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If Slow Is Good For Food, Why Not Medicine?

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Maybe you've heard about the slow food movement. Maybe you're a devotee.

The idea is that cooking, nutrition and eating should be intentional, mindful and substantive. Avoid fast food and highly processed grub. For the slow food set, the process is as important as the product.

Now I'm seeing a medical version of slow food. The concept is bubbling up in response to industrialized, hypertechnological and often unnecessary medical care that drives up costs and leaves both doctors and patients frazzled.

As a teacher of medical students and residents, I find myself pulled between two contradictory poles. I want new doctors to be efficient so that they can survive in the real world of medical practice, which breaks our time into eight-minute increments. But I also want them to take the time to think through their actions and consider potential consequences.

Slow medicine adherents will be quick to tell you that the vast majority of CT scans ordered in emergency departments are of little value, most of the time adding only unnecessary cost and radiation risks for patients. Antibiotics for colds are another example of harmful waste. They don't work for viruses, and patients who take antibiotics are more likely to develop resistant bacteria, diarrhea and other symptoms that lead to avoidable office visits and hospitalizations.

As I've learned more about slow medicine, I've found it comes in many flavors.

One variety geared to geriatrics is exemplified by family doctor and author Dennis McCullough. He argues that in caring for the elderly, we doctors need to slow down and think twice about treatments we might reflexively offer younger folks, like medication for blood pressure, which can cause older patients to faint. Doctors also have to take extra care to avoid sending the frail into a medical-industrial complex that frequently causes unintended harm think bedsores, falls and hospital-acquired infections.

Another vision of slow medicine is advocated by Victoria Sweet, whose two decades spent working at a hospital outside San Francisco taught her the value of low-tech, high-touch medical care for society's poorest patients. For Sweet, slow medicine incorporates the medieval view of the human body as a garden to be tended rather than a machine to be fixed.

At her hospital, a throwback to almshouses of old, severely ill patients sometimes stayed for years, and were slowly nursed back to health. Admittedly, this is an ideal that can't be easily copied because it's so expensive. But I find it is both possible and therapeutic to spend more quiet time with patients, away from the distractions of computers.

In searching for ways to teach the essence of slow medicine to new doctors, I was fortunate to come across what is perhaps its newest flavor: a running correspondence from two physicians driven to find hard evidence for the best approaches to medical practice. Their emails have sparked a nationwide conversation among doctors about costs, the limits of scientific proof and yes the art of medicine.

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If Slow Is Good For Food, Why Not Medicine?

ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS: Food is medicine

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

In todays society, everyone seems to know that a healthy diet is key to maintaining good health, whether we choose to do it or not. But a connection that seems more difficult for people to make is that food is actually medicine. That is, your food is your medicine if it enhances your health; but it can actually be a poison if we consume things that destroy the healthy functioning of the mind and body.

The thinking around food and medicine seems to be caught up in the notion that medicine can cure you in a short time. We are accustomed as a society to alleviating uncomfortable symptoms with a pill, so the medical profession has become a pill-pushing mill, bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry. It has produced a system in which the connection between diet and health are paid mere lip service, while the industrys economics center on hawking an ever-expanding menu of new drugs promising to cure whatever ails us.

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This system of drug-based medicine is also deeply ingrained in the insurance system, which pays for drugs to supposedly cure problems, but very rarely finances the much cheaper alternative promoting fresh healthy foods that would probably prevent most of the prevalent chronic diseases that plague the population.

Lets not even start with the FDA a labyrinthine bureaucracy that tries to regulate the distribution of foods and pharmaceuticals to the consumer. One cannot overstate the corrupting influence of corporate food producers and big pharmaceutical companies over how the FDA inspects, regulates and analyzes the food we consume. One look at the shelves in any major supermarket is all the proof you need to know that when it comes to your health, the FDA is often part of the problem.

We have to get back to square one. The father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, was credited with the saying, let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food. But a point of clarification is needed here. What passes as food these days processed and packaged products filled with preservatives and artificial ingredients is not what Hippocrates envisioned when he was talking about food. A growing number of studies in recent years should put to rest the notion that artificial sweeteners and fats have any place in a healthy diet. And yet the standard American diet is filled with so many of them aspartame, trans-fats, modified sodium, concentrated sugars that the American palate can scarce recognize, much less appreciate what real food tastes like any more.

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If you have any doubt whatsoever that food can be a drug, take a trip down to your local strip mall and look some of the stuff that passes as food: cheese-stuffed Doritos, a sandwich made of fried chicken and bacon, a supersized cherry soda, a pepperoni pizza with a crust made of chicken parts. If it werent for the genius marketing around these products, if people know these products by their ingredients, the very thought of eating them would make most people nauseous.

