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Low magnesium levels have been found to be the best predictor of heart disease, contrary to the traditional belief that cholesterol or saturated fat play the biggest roles....

If you thought nothing could be more tedious than filling out your tax forms, just wait until you try to apply for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s new exchanges. The draft of the paper application is 15 to 21 pages, depending on whether someone is applying individually or for their family. See the Application for Health Insurance And the instructions for the application run no less than 61 pages. That’s nearly six times longer than the instructions for a green-card application. (There are also videos of the process.) “If you like IRS forms, you’re going to love this...

New Delhi - It's a disease long associated with the elderly but is now diagnosed in younger people as well and with no permanent cure available till date. However, in what could give hope to thousands suffering from Alzheimer's Disease (AD), the pharmacology department in AIIMS has identified Ayurvedic drugs which could have a role in preventing the onset of AD and also restricting its spread in affected patients. AD is a degenerative neurological disorder leading to progressive loss of cognitive abilities, including the patient's memory due to a drop in chemicals — known as neurotransmitters — which transmits messages...

One in five high school boys and 11% of schoolkids overall have received an ADHD diagnosis, according to new data from the CDC. The data also shows two-thirds of children diagnosed with ADHD are prescribed stimulants like Adderall (above) and Ritalin. About 6.4 million children have received an ADHD diagnosis at some point — an increase of 16% since 2007 and 53% in the past decade. One in five high school boys and 11% of all schoolkids in the U.S. have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and...

New Delhi - Doctors going to the US for studies and then planning to settle down there will not find it easy to do so now. As per new guidelines recently finalised by the Centre, the Union Health Ministry will no longer issue them a ‘No Obligation to Return to India’ (NORI) certificate that allows them to settle in the US. The move aims to check brain drain in the medical profession in the country, said a senior Health Ministry official. He said it is ironic that while the health system in India is crippled due to the acute shortage...

In my last column, I argued that for all the undeniable woes of the Republican Party, the unfurling of Obamacare represents a huge vulnerability for Democrats. The Democratic health reform bill is economically nonsensical and politically unpopular. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent believe the law will damage the U.S. health care system. Even among Democrats, support for the law is ebbing. In February, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that only 57 percent of Democrats (compared with 72 percent in November of 2012) support the law. The battle over health care reform is not over. Yes, the...

With time-running out before the major provisions of President Obama’s health care law are set to be implemented, the official tasked with making sure the law’s key insurance exchanges are up and running is already lowering expectations.

Miyamoto Musashi was a serious man. The warrior-poet walked the medieval Japanese countryside seeking duels with the strongest warriors he could find. He lived a pure ascetic existence. He didn't care where he slept. He carried no money or food. And when too old to fight, after a life on the edge of mortality, he wrote philosophy in a cave. So, pretty much the exact opposite of the modern American lifestyle. Yet as our country grapples with a dangerous debt/deficit problem, caused by demographic challenges and an overpriced and inefficient health care system, we should pay heed to two of...

Coffee or green tea drinker? Don't put that cup down: Those beverages may lower your stroke risk if they're a regular part of your daily diet. Researchers discovered that people who drank at least one cup of coffee a day lowered their stroke risk by about 20 percent compared to those who drank it rarely. Compared to those who rarely drank either beverage, those who drank at least one cup of coffee or two cups of green tea a day had a 32 percent lower chance of having an intracerebral hemorrhage, a type of stroke that occurs when a blood...

ObamaCare is pushing physicians into becoming hospital employees. The results aren't encouraging. The irony is that in the name of lowering costs, ObamaCare will almost certainly make the practice of medicine more expensive. It turns out that when doctors become salaried hospital employees, their overall productivity falls. The result? It is estimated that by next year, about 50% of U.S. doctors will be working for a hospital or hospital-owned health system. Once they work for hospitals, physicians change their behavior in two principal ways. Often they see fewer patients and perform fewer timely procedures.

