on Evidence Based Medicine

Medicine or drug? Western? The ideal or your ideal body temperature? Diagnosis = guesses? Below are some of my quick comments on the above.

A Lasik patient advocacy

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Wholesome solution is lacking

A recent experience on the imbalance of modern medical therapy approach. Son is coughing and some kind of smoke treatment is given, but son doesn't like it. However, as the nurse stressed we have to insist, and anyway, the medicine has already been dispensed, i.e. paid for. Thus, we forcefully held son throughout the process.

Later, we were asked to buy a very simplify and easy to use equipment, which is also used for asthma, for the similar purpose. Too bad, we didn't manage to use it because the earlier incident has left a terrible impression and son is unwilling to sniff it. We are also very unwilling to hurt our bond with him.

Between spiritual/social and physical, I value the former much more.

KPI

Recently I have some thoughts about KPI. KPI is a quantifiable measure to reflect progress. To progress is the real objective. To have a nice KPI is not. If there is progress but KPI doesn't reflect, the KPI needs to be tuned or changed. On the other hand, if there is no progress or even regress but KPI suggests progress, then more important to correct the KPI.

However, very often, attaining a nice KPI became ...
the objective instead, while the real objective was forgotten. I am seeing this happening all over the places, in different fields, from education (test/exams), management, and etc. Here, lets just look at fever.

Fever in itself is not bad.

The so called western medicine is also termed as evidence based medicine. It has its strength as drugs are tested. The problem is the limitation of tests. Usually, they are targeted at a single symptom. Furthermore, may even only based on one or very limited quantitative measures of the symptom. A typical example is body temperature. As time passes, the measure is being seen as the problem. Instead of focusing on restoring health, it became focusing on restoring these measurements.

By the way, 37 degree Celcius, the so called normal body temperature is actually the average temperature. Each individual probably has his/her own normal body temperature.

A bit late when we see symptoms on skin

Ironically, the 7 Cream with Manuka Honey description starts with:

The develpoment of 7 Cream may seem like something of a contradiction because I have stressed many times on this site that the healing of skin conditions has to come from within.

I agree. What we see on the skin is similar to ... the iceberg we see on the surface of the ocean. However, as the site name is Natural-Skin-Health.com, it is worthwhile to make a visit there.

Post Sponsored by Natural-Skin-Health.com

A plaster on a face means...

A scene from a cartoon show a little kid with a plaster on his face. The character is some kind of heroic type. Thus, by drawing that plaster on his face should mean to suggest that he is rugged.

However, to me, I think otherwise ... . Drawing a cut on his face should suggest rugged, while a plaster suggests he requires care for little wounds.

Knowing the ideal and trying to do achieve it are good. However, ensuring the ideal at all instances may be unwise. After we, humans, learned about germs and bacteria, we know that what seems clean is actually not. Now, we know the ideal of clean is when even these invisible to naked eyes germs and bacteria aren't around.

Then, we behave in more hygienic ways. Keeping clean has quite a different meaning since then. So, we have been trying to achieve the state of clean.

Then, we invented ways to kill all these. By pasting plaster over little cuts so that any germs there can be killed by the chemicals, we achieve the ideal at the wound. That, I think is somehow over doing it.

I think that behind all the sciences is the acknowledgment that all existences are results from design. I trust our designer much more than human inventors and inventions.

Nature has its reasons

A research found that preterm birth tied to lifelong problems. The researcher said the re­search raises an im­por­tant ques­tion con­cern­ing the long-term ef­fects of ad­vanc­es in pre­na­tal and ne­o­na­tal care. “Preterm sur­viv­al is im­prov­ing now be­cause of in­ter­ven­tions we have in preg­nan­cy and ne­o­na­tal care. How­ev­er ... something looks good may not be good.
, it may be that we’re im­prov­ing sur­viv­al while ad­versely af­fect­ing the over­all health and qual­ity of life in the long run.”

In many things, Nature has its reasons, which many of them we are not aware and even dislike them. Recently, I think more people start to realize that fever is not a bad thing as it is the way our body handle illness. Getting rid of fever might be an act welcome by the causing agents of the illness.

Thus, for people who want to act smart by giving birth earlier for conveniency, think thrice to the power of many thrices! If ending our life prematurely is wrong, terminating a life in the womb prematurely should be equally wrong!