A recent study by Israels the Weizmann Institute of Science showed that low-calorie sugar substitutes produced alarming changes in body chemistry, including glucose resistance, weight gain, and diminished organ function, even when consumed over a relatively short period of time. These substances are prevalent in many supposedly health-oriented diet products, including soft drinks, cereals and desserts. The Weizmann Institute study also found that natural sugars found in fresh fruits and vegetables produced no such effects, even in large quantities.

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ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS: Food is medicine

Penn Medicine Researchers Announce Latest Results of Investigational Cellular Therapy CTL019

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EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL: Abstract #380: 10 a.m. PST, Saturday, Dec. 6 Abstract #1982 and #1983: 5:30 p.m. PST, Saturday, Dec. 6 Abstracts #3087 and #2296: 6:00 p.m. PST, Sunday, Dec. 7

Newswise SAN FRANCISCO The latest results of clinical trials of more than 125 patients testing an investigational personalized cellular therapy known as CTL019 will be presented by a University of Pennsylvania research team at the 56th American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition. Highlights of the new trial results will include a response rate of more than 90 percent among pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients, and results from the first lymphoma trials testing the approach, including a 100 percent response rate among follicular lymphoma patients and 45 percent response rate among those with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

We have now treated more than 125 patients in our trials of the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy CTL019, and with each patient, we learn more and more about the potential of this therapy, said the research teams leader, Carl June, MD, the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in Penns Perelman School of Medicine, and director of Translational Research in the Abramson Cancer Center. We are continuing to refine our approach to ensure the best outcomes for patients who may be eligible for this experimental therapy, and we hope our findings will contribute to the emerging field of cellular therapy as a whole.

This personalized cellular therapy approach begins with patients own immune cells, collected through a procedure similar to dialysis. The cells are then engineered in a laboratory and infused back into patients bodies after being trained to hunt and kill their cancer cells. All patients who enroll in the trials have cancers that have progressed despite multiple conventional therapies.

Updated results of a CTL019 trial for children and young adults with relapsed, treatment-resistant acute lymphocytic leukemia who were treated at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia (Abstract #380) includes data on 39 patients. The findings, which will be presented by Stephan Grupp, MD, PhD, the Yetta Deitch Novotny Professor of Pediatrics and director of Translational Research in the Center for Childhood Cancer Research at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, build on the teams report on 25 pediatric and five adult patients which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October.

Thirty six of 39 children (92 percent) achieved a complete response (CR) after receiving an infusion of the modified cells. After a median follow-up of six months, more than two-thirds (70 percent) of children who responded remained in remission and 75 percent were alive, including the first patient to receive the therapy, in the spring of 2012. These results were achieved with only 3 of the patients going on to receive stem cell transplant while in remission.

All pediatric patients who responded to the therapy experienced a cytokine release syndrome (CRS) within a few days after receiving their infusions a key indicator that the engineered cells have begun proliferating and killing tumor cells in the body, but also a known potentially lethal type of toxicity. Patients who experience a CRS typically have varying degrees of flu-like symptoms, with high fevers, nausea, muscle pain, and sometimes, low blood pressure and breathing difficulties. Some patients require treatment with anti-cytokine agents and steroids to manage these symptoms.

The research team will also report the first results of a CTL019 study of patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHL) (Abstract #3087). In patients with follicular lymphoma (FL) or diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL) who received infusions of CTL019, assessments at three months after treatment revealed that all five FL patients (100 percent) and five out of 11 DLBCL patients (45 percent) responded to the therapy, including complete responses in four patients (80 percent) with FL and four patients (36 percent) with DLBCL. All patients who received infusions developed varying degrees of CRS. The longest complete response durations are ongoing, at 8.8 months for DLBCL and 7.4 months for FL; all other responses continue, as well. The findings will be presented by Jakub Svoboda, MD, an assistant professor of Medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center, on behalf of the Lymphoma Program under the leadership of the studys principal investigator, Stephen J. Schuster, MD, the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Associate Professor of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Lymphoma.

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Penn Medicine Researchers Announce Latest Results of Investigational Cellular Therapy CTL019

Genetics Policy Institute (GPI) and the Regenerative Medicine Foundation (RMF) Announce Merger Plan – Video

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Genetics Policy Institute (GPI) and the Regenerative Medicine Foundation (RMF) Announce Merger Plan
The Genetics Policy Institute (GPI), producer of the annual World Stem Cell Summit, and the Regenerative Medicine Foundation (RMF) have agreed to merge in order to leverage their resources...

