DiversityNursing Blog

Nurses’ Health Study recruits “next generation”

Boston, MA - From the dangers of tobacco and trans fats to the benefits of physical activity and whole grains, much of what we know about health today is thanks to the Nurses’ Health Study.

Researchers are recruiting 100,000 nurses and nursing students to join the long-running Nurses’ Health Study and expand its landmark research on health and well-being. And for the very first time, male nurses and students are being invited to join. 

RNs, LPNs, and nursing students between the ages of 19 and 46 who live in the US or Canada are eligible to join the study. More than 38,000 have signed up already, and recruitment will stay open until the goal of 100,000 participants is reached.

Researchers hope to engage a highly diverse group of nurses in the “next generation” of the study. For the first time, nursing students are eligible to enroll.

In order to make participation as convenient as possible for busy nurses, participants can join online and complete the study’s surveys through a secure website, http://www.nhs3.org/.

More than 250,000 nurses have participated in the study since the 1970s. By completing confidential lifestyle surveys, they have helped advance medical knowledge about nutrition, exercise, cancer, heart disease, and many other conditions.

“Nurses were originally recruited for their expertise in accurately reporting health data,” explains Dr. Walter Willett, the study’s lead researcher and Chair of the Nutrition Department at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Mass. “Their involvement has been invaluable, and their dedication is remarkable—an astounding 90% of them are still enrolled, decades later! The new group, NHS3, will allow us understand how today’s lifestyle and environment affect a person’s health in the future.”

Nurses enrolled in the earlier studies are encouraging their children and younger colleagues to join. “My mom started filling out surveys when the study began,” one nurse recently commented on the NHS3 Facebook page (www.facebook.com/NHS3.org). “I am so proud to be part of this study and see what it has done.”

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NURSES’ HEALTH STUDIES
Started in 1976 and expanded in 1989, the Nurses’ Health Studies have led to many important insights on health and well-being, including cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Most importantly, these studies showed that diet, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors can powerfully promote better health.

Contact: Michael Keating
617-432-7078

 nhs3@channing.harvard.edu

SOURCE Nurses Health Study 3    www.nhs3.org

By Jodie Diegel, BSN, MBA, RNC, LNCC

Laura* is severely disabled, but when she spent time with Lunar, her caregivers at Little Angels, a non-profit skilled nursing facility in Elgin, Ill., witnessed something they had never seen. Laura began to move her fingers back and forth. Lunar is not a doctor or a therapist, but a 6-year-old specially trained miniature therapy horse from the Northern Illinois-based non-profit organization Mane in Heaven that I started in 2012. Mane in Heaven specializes in animal-assisted activity and therapy visits. Our horses visit with people with physical, mental and emotional challenges ­— from people with severe disabilities to Alzheimer’s and dementia patients to patients who are undergoing treatment for cancer.

Laura’s reaction was no surprise to me. We witness this type of reaction all the time when Lunar — with her chestnut brown coat and blonde eyelashes and her gentle demeanor — or one of her fellow mini-horses meet our clients. I recall another visit between a young man who was blind and disabled and Turnabout, a 3-year-old mini-horse. Turnabout is the only boy in the bunch and has the biggest personality. When the young man put his hands on Turnabout’s face, they obviously made a connection because the man laughed exuberantly again and again. 

It brings us joy to see the light, laughter and hope our minis provide to people experiencing profound illnesses or disabilities — not to mention that these visits can lead to improved physical, mental and emotional well-being. 

I remember when the idea of working with mini-horses came to me. I was surfing the Internet one evening in December 2011 after volunteering with my two therapy dogs, Buffet and Dudley, when an advertisement caught my eye. “Mini Therapy Horses for Sale,” it said. I thought, “I have two big horses, so I know horse behavior, and I’ve done a lot of obedience training with my two therapy dogs. I can train mini-horses to do the same thing that Buffet and Dudley do.” 

But I knew I couldn’t do it alone. Two months later, I had established a volunteer board of directors, including founding board member and friend Dina Morgan, RN, and had acquired three mini-horses — Lunar, Turnabout and 3-year-old Mystery, our smallest horse. In 2013, 2-year-old Jenella joined the group. 

