to them. Running through a number of scenarios hopefully leads us to a better option.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles found that students who engaged in detailed simulation of studying for a test—imagining all the steps involved in studying—ended up doing better on the exam than those who simply imagined doing well.

Memory also appears to play a role in imagining what someone else might be feeling, known as theory of mind, which is helpful in deciding how to behave in unfamiliar social situations, such as going to a party with a new group of friends or starting a job. People with autism, a condition characterized in part by poor social skills, tend to have poor episodic memory and also poor ability to anticipate others’ reactions or emotions.

Little is known, however, about exactly how the brain works when it is trying to imagine what is going on in someone else’s head. Dr. Hassabis, Dr. Schacter and collaborators delved into this question in their new study, in which they scanned the brains of 19 healthy adults with an average age of 21. During the scans, the doctors asked them to imagine four short scenes involving imaginary people.

First, participants were given photos and 12 statements profiling each of the four characters. Each possessed a different level of extroversion and friendliness.

After spending time familiarizing themselves with the made-up profiles, participants were asked to imagine each of the different personas in situations. For instance: How would they react if a stranger spilled a drink on them?

The researchers found that the ability to spot the different personality traits was encoded in distinct brain regions. This meant they were able to figure out which of the four profiles the participant was thinking about just by looking at what part of the brain showed greater activation when a participant was imagining a scene.

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The New Power of Memory

Deadly Bacterial Infections on the Rise

BY LAURA LANDRO

A deadly type of infection that has become difficult and sometimes impossible to treat is on the rise in American hospitals, and threatens to spread to otherwise healthy people outside of medical facilities, federal health officials said Tuesday.

The culprit is a family of germs known as enterobacteriaceae that are a normal part of the digestive system but can cause infection when they get into the bladder, blood or other areas where they don’t belong. In a report that for the first time quantifies the scope of the problem, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the germs are

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Deadly Bacterial Infections on the Rise

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

1. Routine Care, Unforgettable Bills

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.

Because Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance,” said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.

Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children.

About a week later, Stephanie had to ask her mother for $35,000 more so Sean could begin the treatment the doctors had decided was urgent. His condition had worsened rapidly since he had arrived in Houston. He was “sweating and shaking with chills and pains,” Stephanie recalls. “He had a large mass in his chest that was … growing. He was panicked.”

Nonetheless, Sean was held for about 90 minutes in a reception area, she says, because the hospital could not confirm that the check had cleared. Sean was allowed to see the doctor only after he advanced MD Anderson $7,500 from his credit card. The hospital says there was nothing unusual about how Sean was kept waiting. According to MD Anderson communications manager Julie Penne, “Asking for advance payment for services is a common, if unfortunate, situation that confronts hospitals all over the United States.”

The total cost, in advance, for Sean to get his treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy was $83,900.

Why?

The first of the 344 lines printed out across eight pages of his hospital bill — filled with indecipherable numerical codes and acronyms — seemed innocuous. But it set the tone for all that followed. It read, “1 ACETAMINOPHE TABS 325 MG.” The charge was only $1.50, but it was for a generic version of a Tylenol pill. You can buy 100 of them on Amazon for $1.49 even without a hospital’s purchasing power.

(In-Depth Video: The Exorbitant Prices of Health Care)

Dozens of midpriced items were embedded with similarly aggressive markups, like $283.00 for a “CHEST, PA AND LAT 71020.” That’s a simple chest X-ray, for which MD Anderson is routinely paid $20.44 when it treats a patient on Medicare, the government health care program for the elderly.

Every time a nurse drew blood, a “ROUTINE VENIPUNCTURE” charge of $36.00 appeared, accompanied by charges of $23 to $78 for each of a dozen or more lab analyses performed on the blood sample. In all, the charges for blood and other lab tests done on Recchi amounted to more than $15,000. Had Recchi been old enough for Medicare, MD Anderson would have been paid a few hundred dollars for all those tests. By law, Medicare’s payments approximate a hospital’s cost of providing a service, including overhead, equipment and salaries.

On the second page of the bill, the markups got bolder. Recchi was charged $13,702 for “1 RITUXIMAB INJ 660 MG.” That’s an injection of 660 mg of a cancer wonder drug called Rituxan. The average price paid by all hospitals for this dose is about $4,000, but MD Anderson probably gets a volume discount that would make its cost $3,000 to $3,500. That means the nonprofit cancer center’s paid-in-advance markup on Recchi’s lifesaving shot would be about 400%.

When I asked MD Anderson to comment on the charges on Recchi’s bill, the cancer center released a written statement that said in part, “The issues related to health care finance are complex for patients, health care providers, payers and government entities alike … MD Anderson’s clinical billing and collection practices are similar to those of other major hospitals and academic medical centers.”

