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WE ALL HAVE A PRE-EXISTING CONDITION---it's called CHOICE....We all choose to live hear, eat on tephlon, smoke, drink, eat Mcdonalds, pizza, wings, etc etc....the list is endless.....

we can even CHOOSE to go to the doctor....and after we leave the doctors office we can CHOOSE not to take the treatment as prescribed or we can CHOOSE a second, third or fourth opinion, until we hear what we want to hear and do what we actually want to do......WE ARE NOT A TEXTBOOK AND THERE IS NO TEXTBOOK CASE..... when the FRAUDULENT government takes over the healthcare we will be textbook cases.....WE WILL GET WHAT WE DESERVE AND THE LIGHT OF THE PAST WILL BE LOST TO OTHER FORCES NOT UNLIKE THE DARKNESS OF HITLER OR FDR'S NEW DEAL........

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Hormone study finds heart risks fade while cancers rise
The Associated Press

    CHICAGO — The first follow-up of a landmark study of hormone use after menopause shows heart problems linked with the pills seem to fade after women stop taking them, while surprising new cancer risks appear.
    That heart trouble associated with hormones may not be permanent is good news for millions of women who quit taking them after the government study was halted six years ago because of heart risks and breast cancer.
    But the new risks for other cancers, particularly lung tumors, in women who’d taken estrogen-progestin pills for about five years puzzled the researchers and outside experts.
    Those risks “were completely unanticipated,” said Dr. Gerardo Heiss of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, lead author of the follow-up analysis.
    The analysis focused on participants’ health in the first two to three years after the study’s end. During that time, those who’d taken hormones but stopped were 24 percent more likely to develop any kind of cancer than women who’d taken dummy pills during the study.
    “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the cause of the increased cancer risk,” said analysis co-author Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
    The cancers included breast tumors, which also occurred more frequently in hormone users during the study.
    The researchers noted that the increased risks for all cancers amounted to only three extra cases per year for every 1,000 women on hormone pills, compared with nonusers.
    Still, Heiss said the results suggest that former hormone users need to be vigilant about getting cancer screening including mammograms.
    “Vigilance is justified,” he said. “No alarm, but vigilance.”
    The initial study of 16,608 postmenopausal women was designed to examine pros and cons of taking pills long thought to benefit women’s health. It was halted in 2002 when more breast cancers, heart attacks and related problems were found in hormone users versus nonusers.
    There were some health benefits — decreased risks for hip fractures and colorectal cancer — but the follow-up found those also faded after women stopped the pills.
    Some data suggest that U.S. breast cancer rates have declined since the study’s end. But that likely reflects fewer women starting on the pills rather than any decline in breast cancer risk among past users, said Dr. Michael Lauer of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health, which conducted and funded the landmark research.
    The authors said the new results send the same message they’ve been advocating ever since the study ended: Health risks from estrogenprogestin pills outweigh their benefits, and they should only be used to relieve hot flashes and other menopause symptoms, in the lowest possible dose for the shortest possible duration.
    The new analysis appears in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Flat growths on colon raise alarm
Study: Cancer risk higher than polyps
BY CARLA K. JOHNSON The Associated Press

    CHICAGO — Flat growths on the colon wall are more common in Americans than previously thought and more likely to be cancerous than the more familiar knobby masses known as polyps, a new study finds.
    New techniques can locate and remove the flat growths, but many doctors aren’t aware of their cancer risk and may not know how to look for them. The findings are likely to change the practice of colonoscopy, experts said, and may explain some colon cancers that arise between colonoscopies.
    “I think it is very important. It’s going to intensify the need for quality screening,” said Dr. Stephen Hanauer, gastroenterology chief at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the study. “You’re not going to be able to do sevenminute colonoscopies.”
    The growths tend to be smaller when they are cancerous — the size of a nickel instead of a quarter — and are level with the colon wall or depressed like a pothole. They blend in with the surrounding tissue and are difficult to spot.
    “They look like a pancake just lying on the floor,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Roy Soetikno of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California.
    Doctors have known about fl at growths but haven’t recognized their danger, experts said.
    While knobby polyps were found in four times as many participants, more than half the colon cancers found — 15 of 28 — were in flat and depressed growths. Thirteen were in polyps.
    Researchers found the flat growths were nearly 10 times more likely to be cancerous than the polyps. They believe the growths represent a separate colon cancer pathway, rather than being precursors to knobby polyps, Soetikno said. The study appears in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
    Since the 1980s, Japanese doctors have reported more flat colon growths than were seen in the United States, but Western scientists doubted their importance, said Dr. David Lieberman of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, who wrote an editorial in the journal.
    “This paper will have a big impact on gastroenterology,” Lieberman said. “It will heighten people’s awareness that, yes, these are found in United States.”
    The findings came from colonoscopies of more than 1,800 mostly male veterans who were seen at one VA center from July 2003 to June 2004. Doctors involved had been trained by Japanese specialists to use a dye during colonoscopies to spot flat growths. One-third of the patients were coming in for routine screening. The rest either had symptoms such as bleeding or pain, or were being screened because they had previous polyps or a family history of colon cancer.     