Mane in Heaven volunteers and mini-horses began site visits in June 2013, and since then our volunteers and horses have visited with thousands of people in need. We have relationships with numerous providers and non-profit organizations in the region, including Marklund, a home for infants, children, teens and adults with serious developmental disabilities; Gigi’s Playhouse, which cares for children and adults with Down Syndrome; Wings, which advocates for survivors of domestic violence, as well as homeless women and children; JourneyCare, which specializes in palliative medicine and hospice care; and Rush University Medical Center, a premier hospital located in Chicago. 

A site visit usually lasts up to two hours and involves an exchange of unconditional love between the horses and our clients. People watch, pet, brush, hug and take pictures with the minis. Rather than thinking and talking about themselves and their problems, our clients focus on the animals. When our horses visit a care facility, the residents laugh and interact more, are mentally stimulated by the entertainment and are able to recall personal memories more readily. 

When Corin Garcia, 19, from Palos Hills, Ill., met Lunar at a Mane in Heaven visit at Rush University Medical Center, it changed her whole perspective on her pending treatment. Corin told me it was a day she dreaded more than anything — admission day for “four tedious, boring days of chemotherapy,” she said. But Corin’s attitude changed when her she met Lunar. “I was in an awful mood, yet when two miniature horses walked through the door my mind cleared all its negative thoughts and my heart instantly melted. Being around these beautiful creatures made the worse day turn into the best I have ever had in the hospital.”

Mane in Heaven does not charge for visits; we rely on donations and fundraising, so fundraising is important work for our volunteers. Interest is growing in our services, thanks, in part, to media coverage by CNN, the Associated Press, and local media outlets. Having the support of volunteers helps us to maximize donations, but we hope to find others who believe in our mission and will also support us financially. While our horses are tiny, there are still significant expenses associated with running our organization. One day we’d love to open our own therapy center and acquire more horses, so we can serve more people. 

Running a nonprofit business is challenging while also working full time, but I really never feel like this is work for me. While I may have had the vision for Mane in Heaven, our volunteers have made it a reality. We have a group of amazing and generous volunteers who help special horses help special people. Everyone has challenges in their lives, but whether we are with the minis at training sessions or on visits, we always feel happier and joyful after some “mini love.” We are the privileged ones to be on the other end of the rope.

Source: http://news.nurse.com

By DANNY HAKIM

ATHENS — Fotini Katsigianni wears a white nurse’s hat that protrudes prominently from the top of her head. She is head nurse at Evangelismos Hospital, one of the city’s most prominent.

So she was surprised last month when she was approached by a man in the hospital’s hallway. At the time, Ms. Katsigianni’s husband was a patient there. The strange man extended an arm with a business card and averted his face, so she could not identify him. He offered to rent her a cut-rate nurse.

“He told me for 30 euros I could have whatever I want!” Ms. Katsigianni said, laughing at the idea of the head nurse being solicited to buy illegal nursing care.

First the men come to the hospitals of Greece during visiting hours, leaving business cards with pictures of nurses under pillows and in waiting rooms. Then the women come at night, mostly foreigners from countries like Georgia, Romania and Bulgaria. They are the nurses of Greece who aren’t really nurses.

Greece’s dire finances have gutted its health care system. Universal coverage effectively ended under the austerity measures imposed under the terms of the country’s bailout. Budget cuts have also thinned the ranks of hospital staff nurses, who are supposed to handle medical tasks like changing IVs.

Now, when patients come to a hospital in Greece, they increasingly have to hire their own nurses just to receive basic care. While private nurses have long been a feature of Greek health care, the country’s wrenching economic crisis has left many patients with neither the money nor the insurance coverage to hire licensed caregivers.

Instead, patients are turning to illegal nurses, often immigrants with little or no training. One top official said he believed that half of the nursing care came from 18,000 illegal providers.

The situation reflects the grip of the black-market economy on Greece, where even paying skilled workers like mechanics and plumbers under the table to avoid taxes is commonplace. Frustrations among Greeks over the deterioration of living standards helped feed the left-wing Syriza Party, which came to power last month vowing to reject austerity policies.