The hospital’s hard-nosed approach pays off. Although it is officially a nonprofit unit of the University of Texas, MD Anderson has revenue that exceeds the cost of the world-class care it provides by so much that its operating profit for the fiscal year 2010, the most recent annual report it filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was $531 million. That’s a profit margin of 26% on revenue of $2.05 billion, an astounding result for such a service-intensive enterprise.1

The president of MD Anderson is paid like someone running a prosperous business. Ronald DePinho’s total compensation last year was $1,845,000. That does not count outside earnings derived from a much publicized waiver he received from the university that, according to the Houston Chronicle, allows him to maintain unspecified “financial ties with his three principal pharmaceutical companies.”

DePinho’s salary is nearly two and a half times the $750,000 paid to Francisco Cigarroa, the chancellor of entire University of Texas system, of which MD Anderson is a part. This pay structure is emblematic of American medical economics and is reflected on campuses across the U.S., where the president of a hospital or hospital system associated with a university — whether it’s Texas, Stanford, Duke or Yale — is invariably paid much more than the person in charge of the university.

I got the idea for this article when I was visiting Rice University last year. As I was leaving the campus, which is just outside the central business district of Houston, I noticed a group of glass skyscrapers about a mile away lighting up the evening sky. The scene looked like Dubai. I was looking at the Texas Medical Center, a nearly 1,300-acre, 280-building complex of hospitals and related medical facilities, of which MD Anderson is the lead brand name. Medicine had obviously become a huge business. In fact, of Houston’s top 10 employers, five are hospitals, including MD Anderson with 19,000 employees; three, led by ExxonMobil with 14,000 employees, are energy companies. How did that happen, I wondered. Where’s all that money coming from? And where is it going? I have spent the past seven months trying to find out by analyzing a variety of bills from hospitals like MD Anderson, doctors, drug companies and every other player in the American health care ecosystem.

When you look behind the bills that Sean Recchi and other patients receive, you see nothing rational — no rhyme or reason — about the costs they faced in a marketplace they enter through no choice of their own. The only constant is the sticker shock for the patients who are asked to pay.

Yet those who work in the health care industry and those who argue over health care policy seem inured to the shock. When we debate health care policy, we seem to jump right to the issue of who should pay the bills, blowing past what should be the first question: Why exactly are the bills so high?

What are the reasons, good or bad, that cancer means a half-million- or million-dollar tab? Why should a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out to be indigestion bring a bill that can exceed the cost of a semester of college? What makes a single dose of even the most wonderful wonder drug cost thousands of dollars? Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car? And what is so different about the medical ecosystem that causes technology advances to drive bills up instead of down?

Recchi’s bill and six others examined line by line for this article offer a closeup window into what happens when powerless buyers — whether they are people like Recchi or big health-insurance companies — meet sellers in what is the ultimate seller’s market.

The result is a uniquely American gold rush for those who provide everything from wonder drugs to canes to high-tech implants to CT scans to hospital bill-coding and collection services. In hundreds of small and midsize cities across the country — from Stamford, Conn., to Marlton, N.J., to Oklahoma City — the American health care market has transformed tax-exempt “nonprofit” hospitals into the towns’ most profitable businesses and largest employers, often presided over by the regions’ most richly compensated executives. And in our largest cities, the system offers lavish paychecks even to midlevel hospital managers, like the 14 administrators at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who are paid over $500,000 a year, including six who make over $1 million.

Taken as a whole, these powerful institutions and the bills they churn out dominate the nation’s economy and put demands on taxpayers to a degree unequaled anywhere else on earth. In the U.S., people spend almost 20% of the gross domestic product on health care, compared with about half that in most developed countries. Yet in every measurable way, the results our health care system produces are no better and often worse than the outcomes in those countries.

According to one of a series of exhaustive studies done by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, we spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia. We may be shocked at the $60 billion price tag for cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy. We spent almost that much last week on health care. We spend more every year on artificial knees and hips than what Hollywood collects at the box office. We spend two or three times that much on durable medical devices like canes and wheelchairs, in part because a heavily lobbied Congress forces Medicare to pay 25% to 75% more for this equipment than it would cost at Walmart.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 10 of the 20 occupations that will grow the fastest in the U.S. by 2020 are related to health care. America’s largest city may be commonly thought of as the world’s financial-services capital, but of New York’s 18 largest private employers, eight are hospitals and four are banks. Employing all those people in the cause of curing the sick is, of course, not anything to be ashamed of. But the drag on our overall economy that comes with taxpayers, employers and consumers spending so much more than is spent in any other country for the same product is unsustainable. Health care is eating away at our economy and our treasury.

