Blog

The end of the year holiday season is a time of temptation. Cookies, cakes and other treats abound, not to mention any number of parties and family dinners that would make even a groaning board groan.

The good news is that American’s don’t gain nearly as much weight between Thanksgiving and New Year’s as we think. The Washington Post recently pointed out an actual study of real people found the average weight gain to be about a pound.

It may be better than most of us would have guessed, but it’s not a reason to loosen our restraint. Were that rate of gain to continue throughout the year, it would add an easy 10 lbs. to our already none-too-sleek physiques. Far more troubling than the modest weight gain, though, is that we tend not to shed the extra pound come January 2nd. Read the rest of this entry »

Has Resverlogix found the Holy Grail of heart disease treatment?

Maybe. The company announced last week that its  Phase IIb study of the HDL-raising compound RVX-208 found the drug successful in significantly increasing levels of the so-called good cholesterol. In addition, the drug was found to have also increased the levels of APO-AI and large HDL particles. Read the rest of this entry »

Healthcare jobs continue to grow. After taking a big dip at the height of the recession three years ago, the industry has been adding jobs at a pace faster than any other sector. Just how fast? The number of jobs posted online in May were 14% above two years ago. That translates into 620,000 job ads for healthcare careers. A third of those jobs were posted by staffing agencies and recruitment firms. At the top of the job list in May was physical therapist, followed by occupational therapist, nurse, pharmacist, and speech pathologist. Wanted Technologies.

This is to honor the nurses of America.  You are the women, and the men who staff our hospitals, tend the sick, comfort the dying, perform triage at disaster sites and emergency rooms, and manage the hundreds of details that make modern medicine function.

This is your week — National Nurses Week — the seven days when the hundreds of millions of us, thank the 3.1 million of you for being there when we need you.

It’s amazing that it took almost three decades from the first seed of a suggestion that nurses should have a special day to the Congressional act declaring May 6th National Recognition Day for Nurses. In 1990, the day became a week that now includes May 8th as National Student Nurses Day.

Nursing has come a long way from the days when Florence Nightingale made her nighttime rounds of injured soldiers during the Crimean War. The work is still demanding, the material rewards are better, but it is the calling that is still the same. “God,” wrote Nightingale, “called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.” Read the rest of this entry »

Based on how frequently the job turns up in online ads, physical therapists are the most in-demand job of any posted anywhere online. Wanted Technologies, an online data analysis firm, says employers posted more than 11,600 jobs online for physical therapists in March. It’s the highest number of ads seen in any single month since October 2009, and represents a 19% increase over March 2011. The biggest demand is in the Washington, DC area where 916 jobs for physical therapists were posted in March, a 205% increase from a year before. Wanted says the average time these jobs remained online was seven weeks, a sign of how hard they are to fill. Wanted Analytics

Turns out that the way to a mouse’s brain may be through the stomach. Mice fed a broth rich in probiotic bacteria displayed less stress, anxiety, and depression than those who got plain broth. Mouse are a long way (genetically speaking) from humans, but as one researcher said: “Without overstating things, this does open up the concept that we could develop therapies that can treat psychiatric disorders by targeting the gut.” So eat your (probiotic) yogurt. As mother used to say, “What can it hurt?” LiveScience.com