Illegal nurses typically pose as family members or say they are longtime personal employees of a patient. In reality, temp agencies employing these women send men into the hospitals to distribute business cards advertising 12 hours of nursing care for less than $60. By contrast, a contract nurse at another hospital, Sotiria, costs nearly $70 for 6 hours and 40 minutes, though those who still have insurance can be reimbursed for about a third of the cost.

Thanos Maroukis, a professor at the University of Bath, England, who has studied the problem, said temporary agencies are taking “over control of the hospital’s workplace,” adding, “It’s incredible what’s happening, but it’s true.”

Nurses are just the beginning. Almost anything can be rented.

“We have the same thing with TVs, with ambulances, I would say with bedding,” said Anastasios Grigoropoulos, the chief executive of Evangelismos Hospital. “Or chairs.”

Chairs are carried in by strangers who rent them to groups of visiting relatives. Or they bring televisions.

In many other developed countries, hospital security would simply expel unauthorized visitors. But administrators face staff shortages and impoverished patients. They also say they lack the legal jurisdiction to act without police intervention.

“Because of the crisis, the last three years, we see more and more illegal nurses,” said Mr. Grigoropoulos. “You can’t do anything.”

He has called the police, and a few days earlier, Evangelismos was raided. Several illegal nurses were arrested, but that is a fairly rare event, because the police have had their own cutbacks.

Government agencies, too, have been overwhelmed. An influx of immigrants since the 1990s swelled a pool of cheap labor.

These immigrants “filled the space and found themselves in every clinic and every hospital,” said Dimitrios Papachristou, a senior official at the Social Insurance Institute, a state agency known by its Greek acronym, IKA, which provides insurance and pensions to 2.2 million Greek workers, including nurses. “Why is that? There was a great demand by the patients” for cheaper care, Mr. Papachristou said.

Part of the problem, he said, was that his agency had been given the task of conducting inspections of nursing credentials, a task beyond its typical expertise.

“Let me give you an example,” he said. “I’ll send an inspector to a hospital to inspect contract nurses who work there. So I find at that hospital 15 people who are working there do not have an IKA permit.”

But often he does not have the authority even to issue fines. Instead, his agency reports such incidents to hospital directors, and they decide whether to call the police.

“It’s an extremely illogical thing,” he said.

Because most illegal nurses are immigrants, Golden Dawn, the far-right extremist party, has attempted some of its own “raids” on hospitals, advancing its xenophobic agenda.

But some of the real nurses having trouble getting work are themselves immigrants, like Eleni Souli, a 41-year-old Albanian who married a Greek man and works as a contract nurse. She was sitting among a group of eight other nurses at a cafe outside another Athens hospital recently. All had studied for two to four years to become nurses, and they poured out their frustration over coffee and cigarettes.

“They are not nurses," Ms. Souli said of the illegal workers.

Maria Skiada, 54, has been a nurse for 23 years. She said she recently saw a woman who did not even use gloves when she cleaned up.

“That is how you get bugs all around the hospital,” she said.

Ms. Souli said doctors would sometimes be surprised at how infections spread.

“When they see that in the blood work of a patient, they’ll see something and say, ‘Where did he get that from?’ ”

She counted eight illegal nurses at the clinic where she worked the previous evening. “At night,” she said, “it’s full of them.”

That was clear in another part of town, at Sotiria Hospital, on a recent chilly night.

A young Georgian woman in a striped blue shirt was caring for a patient. She said she had already been working at the patient’s home and came with him to the hospital, a claim administrators say is frequently used. A second woman peeked out of the room next door, then waved away questions, saying she could not speak Greek.

“They take food out of our mouths. That’s how it is,” said Stavroula Antoniou, 46, a licensed nurse who works on temporary contracts at Sotiria. She emphasized that her bitterness was not tinged with racism and that many legitimate nurses were foreign-born.

“We’ve earned this,” she said of her job. “We’ve studied and we’ve sat in classrooms.”