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SCHENECTADY COUNTY
State gives $1.9M for 2 nursing homes
BY MICHAEL LAMENDOLA Gazette Reporter

    The state Department of Health awarded $1.9 million Thursday to The Avenue and The Dutch Manor nursing homes as part of a state mandate to restructure long-term care in Schenectady County.
    Capital Living and Rehabilitation Centres, for-profit owner of The Avenue on Altamont Avenue and Dutch Manor on Hamburg Street, will use the state grant as seed money toward a $50 million, 240-bed skilled nursing facility near the two facilities.
    Meanwhile, Schenectady County offi - cials continue to negotiate with the state over the fate of the Glendale Home, a county-run facility in Glenville that serves the poor. The state ordered the county to decertify 192 of the 360 beds there, leaving it with 168 beds. County officials said the state’s proposal would leave the county with too few nursing home beds to deal with projected acute and long-term medical needs.
    The Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, also known as the Berger Commission, recommended Capital Living merge The Avenue and Dutch Manor, which have a total of 310 beds, into a rebuilt facility with 240 beds.
    It also recommended Capital Living build a 50-bed assisted-living facility, considered a less-expensive alternative to skilled nursing beds and to create 25 adult day care openings.
    A further recommendation called for Ellis and St. Clare’s hospitals to consolidate services and for Bellevue Woman’s Hospital to close. The recommendations became state law in 2007.
    Department of Health spokeswoman Claudia Hutton said the state’s objectives are to reduce costs, modernize facilities and provide medical services currently lacking in targeted communities.
    Capital Living CEO Patrick Martone said he is excited by the proposed proj- ects. “We have been supportive of the Berger concept since we had the initial conversations with them. It will allow us to enhance services and diversify into more community-based services that Schenectady County desperately needs,” he said.
    Martone described these as medical day care, assisted living and adult day care, which keep people out of expensive nursing homes and allow them to remain in their own homes for as long as possible.
    “We are addressing an older, medically complex population. We are rehabilitating them, strengthening them and discharging them into the community,” Martone said. “I look at it as part of a continuum of care. With the consolidation of hospitals, this helps people transition from acute care and long-term care back into the community.”
    Capital Living proposes three phases to the projects: Constructing the nursing home, demolishing The Avenue and converting Dutch Manor into an assisted living facility at a cost of $20 million. He hopes to have the new nursing home operational in three years, with the other components later.
    Construction is contingent on Capital Living’s acquiring additional funding for the total $70 million project, Martone said. Capital Living asked the state for $9 million toward phase one, receiving $1.9 million instead.
    “This project has a huge scope, but it is a good first step. Our goal is to make it happen. The question is not if, but when,” Martone said.
    Hutton said not everyone received what they requested. “We had $2.5 billion in requests and $150 million in money.”
    The state will make an additional $250 million in grants available this summer. The money comes state and federal sources set aside to pay for mandated closures, mergers or bed reductions at hospitals and nursing homes around the state, as ordered by the Berger Commission in late 2006.
    The state wants the county to reduce beds at Glendale because the facility is old and expensive to operate, Hutton said. The county spends millions of local property tax dollars annually to subsidize it. The 2007 subsidy was $7 million, down from $10.5 million in 2005.
    Earlier this year, the county received $3 million from the state to begin studies on replacing Glendale with a smaller, more homelike nursing facility. The county, however, continues to negotiate with the state to build a 240-bed facility.
    “We are still working with them to come up with a plan for Glendale Home,” said County Manager Kathleen Rooney. She said the county needs Glendale because it is part of the safety net that provides essential services to the indigent.
    Dr. Brian Gordon, D-Niskayuna, chairman of the county Legislature’s Health Committee and its sub-committee on Glendale, said the county wants to “maintain an adequate number of beds so we can have a viable countywide health care system.”
    The county needs to a new nursing home to receive enhanced reimbursements, which would reduce the county’s annual subsidy, to provide care to the poor and to offer local hospitals a facility where they can discharge patients for short-term recovery.
    “The importance of Glendale is that it is accessible to all members of our community and that hospitals have a place to discharge patients to,” Gordon said. “Many facilities will not accept patients with little or no insurance. It is injuring our most vulnerable patients who do not have access to nursing homes that accept private insurance.”

