To Turn Opioid Addiction Around, This Clinic Tries Exercise, Meditation And Acupuncture →

To Turn Opioid Addiction Around, This Clinic Tries Exercise, Meditation And Acupuncture

Excerpt  "Kaiser tracked more than 80 patients over a year. It found the group’s ER visits decreased 25 percent. Inpatient admissions and total opioid doses dropped 40 percent.

Bye says the team helps patients taper off opioids and explore the benefits of alternatives like exercise, meditation, acupuncture and mindfulness. “And we found that we've had really good results getting those patients unstuck from the mud, getting them moving and living the life they want to live,”

Family medicine Dr. Heidi Clune says sometimes a  pain prescription can escalate to addiction.  “Our goal with  is to take that patient off that opioid Island and build that bridge, and get them back to functioning with society,” Clune says. " Read more

India's Philanthropist-Surgeon Delivers Cardiac Care Henry Ford-Style →

India's Philanthropist-Surgeon Delivers Cardiac Care Henry Ford-Style

$106,000 Heart Surgery Costs $1,500 in India
NPR.org

Read about how this amazing Indian heart surgeon makes surgery affordable for all people in need.   Excerpt  "Devi Shetty says Narayana's profits are poured back into the enterprise, which now has 29 hospitals in India. The volume of surgeries has drawn comparisons to the assembly lines of Henry Ford. It's not something Shetty shies away from: "The is the way forward for the world," he says.  "It's pointless building boutique hospitals where one surgery or two heart surgeries are done in a day. We need to have a few hospitals, but these hospitals should do very large numbers. Then your quality improves, costs go down," he says.  Shetty contends people are entitled to care regardless of how little they earn.   "We do about 30  major heart surgeries a day. And we have never refused a patient because they have no money."  The fees from the rich offset the costs for the poor. Patients with money pay several thousand dollars for open heart surgery. But patients with little money — and little hope of raising any — pay very little. They are 60 percent of the cases.

The head of the charitable trust wing, Lakshmi Mani, says there's no complicated test to determine who's eligible for free surgery.  "One look at them and we can make out: They are poor, they don't have the money. And once we start doubting their credentials, there's no end to it," Mani says."
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Acupuncture Relieves Pain In Emergency Patients, Science Daily →

Acupuncture Relieves Pain In Emergency Patients, Science Daily

Excerpt  "The world's largest randomized trial of acupuncture in emergency departments has found the treatment is a safe and effective alternative to pain-relieving drugs  The study found acupuncture was as effective as pain medicine in providing long-term relief for patients. But the trial, conducted in the emergency departments of four hospitals, showed pain management remains a critical issue."    Read More

Westen Doctor Trades Pills For Acupuncture Needles, Acutakehealth.com →

Meet A Western Doctor Who Traded Pills For Acupuncture Needles

Excerpt  "Leslie Smith, MD, is a Western-trained physician who prefers acupuncture needles to scalpels and herbs to pharmaceuticals. At her  practice in Chicago, she rarely prescribes medications, relying instead on  modalities from Asian medicine and nutritional counseling. She teaches courses on acupunctur, and on  alternative medicine, to medical students at the University of Illinois ."   read more

To Curb Pain Without Opioids, Oregon Looks To Alternative Treatments, National Public Radio →

To Curb Pain Without Opioids, Oregon Looks To Alternative Treatments

Excerpt: "There should be an array of things for people to choose from," Eisen says, "whether it be chiropractic care, or naturopathic care, or acupuncture, nutrition, massage. Try those things — and if they don't work, you use opioids as a last resort."  ...Oregon wants more patients to try this approach. Denise Taray, coordinator of the Oregon Pain Management Commission, says Medicaid's traditional way of dealing with back pain involved bed rest and prescription painkillers.

Excerpt  "The only thing that might have been covered in the past was narcotics," Taray says. "But treatments such as acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, physical therapy and rehab would never have been covered."... Starting in January 2016, the state will fund many of these alternative treatments for patients who get their health care via Oregon's version of Medicaid. While treatments may cost more than pain pills, the hope is to save money by reducing the number of people who become addicted to opioids or abuse them."   read more

Bad Medicine, Part 3, Death By Diagnosis, National Public Radio, Freakonomics Radio Podcast →

Bad Medicine, Part 3, Death By Diagnosis

Excerpt "I think the number-one problem is we don’t measure performance. We don’t measure the outcomes of patients in health care for 99 percent of the health care that’s delivered. Ninety-nine percent of people that have surgery in the United States go home and no one documents or keeps track at a systematic level — that is, national or regional, or hospital — how the patient does.  At six months, are you glad that you had your knee surgery done? At six months after hip surgery, are you walking again? Or a year after weight-loss surgery, what is your weight today? We don’t keep track of those things for most of the procedures  that we do. How can you really come up with a quality metric if nobody’s tracking it?"

Dr Marty Makary, Surgeon and Professor Healthcare Policy   read more