Dr. Miltiadis Papastamatiou, Sotiria’s chief executive, said retired nurses were often not replaced, “and that’s led to the needs of both patients and staff not being adequately met,” though he downplayed the extent of the problem at Sotiria.

But a staff nurse there, who would not give her name for fear of losing her job, acknowledged the severity of the issue.

“We know what’s going on,” she shrugged. “Everybody knows.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

By JEFF SHARLET

The photograph that Markisha McClenton posted on Instagram is a self-portrait, a close-up that is muted in dim light. She might be on her way to work. She might be coming home. Her workdays begin and end in the dark, and they are dark in between. She’s a lab technician in Jacksonville, Fla. Her specialty is blood. She has worked these dark hours since her son was 7. “Freedom,” she told me over the phone from her lab. That’s why she works these hours: The freedom to work at night and to raise her children during the days. To her, this is good fortune. She is smiling in this photo. But her eyes are midnight eyes, 3 a.m. eyes. Why take a photo at that hour? “People forget about us, the night shift,” she said. The #nightshift. That’s the hashtag she used. It’s how I found her.

I’ve been working at night myself for a long time now. Once it was out of choice, a preference for the quiet hours. More recently it was because I had no choice. Insomnia. One night, I was drinking my third cup of coffee — because when you can’t sleep, you might as well stop trying — and ignoring the deadline looming the next morning. Instead, I stared at the matrix on my phone, my own red eyes scanning a tiny sample of some 670,000 photographs under #nightshift. Most of them were people like me, awake when they didn’t want to be awake. And like me, they were looking at the screen in their hands, held up by the one in mine.

Night Life

This is the ghost world of #graveyardshift (#nightshift’s sister hashtag), whose workers file into Instagram every evening. These pictures may be clever or maudlin, silly or harrowing or sad. “Desperate” is a word that comes to mind, but so does “resigned.” And even “resistance.” Sometimes it’s in the form of a gag, a ridiculous pose; sometimes it’s in the form of a gaze so steady that it seems to warm the fluorescent panels framing so many of these pictures. The hashtag itself is a form of solidarity.

There are the warehouse workers who snap themselves letting a wisp of marijuana smoke slip from between their lips, little Instagram rebellions. There are the soldiers and sailors pulling a night shift for no good reason other than orders, photographing themselves and their comrades on the verge of sleep or already under. Cops in noirish black and white, their pictures framed to show a bit of badge. And nurses. A lot of nurses. Close-up, arm’s length, forced smiles, dead eyes. Scroll through #nightshift, and you’ll see some saints among them and some whose hands you hope will be more alive in an emergency than their ashen faces.

The #nightshift hashtag is especially well populated by the armed professions and the healing ones. Sometimes they are almost one and the same, as in the case of @armedmedic3153, a.k.a. Marcelo Aguirre, a paramedic in Newark and suburban New Jersey. He owns an AR-15, a ­9-millimeter­ and a shotgun, but the only thing he shoots on the night shift is his camera. He works nights so he can study days; he wants to be a doctor. Nights are good preparation for that: You get more serious cases. You learn on the job. A 12-hour course each night you’re on. Twenty-four hours if you take a double. After a while, the adrenaline that juices you when you’re new — when you’re still keeping a tally of the lives you’ve saved — disappears. You just do the job. “High speed and low drag,” Aguirre told me when I called. “Please ignore the siren,” he said. “We’re going to a call.” A stroke. Nothing to get excited about. Coffee sustains him. He stays clean. Some guys, he said, use Provigil, but that’s prescribed. “For shift-work disorder,” he said.

Markisha McClenton, the lab tech, told me that she no longer gets sleepy. “I program myself,” she said. She wouldn’t change her schedule now if she could. She likes working alone. There are nurses at the facility where she works, but they don’t often venture back to the lab. “They think it’s creepy,” she said. “At night.” Maybe it is: The long hours of the night shift are a reckoning with time.