Some children living in the U.S. Southeast have a rare meat allergy linked to tick bites, according to a new study. Bites from ticks, usually lone star ticks, cause the body to become allergic to a protein called alpha-gal — which also happens to be found in some mammals, including cows, pigs and sheep, the researchers said. When people who have been bitten develop this allergy, and then eat meat from these animals, they can experience hives, swelling, or more rarely, a life-threatening allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis.

The study found that a higher number of firearm laws in a state is associated with a lower rate of firearm fatalities in the state, overall and for suicides and homicides individually. However the study could not determine cause-and-effect relationships because of limitations inherent in the study design. States with more intensive regulation of gun ownership, sales, and storage tended to have lower rates of gun-related fatalities, researchers said. With state-level gun laws from 2007 to 2010 rated on a "legislative strength" scale, states in the top quartile had gun-related fatality rates more than 40% lower than states in the...

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A single injection, then a five-minute wait. That's all it took for hundreds of stroke and traumatic brain injury patients nationwide to reverse years of debilitation. Now they're walking more steadily, reading more easily, concentrating better, speaking more clearly and regaining use of once-rigid limbs — long after giving up hope that their bodies would ever respond. The 25-milligram shot at renewed independence is the brainchild of Boca Raton, Fla., physician Dr. Edward Tobinick. His patented method for delivering the anti-inflammatory medicine, etanercept, to the brain is getting praise around the world as a "radical breakthrough"...

When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years. Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in...

'It is extraordinary that doctors were able to do anything for Todd Nelson. The former US Army master sergeant's injuries were so bad the medics thought he would not survive. "I was on my 300th-plus convoy across Kabul, Afghanistan," he recalls. "We were headed home for the night when we passed next to a typical yellow and white sedan. When they saw us getting ready to pass, they flipped the switch. "The blast came in my side of the truck; I was on the passenger side. "It flipped the truck through a brick wall and put shrapnel through my right...

A nurse is researching whether an old family remedy using sugar to heal wounds does actually work. Moses Murandu, from Zimbabwe, grew up watching his father use granulated sugar to treat wounds. Sugar is thought to draw water away from wounds and prevent bacteria from multiplying. Early results from a trial on 35 hospital patients in Birmingham are encouraging, but more research is needed. One of the patients who received sugar treatment on a wound was 62-year-old Alan Bayliss from Birmingham. He had undergone an above-the knee amputation on his right leg at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham and, as...

Suicides and Homicides in Patients Taking Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft: Why They Keep Happening -- And Why They Will Continue Underlying Causes That Continue to Be Ignored by Mainstream Medicine and the Media From almost the day that they were introduced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, sudden, unexpected suicides and homicides have been reported in patients taking serotonin-enhancing antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft. I'm not surprised this problem hasn't disappeared, nor will it unless we look deeper. I never hesitate to say that these drugs -- selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) -- help millions of people....

President Obama must have been stunned at the "audacity" of Dr. Benjamin Carson in challenging his core assumptions right to his face in front of thousands of people at the National Prayer Breakfast. Obama is not used to being challenged, especially in public, even if indirectly and without being specifically named. From the look on his face, it was obvious Obama was none too pleased with Carson's message or with his "presumptuousness" in presenting it in that forum, while he had to sit still and -- remain silent. I think we can best understand Carson's message in light of his...

FULL TITLE: 'If they'd treated a dog like dad, the RSPCA would have blown the hospital apart': Families of victims of Stafford hospital scandal tell their stories Families of victims of the Stafford Hospital scandal have revealed harrowing details of how their loved ones died. Here are some of their stories: What I witnessed on the wards I will take to my grave Ellen Linstead, 67, died on December 13, 2006, of C.difficile and MRSA after being admitted with bone cancer. Her daughter Deb Hazeldine said wards were ‘filthy’ and she had to wash faeces off her mother’s hands. She...

As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die? My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy. To clarify, you’re predicting your immortality. The problem is I can’t get on the phone with you in the future and say, “Well, I’ve done it, I have lived forever,” because it’s never forever. You have described microscopic nanobots of the future that will be...