Lifeboat Foundation

The next time you get sick, your care may involve a form of the technology people use to navigate road trips or pick the right vacuum cleaner online.

Artificial intelligence is spreading into health care, often as software or a computer program capable of learning from large amounts of data and making predictions to guide care or help patients.

It already detects an eye disease tied to diabetes and does other behind-the-scenes work like helping doctors interpret MRI scans and other imaging tests for some forms of cancer.

LONDON (AP) — Four African countries have reported new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine, as global health numbers show there are now more children being paralyzed by viruses originating in vaccines than in the wild.

In a report late last week, the World Health Organization and partners noted nine new polio cases caused by the vaccine in Nigeria, Congo, Central African Republic and Angola. Seven countries elsewhere in Africa have similar outbreaks and cases have been reported in Asia, including the two countries where polio remains endemic, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In rare cases, the live virus in oral polio vaccine can mutate into a form capable of sparking new outbreaks. All the current vaccine-derived polio cases have been sparked by a Type 2 virus contained in the vaccine. Type 2 wild virus was eliminated years ago.

Sugar poses one of the most pressing health problems in the modern world – not least because it’s just so delicious. Rather than quitting sweets cold turkey, low-calorie alternatives to sucrose could make tasty treats that are at least less bad for us. And now, researchers from Tufts University have developed a more efficient method for producing one such sweetener, using farms of bacteria.

The sugar in question is called tagatose, which the FDA says is “generally regarded as safe.” It’s 92 percent as sweet as sucrose – regular old table sugar – but because the human digestive system doesn’t metabolize as much of it, it only has 38 percent of the calories. That, in turn, means tagatose has a much smaller effect on blood glucose and insulin, making it safe for diabetics. And to cap it off, tests show that it doesn’t contribute to cavities or tooth decay.

But, of course, there’s a catch – tagatose is a little complicated to produce. Normally, it’s done by hydrolyzing lactose to make galactose, which is then isomerized into tagatose, which then needs to be purified and crystallized into a solid, usable form. Yields from this process are low, at less than 30 percent.

Can you actually make a disease disappear? Dr Rangan Chatterjee thinks you can. Often referred to as the doctor of the future, Rangan is changing the way that we look at illness and how medicine will be practised in years to come. He highlighted his methods in the groundbreaking BBC TV show, Doctor In The House, gaining him much acclaim from patients, his contemporaries and the media.

He is the author of the international bestseller, The 4 Pillar Plan — http://amzn.to/2yGfpuB which has been released in the USA and Canada under the title, How to Make Disease Disappear — https://amzn.to/2GstJf6 Rangan’s 15 years of clinical experience in the NHS includes internal medicine, immunology and general practice. A pioneer in the emerging field of progressive medicine, he also uses techniques from other disciplines he has studied including movement kinetics and functional medicine.

Continue reading “How to make diseases disappear | Rangan Chatterjee | TEDxLiverpool” »

Ira Pastor, ideaXme exponential health ambassador and founder of Bioquark, interviews Sister Ilia Delio PhD. OSF, a Franciscan Sister (Order of St Francis of Washington, DC) who holds the Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Continue reading “Integrating Science And Religion To Uncover New Ideas And Truths” »

Herbs to increase breast milk supply and heal the spleen. Traditional remedies which promise to cure insomnia and acne. Secret cancer treatments that have been ignored or suppressed by Western medicine.

Practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) have a long history of making outsized claims, not least in the case of fertility and virility, where demand for tiger penis and rhino horn has devastated wild populations.

Quackery and false claims exist in all branches of medicine, but doctors in Europe are concerned that unverified claims made under the guise of TCM are being spread worldwide by social media, inadvertently aided by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Team from Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health say technique was successful in treatment of mice.

“This inverse association was robust, consistently seen across current, past, and never smokers, as well as men, women, and individuals with different backgrounds,” she adds.

Shu says the health benefits may be rooted in their prebiotic (nondigestible food that promotes growth of beneficial microorganisms in the intestines) and probiotic properties. The properties may independently or synergistically modulate gut microbiota in a beneficial way.

The research appears in JAMA Oncology. Additional coauthors are from Seoul National University and Vanderbilt.