“There’s people still struggling like I struggle,” a miner named Mike Tatum told me, explaining why he posts pictures and why he looks at them. “Working through the night, not sleeping next to your wife, missing your kids because they go to school before you get home.” Tatum likes to post pictures of the heavy machines used to dig coal from Wyoming strip mines. He drives a D-11 bulldozer. “I push dirt,” he said. Other machines dig the coal. Twelve hours of ‘dozing, four nights in a row. He came to this job — a good one, $30 an hour or more for as long as the coal lasts — after construction work dried up in California. “Nobody back home has really seen what we do out here,” he said. It’s a good job, he swears. He’s brought his 6-year-old boy out to see the machines. He’d be proud if his kids grew up to be miners. A good job. Rough on the back. But you’re just sitting. Driving the ‘dozer. Nobody bothers you. Hours without a word. “Pretty easy,” he said. Plenty of time to think. To make plans. Things he can do with his days, when he has days.

So far, this is enough to see him through the nights safely. “Quite a few fatalities the past year,” he observed. He heard about a man at another mine who drove a machine into the pit. “Maybe a suicide.” It didn’t seem like an accident; he had to drive through a couple of berms. “Splat,” Tatum said. “And a couple more like that.” He says other guys have died on the road, Highway 59. It’s a long drive out to the mines, and drug testing never stopped anyone from drinking, especially after the shift is over.

Pan out to take in some fraction of the 670,000 faces. Pay attention to the eyes, drooping or unnaturally wide. Is it fatigue? Or something more? Something less? Stay sane, and the night shift may seem like just another set of hours. Lose yourself to the loneliness, and the daylight leaks out of you. But something else can come in. A kind of calm. The kindness of dark hours.

When I was first drawn into this nighttime Insta­gram grid, I was looking for a distraction, for ­images to displace the thoughts that had agitated me to exhaustion. What I found instead was something that seemed descended from Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” his great prose poem of an essay that was really a proposal for a new kind of literature, a way of speaking, a way of seeing. We shouldn’t mistake Instagram’s squares for the public one. But neither should we miss the quiet dig­nity afforded by gathering under this hashtag: the solidarity of recognition, of being seen.

“Nightwalkers,” Pierre Bell calls the men and women who find their peace after-hours. He’s new to the night himself, working as a nurse’s aide on the behavior unit at an assisted-living home in Akron, Ohio. “What’s behavior?” I asked. “Combative,” he said. “Lockdown. Spit, kick, hit, bite.” Sounds terrible, I said. It’s not, he told me, especially at night, when the anger subsides, and when the alarm I can hear beeping in the background is an event rather than a constant song. The other aide will get that one. Bell, a 28-year-old father of a 9-month-old, was sitting with the nightwalkers. The strange ones, the restless ones, the story­tellers. “Some were in wars,” he told me. “Some were teachers.” Sometimes they talk for hours. If they’re up, he’s up. It feels to him like a matter of courtesy. The behavior unit is his patients’ home. He’s only visiting. Trying out the night they live in.

And on his break, he can slip away. Take a snapshot, make a record of himself in this new country of the other hours, post it on Instagram as ­@piebell522.­ He took the one that caught my eye when he was in the bathroom. “I saw the dark behind me,” he said. “I thought it could be a picture.” A lovely one, as was the shot that followed hours later: Bell’s baby boy, the reason he works the night shift. Not for the money but for the days he can spend with his son, a handsome little guy with his father’s gentle eyes, but warmer in the golden sunlight of the morning.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Nurses are an important part of the medical workforce. They provide crucial supplementary services and are primary caregivers in a lot of industries. As such, the demand for nurses is high, though there are variations according to different states. As the country’s population and access to medicine continues to grow, the demand for nurses does as well.

Source: http://online.adu.edu

BY EMMANUELLE SALIBA

After a howling blizzard with hurricane-force winds socked Boston with 21 inches of snow on Tuesday, some nurses and doctors hitched rides with police or put on skis and snowshoes to get to work.

Kelli O'Laughlin, one of the doctor's at Brigham and Women's Hospital who skied to work, found her ride "fun" and "exhilarating." She told NBC's Miguel Almaguer that doctors have to come in to work because"the emergency department is one of those places where 24 hours a day, 7 days a week it's always going."