By: worldstemcell

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Genetics Policy Institute (GPI) and the Regenerative Medicine Foundation (RMF) Announce Merger Plan - Video

Medicine Hat 5, Everett 2

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Published: Friday, December 5, 2014, 11:02 p.m.

That was a fun game to watch.

Medicine Hat has a really good team, and the Tigers have played the same style for as long as I can remember. Medicine Hat always has a bunch of small, fast forwards, and they aren't just fast of foot, they play a fast game as they're constantly moving the puck. It makes for very entertaining hockey.

Everett actually outshot the Tigers 31-16, and I thought the Tips played pretty well. But this game sure didn't feel like that shot differential as Medicine Hat had plenty of the puck.

Medicine Hat's first line and top two defensive pairs are dynamite. The line of Trevor Cox, Cole Sanford and Steve Owre has so much speed and quickness, and it took a while for the Tips to adjust to that. By the time they did, the Tigers had a 3-0 lead.

Everett nearly got itself back into it (see below), and we got an old-school Kevin Constantine moment as he pulled his goaltender with 5:33 remaining. But the Tips couldn't turn pressure into goals late, and the empty netter made the final margin deceiving.

TURNING POINT

Trailing 3-0, Everett scored power-play goals 1:21 apart late in the second period to get back within one and grab momentum. All the Tips needed to do was get through the rest of the period without giving up a goal. But Everett couldn't even get through the next shift. The Tips had chances to clear the defensive zone, but didn't, and the Tigers made them pay as Cox one-timed a shot from the top of the circle into the top corner, immediately bringing Everett's momentum to a halt.

THREE STARS

First star: Cox. Three goals and one assist, he was impressive.

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Medicine Hat 5, Everett 2

Southwest Symposium – Integrative Medicine Continuing Education Conference – Video

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Southwest Symposium - Integrative Medicine Continuing Education Conference
Southwest Symposium - Spirit of the Medicine May 7-11, 2015 Learn about the Southwest Symposium, an integrative health continuing education conference that offers continuing education credit...

By: AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine

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Southwest Symposium - Integrative Medicine Continuing Education Conference - Video

Point-of-care Lung Ultrasound for Anesthesia, Intensive Care, and Emergency Medicine – Video

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Point-of-care Lung Ultrasound for Anesthesia, Intensive Care, and Emergency Medicine
Lung Ultrasound for Pneumothorax Detection. Based on International Consensus Conference on Lung Ultrasound. Volpicelli et al. Intensive Care Med. 2012.

By: ThomasEdrich

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Point-of-care Lung Ultrasound for Anesthesia, Intensive Care, and Emergency Medicine - Video

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Returns…With a Funny or Die Twist!

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Dr. Quinn is back! Sort of. Thanks to Funny or Die, we now know what a gritty Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reboot would like. It's Dr. Quinn meets Breaking Bad.

She is the one who knocks.

Jane Seymour reprised her Emmy-nominated role for the new video and she was joined by several of her former costars including Joe Lando, Jonelle Allen and Chad Allen. We're getting some serious 1990s nostalgia over here!

Dr. Quinn was known for using morphinehey, it was the mid-1800s after allso what happens when all the townsfolk become addicts? She slaps on a pair of Walter White-esque glasses and embraces her new drug lord persona, as TV characters are known to do.

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The original Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman series ran for six seasons from 1993-1998. Two TV movies were produced after cancellation, one in 1999 and one in 2001.

Rest easy, in Dr. Quinn, Morphine Woman Dr. Quinn and Sully are still together and Sully has not cut his hair. Phew.

This is just the latest TV spoof for Funny or Die. Videos recently featured Ellen Page and Kate Mara as the stars of Tiny Detectives,Jane Krakowski auditioning for Peter Pan Live! and Uzo Aduba's Orange Is the New Black audition.

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Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman Returns...With a Funny or Die Twist!

Bone Marrow Stem Cell Treatment (BMAC) for Knee Osteoarthritis – Mayo Clinic – Video

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Bone Marrow Stem Cell Treatment (BMAC) for Knee Osteoarthritis - Mayo Clinic
Shane Shapiro, M.D., orthopedic physician at Mayo Clinic in Florida, discusses a regenerative medicine clinical research trial to treat knee arthritis, which is the bone marrow stem cell treatment...

By: Mayo Clinic

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Bone Marrow Stem Cell Treatment (BMAC) for Knee Osteoarthritis - Mayo Clinic - Video


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