These clinics have the potential benefit of helping those who can walk or transport themselves so that they experience a sense of "normalcy" and avoid being isolated. It is also cheaper than having a nurse driving around all day.

One of the major issues faced here are leg ulcers. A condition where because of either bad circulation or trauma, ulcers appear on the patients lower legs (chins). This is very painful and often ends in a long healing process. Some patients have these ulcers for years, healing one then getting another or repeatedly opening the old one.
Because of the nature of the healing proces the wound is actually preventing itself from healing properly. After an initial surge of coagulants and blood to the wound the body begins to produce fibrin to make a scab over the area. In cronic leg ulcers, this temporary "shield" meant for keeping the area moist on the inside but dry and hard on the outside, just sits in the wound and gets in the way of the new tissue. Traditionally this is scraped away by a nurse and the wound is filled with a wet gel to inhibit the production of new fibrin. But the gel is also a very hospitable place for bacteria to grow, thus increasing the risk of infection. On top of that the body also produces certain proteins that inhibit regrowth after some time. Thus making the wound a stagnant mess.

After treating several of this ulcers, I began to recall something I'd seen in one of my podcasts. A new compound that was meant to inhibit the body's production of inflammation proteins and speeding up recovery tremendously.

The compound is called Nexagon and after an initial clinical test has been shown to speed up healing 6x. It also seems help close the wound completely, so recurring ulcers don't come back.
At the moment the company making it is doing their second clinical trial so this is still something to look out for in the future. The company is called CoDa Therapeutics Inc.

I for one am really looking forward to something like this coming to marked.

                               Make informed choices

Recently I have been in practice at an Orthopedic Ward, a Trauma Ward. Here all the Patients who have broken any part of their body's bonestructure get admitted after going through the Emergency Room.
A huge number of them have surgeries to fix the broken bones and realign them. This is very traumatic surgery, since the surgeons offen have to break the bone to set it back in position again.

Seeing these patients with casts and crutches has made me think just how far we've come with being able to get people back to their lives, instead of being sick. We used to have people with broken legs lying in a bed until it was completely healed. Meaning you where bedridden for up to 8-10 weeks.
Now they are home within days and getting their routines back.

Much worse of are the people who end up with spinal cord injuries. Sudden loss of limb function is not easy. But getting them on their feet has so far been impossible. So we've put them in wheelchairs and just said "roll".
The new technologies being developed by the military, intended to add substantial strength to otherwise ordinary soldiers. Has proven a great resource for the field of rehabilitation.

We are taking baby steps, but the tecnologi is here and getting better daily.

What I'm talking about is the evention called eLegs. It is an exosceleton that mimics the motion of walking simply by assessing the motion the wearer makes. This has all sorts of positive benefits for a patient.

Getting the muscles activated actually limits and withholds some of the muscle mass that you loose from not using the limb. Your digestive system is essentially triggered by body movement, so indegestion will be a problem no more.
The major benifit is that with this system, you would be able to live a life fairly similar to the one you had before the accident.

I can't wait to see what this turns into and how soon it will be comercially available. I think we'll see this in rehabilitation facilities very soon.

Thank you Cali Lewis for showing me this.

              Make informed choices.

The background story is that Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study in the Lancet (a British medical journal) in 1998 claiming that there was a direct link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Shortly after it was published it became the main political weapon for lobbyists trying to stop vaccinations. In 2004 however the study was scrutinised and they found that the doctor had major biases in his study.
He was infact funded directly by the very lobbyist organisations who wanted the link to be there. He also worked unethically in the involvement of children in this study.

Now 6 years later the Lancet has retracted the study and deem it not peer reviewed. This means that the medical community finally has an opportunity to rectify the superstitions and misinformation a lot of parents make their decisions upon.

I am really exited that this study has been revoked. For vaccinations to have any effect the percentage of the population getting them has to be above 90 percent. This is hard to do when studies like this one, blown out of proportion by the media, makes parents choose not to have their children vaccinated.
The most recent scare surrounding vaccinations was the amount of mercury used as a preservative in them.

The really interesting thing about this preservative is that its not even mercury directly. It has mercury in its structure but only in trace amounts. The product is called Thiomersal and has never been used in MMR vaccines or any other routine vaccines. In several studies it has been proven to be processed by the liver much more easily than mercury itself and there has also been studies shoving that baby and small children are better at excreting it than adults. So in other words the scary consequences of getting a vaccination are about as lethal as eating a regular sized fatty fish (salmon and such).
This ethyl mercury compound has been used in vaccines, skin treatments (creams and so on) and even tattoo inks. It has been phased out of almost all vaccines already and the final few are rarely used and only on adults.

So my point is.

Get your children vaccinated, for their sakes and all the other children around them. Just cut back on fish that week.

                 Make informed choices

Writing this on a PC actually feels kind of morally wrong. But it just so happens that being a student doesn't really allow you to be choosy when you want a gaming machine as well as a laptop. So I have both, a PC for all the not so serious stuff and a Mac for the real deal.

What I bring on this Blog has so far been a mix between personal opinion and more current technical, nursing related stuff. What I've tried to do is divide those up so its easier to distinguish between them.

Ok so for the actual post I have, like a lot of others recently, been presented with the new concept from Apple with its iPad. The idea is not new, we've seen tablets from most of the major manufactures for about 6 months now. What I like about the iPad is that it is just that, an Apple product.
This mean that it's thouroghly tested and designed for maximum ease of use for consumers.