"Our sincerest thanks to all employees that have gone to extraordinary lengths to get to the hospital during the storm," wrote the hospital in an Instagram post along with a photo of pathology technician Vivian Chan on snowshoes.

Source: www.nbcnews.com

Written by James McIntosh

While violence intervention programs have demonstrated that they can be an effective way of preventing violent injury, little has been known about their financial implications. A new study now suggests that these interventions could save various sectors millions of dollars.

Researchers from Drexel University have analyzed the cost-benefit ratio of hospital-based violence intervention programs (HVIPs) and report that - as well as benefiting victims' lives - HVIPs can make costs savings of up to $4 million over a 5-year period in the health care and criminal justice sectors.

"This is the first systematic economic evaluation of a hospital-based violence intervention program, and it's done in a way that can be replicated as new evidence emerges about the programs' impacts across different sectors," states lead author Dr. Jonathan Purtle.

As a major cause of disability, premature mortality and other health problems worldwide, HVIPs have a crucial role to play in helping victims from experiencing further suffering.

The provision of case-management and counseling from combinations of medical professionals and social workers has been associated with not only reducing rates of aggressive behavior and violent re-injury but also improving education, employment and health care utilization for service users.

Many HVIPs still require a sustainable source of funding

Intervention typically begins in the period immediately after a violent injury has been sustained. Not only is this a critical moment in terms of physical health, but it can also be a time when victims may start thinking about retaliation or making changes in their lives.

"The research literature has poetically referred to the time after a traumatic injury as the 'golden hour,'" says study co-author Dr. Ted Corbin.

In 2009, around six programs were in operation and, as word of their success has spread, more and more HVIPs have been initiated.

Calculating the potential financial benefits of HVIPs is crucial, as for many of these programs a stable and sustainable source of funding does not exist. Instead, many rely on a variety of different financial sources such as insurance billing, institutional funding, local government funding and private grants.

For the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the researchers conducted a cost-benefit analysis simulation in order to estimate what savings an HVIP could make over 5 years in a hypothetical population of 180 violently injured patients. Of these, 90 would receive HVIP intervention and 90 would not.

Costs, rates of violent re-injury and violent perpetration incidents that a population would be estimated to experience were calculated by the authors using data from 2012.

The authors made a comparison between the estimated costs of outcomes that would most likely be experienced by the 90 hypothetical patients receiving HVIP intervention - including $350,000 per year costs of the HVIP itself - and the costs of outcomes predicted for 90 patients not receiving any HVIP intervention.

The net benefit of the interventions

A total of four different simulation models were constructed by the researchers to estimate net savings and cost-benefit ratios, and three different estimates of HVIP effect size were used.

Costs that were factored into the simulations included health care costs for re-injury, costs to the criminal justice system if the victims then became perpetrators and societal costs for potential loss of productivity.

Each simulation calculated that HVIPs produced cost savings over the course of 5 years. The simulation model that only included future health costs for the 90 individuals and their potential re-injury produced savings of $82,765. The simulation model including all costs incurred demonstrated savings of over $4 million.

Dr. Purtle acknowledges that estimated lost productivity costs may have been slightly high due to an assumption in their data that all individuals in the simulation were employed. However, he believes that there are also many social benefits to HVIPs that cannot be financially quantifiable:

"Even if the intervention cost a little more than it saved in dollars and cents to the health care system, there would still be a net benefit in terms of the violence it prevented."

The authors believe that the findings of their study could be useful in informing public policy decisions. By demonstrating that HVIPs can be financially beneficial, the study suggests that an investment in HVIPs is one that pays off for everyone concerned.

Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com

By MICHELLE CASTILLO

Pets are getting some pain relief thanks to a centuries-old method that has helped some of their owners: acupuncture.

A dachshund named Samson benefitted from the treatment. Samson was pawed aggressively by another dog at the park and needed surgery immediately. After his first procedure, it was clear he was still in some pain. Doctors recommended a second surgery, but owner Ellie Sutton wasn't so keen to make Samson go under the knife again.

"I wouldn't want to risk something like paralysis," Sutton told CBS News. She decided "to try every other kind of step first."

