US Health Consultant

The idea of finding drugs in drinking water sounds like fodder for a Hollywood movie. The startling truth is that this is the reality we live in. Traces of everything from ibuprofen and acetaminophen to prescription sex hormones antibiotics and even mood stabilizers have been found in municipal water supplies. There are few to no requirements that even mandate that tap water be tested for these drugs.

While the amounts of drugs in drinking water are far smaller than the average medical dose, we drink great quantities of water every day and ingest these drugs with every glass. The antibiotics in tap water are found to be one of the three leading contributors to the outbreak of MRSA or medication resistant staph infections. These infections are making a large number of Americans sick every day, and in many cases can even be fatal.

The sources of these drugs are many. A great portion of them come from human waste. When we swallow a pill, while we absorb some of it, a great deal of it is passed through the body unchanged and removed in our waste. Other sources of the drug are flushed pills and runoff from pharmaceutical plants.

Ingesting small amounts of a medication over time can lead to a resistance to the drug. This especially true of antibiotics, but applies to other drugs as well. A decreased response to antibiotics means more severe and longer lasting infections as well as infections that do not respond to antibiotics at all. This is very dangerous and could eventually lead to a whole host of illnesses that we have no ability to fight. This may sound like it comes straight from a science fiction movie, but it is entirely factual. I urge you to do the research for yourself.

You may wonder what you can do about this. Personally, I ensure the safety of my family with a whole house multi-stage water filtration system. This system removes the drugs found in drinking water as well as other chemicals and bacteria not removed by chlorine. It also removes the chlorine left behind after city treatment. These systems also allow your water to retain valuable trace minerals such as potassium and magnesium that are needed by the body to ensure proper health.

My multi-stage system filters the water that flows into every faucet in my home. It keeps rust particles from yellowing my laundry and removes all of the hundreds of chemicals from my water that I take in when drinking or showering. I pay a little more for this benefit, but it only comes to about ten cents a gallon, which is a very worthwhile price to remove the drugs in drinking water.

I never would have believed only a few short years ago that I would need to filter my own household water. In fact, I assumed that the water bills I paid ensured my water was safe from all chemicals and drugs. I was wrong. With so many drugs found in drinking water, it is high time we all take steps to ensure the health of our families and loved ones. I urge you to look into a filtration system. It may be the best decision you ever make.

People living and working in New York on that fateful day when the Twin Towers came down are becoming ill in growing numbers http://wcbstv.com/topstories/cancer.third.wave.2.244761.html World Trade first responders and others are developing chronic coughs, lung diseases and now other cancers caused by breathing the toxic mix of asbestos, dioxine, benezine, and other carcinogens released at and around the site.

Eventually some are likely to develop mesothelioma

Medical professionals at smaller mammography screen clinics and offices are sometimes at a disadvantage when it comes to radiology information systems, or RIS. These systems are very costly, and thus typically only the largest hospitals have them at their disposal. There is now a less expensive solution for radiology information systems, and it is the Candelis imagegrid PACS and RIS.

PACS refers to picture archive and communication system, and the Candelis pacs makes it possible for multiple doctors and mammography screen clinics to get on the system and use it to send and store patient images. Candelis pacs allows images to be read at volumetric imaging workstations, which can also be used to read images from multiple modalities, including CT, or computed tomography scans and MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

Ris pacs is an integrated system that allows you to smoothly process and access work in clinics and hospitals that focus on mammography screen appointments. Internet access makes all of this connectivity possible.

From the beginning to the end of a patient examination, you will be able to process the patient information efficiently. RIS PACS allows for patient registration, which will help to streamline the workload of your office staff.

The Candelis imagegrid also makes it easy for you to schedule procedures that your patients need quickly and simply. Patient registration, necessary for first time patients visiting your office, is ordinarily a time consuming effort for the office staff, but with RIS access the task is performed with no wasted effort. Doctors and nurses will be able to enter in relevant patient information, including allergies and other statistics, with haste by using this program, information which can be added to each time a patient visits. You will be able to schedule multiple procedures at the same time, and that, along with an online appointment book that allows for flexible appointments to be created, makes your paper trail much easier for patients and office staff to get the best out of at each patient visit.