Using the concept from the iPhone and putting it on a bigger screen is genius.
The product itself looks like this and features a screen about the size of a piece of regular A4 paper.
If you've tried an iPhone or iPod Touch, you've tried the controls for this as well.
This makes it far more intuitive than any other tablet out there.

What I find so exiting is that this is just exactly what is needed in nursing today. A way to log your patients information, chedule and symptoms from something portable, light and user friendly.
The only thing that is needed are applications that meet this goal. Some of the applications out there, like this one help nurses get a quick overview of diceases and symptoms when they are with the patient. The great thing would be to have the hospitals electronic patient information right at your fingertips when you need it.
Because of the very open SDK given by apple, its almost as easy as dragging and dropping buttons to make one such application. I for one therefor have high hopes that this will be the future in pervasive healthcare.

Another great use of this hardware is that it is so intuitive that showing grafs or patient data to the patient will be no hassle, as you can choose just exactly how you want it to be shown. Rather than current methods based on an exstensive medical knowledge and subsequent translation for the nurse.

Make informed choices.

In Videnskabens Verden they recently had a show dedicated to this subject. Bringing up a very interesting test of light on a radiology department at a major Danish hospital. (Rigshospitalet)
The show is available here but to best understand and appreciate it, you have to have a rudimentary understanding of Danish.

In the show they interview a leading Danish physiology professor and a doctor at the test ward.

The effect light has on our bodies is more profound than originally anticipated. The way our eyes interpret light hasn't changed since before fire was invented. Your body therefore wants to get up when its light enough to see and go to bed when its to dark to functionally do things. This hasn't changed, but the way we artificially create light has. The current 24 hour day, where you simply turn on a switch to extend your day has had a great effect on our sleeping patterns. We sleep increasingly less, and get stressed much more easily. Although it hasn't been proven yet, much of the research into the effect of sleep on your general mental health suggests that night is the time to recuperate and "heal" the brain. Without sleep you end up having too much stored, but not filed away, that you get stressed even dealing with small stimuli.
The experiment at Rigshospitalet is to change the way light is used during the day. Challenging the way we think about using light. The suggestion is to increase light from artificial sources in sync with the surrounding sunlight. This means that at noon the highest brightness is achieved, and at midnight the lowest intensity. The span between these to is held within the spectrum of tolerable light so as to keep the space occupied workable. One more feature is to move some of the light so that you achieve shadows as if the source was a window. This helps the brain to relax and distinguish shapes more easily, the previous method of trying to light every single surface has actually been hurtful the the way our brain interprets light.
They emphasised that you also need more of the blue spectrum of light that we have been using. Blue is harsher than the more soothing red light, given off by candles for instance, but stimulates more of the brain. Lastly they talked about the way darkness effects us. When darkness falls the brain produces a hormone called Melatonin that in effect is the exact opposite of adrenalin, it makes your body sleepy and also start the recuperation processes.

What I find interesting about this is that the place it has been implemented first is at a hospital ward. The way shifts are handled here with people coming to work either at 7 am, 3 pm or 11 pm, you naturally have someone coming in during the night for an extended period of time. This is actually not a big issue since giving your body time to reajust to a new cycle makes it easier to go back to daytime. Changing between the two frequently is where the hazard lies. Giving you the equivalent of jet lag each and every week.
By dimming the light at night, not making it too dark to work of course, and changing the light according to the outside intensity, you get a more natural feeling of light in the building and your rest/work cycles is much better.

In the experiment they had very big light fixture with both blue and red light bulbs (here actually as the long version, usually about 3 feet in length, coated with a film that either allows more blue or red light through.) attached to the center of the room, making shadows appear in the corners. In the windows they installed a sensor that measured the outside light, changing when its cloudy or the sun shone freely. A dimmer in the light fixture controlled 4 of the bulbs (2 blue and 2 red) independently and together to change the spectrum and intensity of the emitted light.
Personally I'd love to see the result for myself as I think this project has big promise. It would ease the tension most hospital stays can cause.

Lastly I'd really like to try this in my own home, making sure that you get proper sleep is apparently far more crutial than I thought.

Make informed choices

In Denmark as in many countries, we have universal health care. A system I'm going to be a part of as a nurse.
The debate that has been going on here is that the amount of vaccine has been set to a limit.

The government has bought enough vaccines for 3 mio. people. Denmark's current population is at around 6,5 mio.

Therefore they've decided to offer the vaccine to.

People of importance, elderly, children, patients with pulmonary problems and health care professionals.

The problem that has been debated at length here is what the first group consists of.
To the politicians this means, politicians (head of state, mayors and so on). But the line is a bit blurry.
So blurry that so called celebrities are demanding injections based on fame alone.

I can agree to the queen and so on...but the host of "who wants to be a millionaire"...not so much.

Secondly there has been the debacle about the safety of this vaccine. The first preliminary trials showed that they contained some amounts of mercury. This of course blew all around both health care personnel and patients. Some refusing to take the shot because of the risk surrounding the mercury.

I am glad that as Justin (cohost of TWIS) points out, this is such a minute risk that dying of the decease is much higher.
The extra tidbit of information I've been able to hear is that the amount of mercury in each vaccine is equal to a small can of tuna.
My advise is therefore to skip one of the 3 fish meals you have that week, if you live up to current public health advise.

Make informed choices