To her surprise, the veterinarian suggested acupuncture, the traditional Chinese medicine method of inserting needles into the skin to stimulate parts of the body.

Veterinary acupuncturists can use .2 to .3 mm needles that range in length from .5 inches to 1.5 inches on pooches.

"A lot of people come for acupuncture because they've exhausted a lot of the traditional Western medicine roots, whether it's medication or surgery," Dr. Marc Seibert, Samson's vet, told CBS News. Siebert is the owner and medical director of Heart of Chelsea Animal Hospital and Lower East Side Animal Hospital in New York City.

Seibert explained there are two main theories behind how acupuncture works. Eastern medicine teaches that energy flows through channels in the body called meridians. When the meridians are blocked, the person -- or the animal -- experiences physical pain. The acupuncture needles help direct the energy to the correct path.

Western medicine, on the other hand, suggests that acupuncture may help by bringing oxygen to the area that the doctor is trying to treat. Hormones called endorphins, which promote feelings of well-being, are released, and the anti-inflammatory parts of the immune system kick in.

"Most people think of acupuncture as a pain reliever, but it's more than that," says Dr. Ihor Basko, a holistic veterinarian in private practice in Honolulu, certified by the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society in Ft. Collins, Colo., told Paw Nation. "Acupuncture can boost the immune system and improve organ functions, and it has other benefits. It can complement conventional medicines and procedures without dangerous side effects."

Not everyone is convinced the method works. Veterinarian Craig Smith, the complementary-care expert for the American Veterinary Medical Association, told U.S. and World News Report that it's hard to know for sure if canines and felines are feeling relief from their pain.

"While many people treating pets with acupuncture report success, there isn't any data that proves it works," he said.

Ellie Sutton admitted that a lot of the "energy flow" talk is hard for her to believe. But she says Samson has definitely benefited from the treatment.

"The fact is he walks better afterwards," she said.

Source: www.cbsnews.com

By AVIANNE TAN

A Minneapolis mom who wanted a natural birth was more than 13 hours into labor when she felt she wasn't going to make it without something to take the edge off the pain. But rather than asking for an epidural or narcotics, she begged for laughing gas.

"It immediately took my fear away and helped calm me down, though I could still feel the pain," Megan Goodoien, who gave birth at the Minnesota Birthing Center this month, told ABC News today. "I didn't laugh because the labor was so intense, but I everything suddenly felt doable just when I thought I couldn't make it anymore. It's definitely a mental thing."

Though nitrous oxide has long been used in European countries and Canada, the gas is now making a resurgence in the U.S., according to medical experts.

The gas, once popular in the U.S., was sidelined after the advent of the epidural in the 1930's, midwife Kerry Dixon told ABC News, noting she believes epidurals took over because they were more profitable. Dixon did not treat Goodoien but works at the Minnesota Birthing Center.

"The average cost for a woman opting for nitrous oxide is less than a $100, while an epidural can run up to $3,000 because of extra anesthesia fees," Dixon said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved new nitrous oxide equipment for delivery room use in 2011, which could also explain the resurgence, Dixon told ABC News.

"Maybe 10 years ago, less than five or 10 hospitals used it [for women in labor]," Dr. William Camann, director of obstetric anesthetics at Brigham and Women's Hospital, told ABC News. "Now, probably several hundred. It’s really exploded. Many more hospitals are expressing interest."

He added the gas popular in dentists' offices has an "extraordinary safety record" in delivery rooms outside the U.S. But more studies are needed to confirm its safety, other doctors say.

Laughing gas works differently than an epidural or narcotic in that it targets pain more on a mental level than physical, experts said.

"It's a relatively mild pain reliever that causes immediate feelings of relaxation and helps relieve anxiety," Camman said. "It makes you better able to cope with whatever pain you’re having."

But gas can also change awareness, said Dr. Jennifer Ashton, a senior medical contributor for ABC News and practicing OB/GYN.

"In delivering over 1,500 babies, I had never used it nor has anyone asked for [nitrous oxide]," Ashton told ABC News. "[M]ost moms want to be totally aware when they are in labor."