I believe that there is a state mandate that forces private nursing homes supply a certain number of beds for medicare/medicaid residents. And as long as the state is giving away our tax dollar to a private nursing home, Dutch Manor and The Avenue (aka Hallmark), then mandate these beds for medicare/medicaid residents only. Let these private nursing homes supply additional, private pay beds at their own expense. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing private businesses such as these.

Maybe they should move the Glendale facility down to the million dollar mile on State St and then Metroplex will throw millions of dollars at the facility to keep it modernized.

These homes were in jepardy for fraud and fined alot of $$.....they continue to exist because we have nothing else to do with our elderly and infirm.....as for the industry----there is only one reason why the state gives $$ to certain entities......outside controls(no different than unions, just without the namesake) >---there is a monkey on NYS back still.......

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Dreams hold diagnostic and curative powers

    I was excited to read Kathy Ricketts’ wonderful April 3 article, “The healing power of dreams,” on Wanda Burch’s use of her own dreams in the diagnosis and therapy of her breast cancer.
    I have known Wanda for many years, and have adopted the methods she describes through my studies and work with Robert Moss in his Dream School programs (www.mossdreams.com). I am a family physician, practicing in the Capital Region since 1983, and focused for the past nine years on Integrative Medicine. This is a whole-person, healing-oriented approach that draws on the best practices of conventional, complementary and alternative medicine. I frequently suggest to my many patients with chronic and serious illnesses that they pay attention to their dreams, keep journals and work with the dreams toward their own healing. I encourage patients to discuss their dreams related to their health and wellness issues, and I have often found that these discussions yield valuable insights, information and healing. I often recommend Wanda Burch’s book as a great inspiration and guide to this work.
    As is well described in the article, and in great detail in the book, the key elements are simple: Intend to remember the dreams, and set intentions at bedtime for dreams helpful in healing; write in the journal whatever you remember, even if it is just a feeling or brief image; review what you wrote once you are awake, and give it a title. Additional steps that can be useful include noting how you felt on awakening from the dream; what elements pertain to your waking life, past, present or future; and what questions are raised by the dream. A final step, often most important to bringing the energy of the dream into daily life, is choosing one or more actions to take in order to honor what you have learned.
    I hope this article will lead many people to remember and consult their dreams to support healing in their lives.
    ROBERT A. WEISSBERG, M.D.
    Clifton Park

and we used to practice blood letting too...... ,,,,,it just proves that we have very little control over alot of things.......

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Susan Estrich
MRI experience bad, but beats the alternative
Susan Estrich is a nationally syndicated columnist.

    “I’m a lawyer with a lot of insurance,” I joked with the technician, who asked me why I was back again so soon after my last visit to the basement where all the MRI machines are. Of course, that wasn’t the real reason, or at least not the only one. Being a lawyer with a lot of insurance means you actually get the tests you need. The problem is that plenty of people who need them don’t get them.
    In fact, I was back for a different MRI. Just keeping track. Better safe than sorry. I wasn’t complaining. I made that clear. “I’m not a whiner,” I said, knowing that lots of people have trouble with MRIs, that 10-15 percent can’t get through the session, undone either by the claustrophobia or the loud noise.
    The first time I had one, last year, I couldn’t stop shaking afterward, utterly undone by how awful it was. But the lesson of life is that you get used to almost anything, and I know I’m lucky just to be there for checks, to be getting first-class medical care, to be watching carefully and not fighting desperately, as so many of the folks I saw the other night clearly are.
    But why can’t they make the tables more comfortable?
    As I put my head down and wriggled my body into the right position, the woman who was kindly helping me shook her head. “It’s ridiculously uncomfortable,” she said. “They need more padding.” And with that, she shrugged. I would have shrugged, too, but I couldn’t move.
    Leroy Sievers, whose daily “My Cancer” blog on npr.com  has chronicled his threeyear battle with a recurrence of colon cancer that, when first diagnosed, was viewed as likely to kill him within months, is one of my favorite bloggers. He often leaves me between laughter and tears in his descriptions of the radiation table. Forget about the fear and the boredom and the way your body twitches when you are trying so hard not to move it for hours on end. No, what gets to Leroy is just how uncomfortable, how unbelievably hard and lacking in padding, the table is.
    If we can keep people alive notwithstanding cancer attacking their brains and bodies, if we can use powerful imaging technology to see tiny aneurysms and minuscule growths, you’d think we could find a way to make a table comfortable enough to lie on while all these miracles take place.
    A study out this week from Harvard Medical School found that for 80 percent of American women, life expectancy has increased to nearly 80 — precisely because we are lucky enough to be the beneficiaries of this high-tech medicine, to be strapped in place, studied, mapped and treated. But for the other 20 percent, the numbers are actually heading in the wrong direction.
    As science advances, as technology improves, life expectancy is actually going down for some, as women die of diseases that could be largely prevented, like lung cancer and diabetes, or treated effectively, like heart disease. Who are these women? Do you need me to tell you? They are not lawyers with lots of insurance. They are women who live in the poorest counties in America, for whom a day on an uncomfortable MRI or radiation table is a luxury they can’t afford and we don’t provide.
    Their plight puts our discomfort in context. We definitely need more padding on these tables. But even more urgently, we need to make sure we have enough of them, and that everyone has access to them. It’s something to think about, the next time you find yourself strapped down, bone to metal, earplugs in, the noise drumming so loud you can barely think. We’re the lucky ones. Be well.

