Before becoming a heart recipient, Stephanie Zimmerman, RN, MSN was a nurse practitioner caring for pediatric cancer patients. This year, Stephanie** underwent biopsies of her donated heart to find out if it has been damaged by her immune system. Then during this terrible flu season, she spent over a month with a severe case of pneumonia. Susceptibility...
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You have probably had a Complete Blood Count or CBC test done before. It is a blood test that is commonly requested at regular check-ups to give your physician an idea of your general health. The test takes six measurements. Red blood cells (RBC): Your red blood cells carry oxygen to cells and remove carbon dioxide from cells. White blood cells (WBC):...
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The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference held in Las Vegas in March is an enormous yearly event filled with marketers, vendors, health IT professionals, executives in healthcare and clinicians. At last month’s conference, an unlikely pair took the stage: mother and daughter, Kristina and Kate Sheridan, spoke about...
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In a continuation of posts on the endocrine system, we introduce four tiny glands (the size of a grain of rice) that perform a huge job. The parathyroid glands are in charge of keeping the calcium levels in your body in balance. Parathyroid Glands Location For most people, the parathyroid glands are located behind the thyroid gland (See: What does the...
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Dr. Kelly Shanahan is a doer. As she wrote about her treatment for early stage breast cancer, “Even the four months of i.v. chemo needed because of one positive lymph node didn’t slow me down: I scheduled chemo for Thursdays, did surgery…on Fridays, threw up on Saturdays, ached from Neulasta® on Sundays, and was back in the office on...
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In From Physician to Patient, I introduced Dr. Kelly Shanahan, a mother, wife, and obstetrician-gynecologist living and working in California. Her life changed with a breast cancer diagnosis. “In 2008, I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer, stage IIB to be exact. I underwent an aggressive bilateral mastectomy, because 1) as an ob/gyn...
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Dr. Kelly Shanahan attended the University of Virginia Medical School, graduating in 1987. Her residency at Temple University in obstetrics and gynecology ending as a chief resident in 1991. After practicing for a short time in Pennsylvania, she moved to California spring of 1994 “seeking a more ‘laid back life.'” She set up a private...
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“My son’s deafness was “cured” by early cochlear implants but there is as yet no known treatment for the loss of peripheral vision, nor any way to predict the rate of progression. Literally, the only approved intervention is learn to use braille and a white cane – a folding stick with no light, no tech, no audio, no google maps...
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The adrenal glands-which are also called suprarenal glands-are part of the endocrine system and are found on the top of each kidney. How the endocrine system hormones work Hormones secreted from glands of the endocrine system travel in the bloodstream to target cells. Target cells have receptors that are specific to each hormone. The hormones and receptors...
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Thirty-eight states in the US have passed “Right To Try” laws. These are laws that are created to give terminally ill patients who have run out of options access to experimental drugs that have not completed the FDA approval process. There is an effort underway to pass this type of legislation on a federal level. On February 8, the #LCSM (Lung...
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This week, the American Heart Association put out its first Scientific Statement on SCAD-spontaneous coronary artery dissection. “Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) has emerged as an important cause of acute coronary syndrome, myocardial infarction, and sudden death, particularly among young women and individuals with few conventional...
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Insulin was first extracted from cattle and pig pancreas. It took 8,000 pounds of pancreas from 23,500 animals to make one pound of insulin. In 1978, Eli Lilly needed 56 million animals to meet the US demand for insulin. Everything changed when, Genentech used recombinant DNA technology to create synthetic human insulin (now called human insulin). The...
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