http://lenoxdoctor.com Primary Care in the Berkshires Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:01:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en From Medgadget, I find that Nikon has posted the winning photographs in its Small World competition for photomicrography - photographs of microscopic structures and critters. They are so cool! Here is a picture of a cedar leaf in cross section, using polarized light. And here's a marine worm using a technique called confocal ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/10/06/marine-worms-and-rat-neurons-in-technicolor/ We took a trip Sunday. It was my dad's idea. He thought the kids would be interested in seeing llamas. How he heard about Tregellys Fiber Farm in Hawley, I do not know. What he failed to tell us when we met up at the Creamery ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/09/28/a-trip-to-tregellys-and-i-do-mean-a-trip/ Amidst the crowd of articles on medical therapeutics in the journals every week (it's where the money is), I'm always pleased to find a good study on the pathophysiology of disease. Here's one from the American Heart Journal, Progression of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation to persistent atrial fibrillation in patients with bradyarrhythmias. We ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/09/19/natural-history-of-atrial-fibrillation-new-study-from-american-heart-journal/ I've written here mostly about clinical medicine but I had other things on my mind this morning. Seeing as this is a blog, and I can post whatever I want, I thought I would put up this meditation on the origins of the idea of sin and redemption in ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/09/14/rosh-hashanah-part-i-origins-of-the-theme-of-guilt-and-redemption/ Well, here's an interesting approach to preventing vascular complications in type II diabetes. In this Lancet article, the researchers tried putting all patients on a fixed dose combination of ACE inhibitor and diuretic. Traditional strategies set arbitrary blood pressure levels at which treatment is initiated and arbitrary goals against which treatment should ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/09/11/simplifying-management-of-type-ii-diabetes/ Here's a useful little study from the American Heart Journal. Researchers from the Dokuz Eylul University School of Medicine in Izmir, Turkey compared pretreatment with three different regimens to prevent contrast-induced nephropathy: sodium bicarbonate, N-acetylcysteine (commonly known as Mucomist) and saline. All patients had baseline creatinine greater than 1.2. ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/08/24/sodium-bicarbonate-better-than-mucomist-to-prevent-contrast-nephropathy/ The big article in today's New England Journal is on weight loss surgery. It saves lives. In fact, the benefit is quite dramatic. The authors studied 9,949 patients who had undergone weight loss surgery, and compared them to a control group of 9,628 severely obese individuals who did not ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/08/23/study-shows-dramatic-health-benefit-from-obesity-surgery/ Here's a bit of good news on Avian Influenza. Researchers at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, in Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam, have isolated antibodies from the cells of human survivors of H5N1 influenza (bird flu). These antibodies were found to be protective against the virus ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2007/05/29/monoclonal-antibody-effective-for-bird-flu/ Just a quick update - I can't quite believe it, but we're in our second week. Our first few days were complete chaos. They moved the furniture in on Thursday morning and we opened Thursday afternoon, with unpacked boxes in the hallways, no equipment, no printer, copier or ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2006/08/31/lenox-internal-medicine-is-go/ Thanks to Liz Pertzoff, for notifying me that this site looks odd when viewed with Internet Explorer. I will fix that as soon as I get a chance. I use Firefox as my browser, and if you have not checked it out, I recommend it. It's free, it's extremely ... http://lenoxdoctor.com/2006/08/31/site-looks-funny-with-internet-explorer/