the tables are that uncomfortable so folks dont get so comfortable going to the doctor all the time for silly things like viagra or any of the "ask your doctor about this one or that one,,,etc"....because the next door we go through may be the one with the snake oil salesman and the unlucky dude/dudet under a lawsuit(even if they are good at what they do).......

then the only folks who do the suing and winning of medical lawsuits are those of your own ranking Ms.Estrich.....cause the folks who cant afford the care certainly cant afford a big ole lawyer like yourself now can they?????? So who is driving up the costs?????????

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Gene therapy improves vision
BY STEPHANIE NANO The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — Scientists for the first time have used gene therapy to dramatically improve sight in people with a rare form of blindness, a development called a major advance for the experimental technique.
    Some vision was restored in four of the six young people who got the treatment, teams of researchers in the United States and Britain reported Sunday. Two of the volunteers who could only see hand motions were able to read a few lines of an eye chart within weeks.
    “It’s a phenomenal breakthrough,” said Stephen Rose, chief research officer of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which helped pay for one study done at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. If successful in larger numbers, experts said, the technique has the potential to reverse blindness from other kinds of eye diseases.
    “I think this is incredibly exciting,” said Dr. Jean Bennett, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania and a leader of the Philadelphia study. “It’s the beginning of a whole new phase of studies.”
    The research was published online Sunday by the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with presentations at a medical meeting in Florida.
    The two teams of scientists, working separately, each tested gene replacement therapy in three patients with a form of a rare hereditary eye disease called Leber’s congenital amaurosis.

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Local nursing homes shut out mentally ill

    Recently my husband was sent to a nursing home 64 miles away. In case you’re wondering why he has to go so far away, it’s because he has a mental illness. He hasn’t committed a crime, and has led a productive life as a teacher. Because he was in the psych ward, most of the nursing homes in this area wouldn’t even send someone to the hospital to interview him. It’s heartbreaking that he has been sent so far away from his family.
    It was explained to me that the nursing homes in this area aren’t set up for people with mental illness. I’m sure this is true. The reason I’m writing this letter is because this needs to be changed. These people are in one of the few groups that are discriminated against with regard to nursing home placement in this part of New York.
    I would like to have my husband closer to home, but I’m also hoping to help other families who have to be separated like ours. It’s difficult enough having to place a loved one in a nursing home.
    It’s time to change this terrible stigma.
    JANICE MIX
    Scotia

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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
NY's nursing shortage more severe than national average
The Business Review (Albany)

New York's nursing shortage is worsening and remains more severe than the national average, as hospitals continue to face serious challenges in recruiting and retaining qualified professionals, a study by the Healthcare Association of New York State has found.

The association's Workforce Advocacy Survey of more than 125 hospitals across New York discovered that 80 percent of respondents noted RN shortages. The statewide vacancy rate for registered nurses increased to 8.8 percent in 2007, higher than the national rate of 8.5 percent and up from 6.38 percent in 2006.

"The health-care system in New York state and across this country cannot and will not survive without a commitment to increasing the number of professionals who administer life-saving care," association President Daniel Sisto said. "The work force shortage is not going away. In fact, statistics show us that it will almost certainly get alarmingly worse. We need policymakers to take effective action that opens the door to increased resources, training, and education so that more nurses and health care professionals can join the workforce."

The association is advocating for passage of legislation, sponsored in part by Sen. George Maziarz, R-Newfane, that would authorize funding to schools of nursing, other educational institutions, and health care providers to ensure adequate faculty, administrative and capital resources to prepare future generations of entry and advanced level nurses.