Evidence Based Medicine

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I found a good website discussing some of the benefits of evidence based medicine. It explains what it is, what a systematic review is, and what this means to you. The information is from The Informed Health Online/Gesundheitsinformation.de Team: IQWiG. My favorite paragraph is talking about what to do when there is no clear answer for your medical treatment. It is important to remember, too, that just because there is no clear answer now, it does not mean that there is nothing a patient can do and that someone should take over for them. If there is no conclusive evidence about a treatment, patients need the best description possible of the potential advantages and disadvantages of the alternatives they face so that they can choose what they want to do. A variety of medical and personal issues can influence this … Read more

Dental Spending Expected to Slow

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The Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reports that the growth in dental spending is expected to slow. The projected 2 percent increase from $99.9 billion in 2008 to $101.9 billion in 2009 may prove to be the lowest annual increase in dental spending since 1960. This is tied to the peformance in the economy. Today the DOW fell below 7,000 for the first time since 1997. People have to cut back somewhere, so they may be doing so by forgoing visits to the dentist. Even so, this is not a safe bet. You should have a checkup and cleaning atleast once a year. Dental spending is expected to return to more normal levels in 2010. It is projected that there will be an increase of 4.3 percent in 2010 and a 6 percent … Read more

plaYce invites

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I was lucky enough to get an invite to http://www.playce.com/. I have several invites to give you to anyone who might be interested. plaYce is “Making the World a Playground” by providing a 3D virtual world for games and social interaction, based on the real world. plaYce  reconstructs the world in 3D and streams it with high frame rate from within your browser. It does not need any large download to play the latest visually appealing games. Currently there is only one game available called Downtown Defender, which has some similarities to tower defense map in Warcraft III. Soon new games will arrive ranging from car races in Hong Kong,to first-person shooters in the Amazon and treasure hunts in Manhattan. A word of caution: you will need pretty recent hardware for your computer to play. And you need gaming hardware … Read more

Monkey Stem Cells Stimulate Brain

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Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have discovered dental pulp stem cells can stimulate growth and generation of several types of neural cells. They suggest dental pulp stem cells show promise for use in cell therapy and regenerative medicine, particularly therapies associated with the central nervous system. Dental stem cells are adult stem cells, one of the two major divisions of stem cell research. Adult stem cells have the ability to regenerate many different types of cells, promising great therapeutic potential, especially for diseases such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s. Already, dental pulp stem cells have been used for regeneration of dental and craniofacial cells. Yerkes researcher Anthony Chan, DVM, PhD, and his team of researchers placed dental pulp stem cells from the tooth of a rhesus macaque into the hippocampal areas of mice. The dental pulp … Read more

Brief Downtime

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I apologize for the brief downtime experienced early. I was told by my hosting provider that there was some problem with the .htacess sending my website to another. If you visited around 5:20 p.m. EST today, you would have noticed the website was showing a dentist from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The image of how the website looked is shown below. It is not clear from there “We believe” statement if they support or do not support the preventative removal of wisdom teeth.