The health care industry seems to have the will and the means to keep it that way. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical and health-care-product industries, combined with organizations representing doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, health services and HMOs, have spent $5.36 billion since 1998 on lobbying in Washington. That dwarfs the $1.53 billion spent by the defense and aerospace industries and the $1.3 billion spent by oil and gas interests over the same period. That’s right: the health-care-industrial complex spends more than three times what the military-industrial complex spends in Washington.

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Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us

Health And Beauty For Women – Facebook Page

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From our FAQs.

Why are we seeing a resurgence of Ayurveda?

Today’s patient equipped with knowledge from the Internet, is a much more informed patient. This allows her to be an equal partner in the treatment process rather than the recipient of instructions given by the health care provider.

Not only is the patient seeking wellness, but is also seeking an affordable way to get well. We are seeing in many nations around the world (especially in the United States), health care has become a luxury not all can afford. Large swathes of populations are being left out of the health care safety net.

If health care is not affordable, the treatments method, is not doing a service to humanity – it is only serving a select few.

Ayurveda’s resurgence can largely be attributed to this informed, and empowered care seeker who asks for affordability in staying healthy.

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Ayurveda Remedies For Diabetes

Ayurveda Remedies – for Diabetes

Ayurveda has many remedies to care for Diabetes patients. In Ayurveda diabetes is known as Madhumeha or Prameha. Ayurveda identifies 20 types of diabetes – 4 types of Vata Pradhan Prameha, 6 types of Pitta Prameha and 10 types of Kapha Prameha.

Top Ayurveda Remedies for Diabetes  – Best treatment varies based on the patients individual body constitution and stage of diabetes.

• Gurmar Leaves (Gymnema sylvestrae) is the best and primary herb for all types of Diabetic medicines in Ayurveda.
• Bitter gourd is another remedy for diabetes. Drinking bitter gourd juice daily can reduce blood sugar levels in  blood and urine.
• Having bitter gourd cooked in ghee for a period of three months may be able to bring the sugar level down by a significant amount.
• A tablespoon of Indian gooseberry juice mixed with a pinch of turmeric powder in in, taken daily for two months will enable the pancreas to secrete insulin.
• Drinking a glass of water with tulsi leaves, neem leaves and belpatras daily helps in keeping diabetic complications due to infections under control.
• Mixture of  Fenugreek seeds, turmeric powder and white pepper – Taken one teaspoon of this powder daily can help in balancing diabetic complications on lower body muscles and blood related infections.
• Drinking 2 glasses of water from a copper vessel in the morning can help subside allergies and increase immunity in Diabetic patients.

Ayurveda Remedies For Diabetes

Pancha Karma -

Complete Detoxification

And Rejuvenation

Pancha Karma simply means five actions. Actions to balance body and mind. It has to be accompanied by Purva Karma i.e. pre-actions and Pashchat Karma i.e. post-actions to get the best results. As per Ayurveda, let us define all three stages:

Purva Karma – There are two Purva Karmas to be done as preparation of Pancha Karma.

1. Abhyanga or Snehana – Therapeutic Oil Massage
2. Swedana – Fomentation

Snehana is to help the doshas or toxins to move into the alimentary tract from the extremities for easy evacuation. It is done in two forms – internally and externally. Ghee is mainly used for Snehana in general for internal snehana. However, depending on body constitution and specific health conditions, certain oils can also be used for snehana.
Swedana or Fomentation is to dilate channels in the body to facilitate the movement of the ama towards the Koshta (alimentary canal). It is also to help in the liquifaction of doshas; it is given after Abhyanga or massaging the body, so after the seventh day of oleation.

Now Panchakarma are to be done as follows:

1. Vamana

2. Virechana

3.  Basti

4. Nasya

5. Shirodhara

The above Panchakarma is to be done using appropriate oils, herbs and syrups. Shirodhara can be done by using, milk, herbal teas, yogurt or buttermilk.

After the Pradhan Karmas or Panchakarma, Pashchat Karma are also important. Certain dietary supplements and syrups are important as final balancing of Doshas. This process brings harmony, health and peace for long long time. Pancha Karma done with proper measures and indications give complete rejuvenation. One can feel younger by 20 years by getting complete Pancha Karma process and one can get rid of painful chronic disorders such as Arthitis, Asthma, Diabetes, Hypertension, Obesity, Psoriasis and different types of allergies.

Our success stories in treating above through Pancha Karma are many. We would like you to share your experiences with us. We welcome your comments and open for discussions at  doctor@ayurvedagroup.com.