The mammography clinic is an ideal environment for which the pacs workstations were made. Pacs workstations allow radiology images to be viewed from multiple workstations by radiologists, technologists, and other staff. Working on local or wide area network, even virtual private network connections, your mammo viewer allows all of the necessary parties to access and retrieve patient images for diagnosis and order entry. Radiologists will find the mammo viewer very easy to use, because it allows for built in dictation and quickly brings up the reports you need. Mammogram patient processing and information storage and retrieval are easier and less expensive to work from and access with online medical image devices.

If you are one of the increasing number of people who opt for cosmetic surgery to stay looking that little bit younger you can help to extend that new look by taking the following steps to care for your skin.

?Sun protection ?make sure you use a day moisturiser with a minimum protection level of 15spf to ensure you don

Radial Keratotomy (RK) has been referred to by some as the “Grand Father” of Refractive Surgery. It involved making radial incisions in the cornea some times as deep as 80% of the total corneal thickness in an attempt to flatten the tissue. Astigmatism was treated with specific incisions located in strategic parts of the cornea. The astigmatic incisions were done first, since they created more nearsightedness and when they healed, the radial ones were performed. The optical zone around the pupil varied depending on the degree of nearsightedness that needed to be corrected.
Having seen many thousands of patients that underwent this procedure, I can say with confidence that most complained of glare and the vast majority regressed and required eye glasses not long after the surgery. That period varied from several months to many years. The “father of RK” was Dr. Fyedorov who did his research, and refined his technique on thousands of “very willing” citizens of the Soviet Union. During that time in the 70’s and 80’s his reported results were outstanding. To date it is very hard to find any negative results or complaints from his work. Evidently the Soviet Union may have had a hand in his clinical data reported for public consumption.

RK was brought to the United States by 5 American eye surgeons, two of the most well known being Dr Norman Stahl and Dr Jerry Zelman. They both travelled to Moscow to study with Dr Fyedorov, and I even had the pleasure of being in the office with Dr Stahl when Dr Fyedorov visited him in his Garden City, Long Island office. Dr Stahl was an outstanding doctor and surgeon, and personally performed many thousands of RK procedures. In the short term, most patients were happy with the results. However, where are these patients today? How do they see and what do their corneas look like so many years after having surgery?

I have had the pleasure of examining a number of these same patients years after their procedure. Most, if not all of these folks that I examine require an eyeglass prescription. Most are farsighted, and have a significant degree of astigmatism as well. Their prescriptions are generally unusual, and have acquired unconventional astigmatism. Another very common finding is the presence of a brown semicircular ring in the inferior half of the cornea. The inner most layer of the cornea is a single layer thick, and when RK was performed that layer was stretched thin as required to cover a larger area. Its function is to pump fluid out of the cornea, and keep it at the proper hydration level. However, as this thin layer was stretched out its function was negatively affected. As a result, it left the heaviest materials behind; Iron. Therefore, this brown deposit is iron left in the cornea by a weakened endothelium layer. It does not appear to have any visual effect, or create any physiological determent, but is a constant. What the future holds for these patients is still a question mark.

The big question is why all these patients are farsighted, and what can be done about it. The answer to the first question is still a mystery. It is possible that they were deliberately over corrected to compensate for the regression or more likely, the corneas were so weakened by the RK that they became flatter over time, and warped causing the astigmatism. Unfortunately, both Drs Stahl and Zelman have passed away and are not available for consultation regarding this matter. A weakened cornea is free to change with out any guidance, since both internal and external pressures can reshape it. The one constant is that they all need some refractive help. In fairness to all the RK surgeons, today’s technology was not available to them. There were no topographers, no Orbscans, and many other measuring instruments that we routinely use today. In addition, surgical calculations were made on a regular refraction. The FDA and all the surgeons did not require cycloplegic refractions which eliminate any spasms of the focusing system abnormalities from impacting the presurgical calculations.

Many of these patients are having PRK as a way of correcting their vision and improving their distorted vision. At least today’s technology has corrected the errors of the past. One must question if 20 years from now we will be having the issues about LASIK or PRK.