Computer computes

I always feel that a very basic advantage brought by the use of computers is under utilized. Computers do calculations well, and they can easily do complicated conditional computations. Here, it was only after months of motorists slowing down and waiting before ERP gantries then the system of gradual increase and decrease of ERP charges was implemented.

I like this approach, the 15by2015 ... 15by2015 - A Campaign to Strengthen Primary Healthcare Around the World. Most administration procedures seem to remain in the pre-computer era where rules are clear and simple. Follow the link to read how a patient has to pay 7 days of hospital stay because he was fortunately not having HIV, because AIDS/HIV related donations will pay for him if he were HIV positive. This is quite typical in many administrative procedures.

I hope the number 15% is just a guideline, while it can be 17.98% or any more optimal figures since computer does not require a nice number in order to do the calculations correctly.

Furthermore, I suggest a minimum portion of such donations be used for education and prevention.

Four stretch mark creams recommended by Diva

Diva, who works in a hair and skin salon, created this blog about skin care. She (I guessed) is sharing her knowledge, experience, and performances of products used by her clients. She just posted a review on stretch mark creams. You may wonder why I, being a guy, choose to talk about stretch marks. My first reason is my wife is having this problem and so I would like to know more, and indeed Diva's blog is a good start for me. On further reading, I realized that I had the impression that stretch marks only happen to pregnant women, but I was wrong. Any fat guy or gal who managed to slim down can have it.

I guess it is a bit late for my wife to prevent stretch marks now, but hopefully during the next pregnancy. Nevertheless, I know of this good source for skin care products review and recommendation. Find out why Revitol stretch mark cream won the first ranking in her review, and also which the other three of the four best creams are.

In addition, you can read about others' experiences and solutions in the comments, and you are welcome to share your knowledge if you are also good in skin care.

This is a sponsored review.

Change heart

Just read this news, Hearts from cadavers beat anew: study.

How about temporarily replace one's heart with an artificial heart, decellularise it, get it back to life, put it back into the body.

It is getting less incentive for doctors to teach the public how to live healthily.

One for all and All for One

Is vaccine for you? Actually, most people had it without saying yes, or even ever had had this question in their head. However, in this era, what's the chance that you will be infected if you were not vaccinated? The chance could be very low for certain infections that certain vaccines are designed for. So, should someone then say, "It isn't for me."

Some years back I heard a discussion regarding should individual choice or rights be ignored for the sake of welfare of the population, and make it compulsory for all to be vaccinated?

In 18 Dec 07 TodayOnline's article: a 56 year-old man said: "It's not for me … It's good for single, young men only. Elder and married men like me who have only one partner are more decent and safe." If a person is safe, there isn't any big different to go for the test, other than the extra few dollars to pay. If only "more" decent and safe, i.e. not 100% safe, isn't it good to be tested? And, even if you have only one partner, not questioning faithfulness, but you can't know for sure if your partner is also decent and safe.

Also, another 54 year-old man said: "Testing isn't for me — the more you know, the more problems there will be." This is similar to choosing not to be vaccinated because somebody would rather die if infected. However, this is not about a single person's life, but about avoiding potential epidemic of infectious diseases that can cause much much more lives.

So, one test for the benefits of all, and all live properly for the benefit of One Human Race.

Bacteria

Amazing! There are 10 times more baterial cells in us than our own cells!

Finally, scientists are starting to look at health in more than a single dimension and single direction manner. Many ancient concepts of health are about balance, while the modern concepts have been more single ended.

Bacteria may seem bad, but without it is also bad.
Check this out: Hacking Your Body's Bacteria for Better Health

Illness and healing

Recently, I'm reading a book about natural healing. It is very encouraging to me because my beliefs and thoughts all along have been echoed exactly and more by the author. I might have mentioned before, my view on oriental/traditional treatment to illness verses the western medicine is that the formal basically focus on enhancing our body built-in system to recover while the latter treat our body as a dumb biological machine. This is also related to another observation that strategies to achieve seemingly best short-term objectives or I called them greedy algorithms, are usually not the best way and probably one of the worst approaches.

Furthermore, many of the perceived to be illnesses are not illnesses, but signs of our body immune system repairing the damages, such as fever, running nose and non-life-threatening inflammatory such as most cuts. Thus, you may want to re-think about should you force fever away by ice or western medication, retain the stuff in your nose rather than letting them out or applying anti-inflammatory on wounds.