Mothers who have opted for nitrous oxide like that it's self-administered by the patient, who has total control over if and when it's used.

A Nashville mother said she opted for the gas during labor only after she found herself too tense to push.

"I instantly felt relaxed," Shauna Zurawski told ABC News. "Before, I was so tense. I was fighting against the contractions, which definitely wasn't good. But after the laughing gas, my body was able to do what it was supposed to. It was so neat."

Both Goodoien and Zurawski said they put a nitrous oxide machine's mouthpiece over their mouth and nose and inhaled about 30 seconds before their next contraction to get the maximum effect.

Another advantage is that the chemical gets out of your system shortly after stopping inhalation.

"With my first child, I had an epidural, I was numb for so long after the delivery and it took a while to get back to normal," Zurawski said. "But with the nitrous oxide, I was walking around and taking pictures almost right after."

Both Goodoien and Zurawski said they didn't experience any adverse side effects.

Nitrous oxide's possible side effects are usually just minor nuisances such as nausea, dizziness or drowsiness, medical experts told ABC News.

Patients can also choose to stop or get an epidural at any time if they find they don't want the laughing gas.

It's still early to tell how popular this new option will get, but in countries like New Zealand, about 70 percent of women in labor choose to use laughing gas, Dixon said.

"When I was working in New Zealand, I told one of my patients, [laughing gas] wasn't really used in the U.S. and you know what she said?" Dixon asked. "'I thought they have everything in America!'"

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

By David McNamee

It has been a dramatic plot device within countless movies and soap operas, but now a new study from Northwestern Medicine and Hines VA Hospital, both in Illinois, has attempted to answer the question: can the voices of family members and loved ones really wake coma patients from unconsciousness?

A coma is defined as an unconscious condition in which the patient is unable to open their eyes. When a patient begins to recover from a coma, they progress first to a minimally conscious or "vegetative state," though these states can last anywhere from a few weeks to several years.

Lead author Theresa Pape was inspired to conduct the new study - the results of which are published in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair - while working as a speech therapist for coma patients with traumatic brain injuries. Pape observed that patients appeared to respond better to family members than to strangers.

From this, Pape began to wonder if patients' ability to recover might be increased if therapists were able to stimulate and exercise people's brains while they were unconscious.

As part of the randomized, placebo-controlled study, 15 patients with traumatic closed head injuries who were in a minimally conscious state were enrolled to Familiar Auditory Sensory Training (FAST). The 12 men and three women had an average age of 35 and had been in a vegetative state for an average of 70 days before the FAST treatment began.

At the start of the study, Pape and her colleagues used bells and whistles to test how responsive the patients were to sensory information. They also assessed whether the patients were able to follow directions to open their eyes or if they could visually track someone walking across the room.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was also used to get a baseline impression of how blood oxygen levels in the patients' brains changed while listening to both familiar and unfamiliar voices tell different stories.

The therapists then asked the patients' families to look at photo albums to identify and piece together at least eight important stories concerning events that the patient and their family took part in together.

"It could be a family wedding or a special road trip together, such as going to visit colleges," Pape explains. "It had to be something they'd remember, and we needed to bring the stories to life with sensations, temperature and movement. Families would describe the air rushing past the patient as he rode in the Corvette with the top down or the cold air on his face as he skied down a mountain slope."

Patients were more responsive to unfamiliar voices after 6 weeks of therapy

The stories were rehearsed and recorded by the families and then played to the coma patients for 6 weeks. Following this listening period, the MRI tests were repeated, with blood oxygen levels being taken while the patients listened to their stories being told by familiar and unfamiliar voices.

The MRI recorded a change in oxygen levels when the unfamiliar voice was telling the story, but there was no change from baseline levels for the familiar voice.

Pape says that these findings demonstrate a greater ability to process and understand speech among the patients, as they are more responsive to the unfamiliar voice telling the story: "At baseline they didn't pay attention to that non-familiar voice. But now they are processing what that person is saying.''

At this point in the treatment, the researchers also found that the patients were less responsive to the sound of a small bell ringing than they had been at the start of the study. The team believes that this indicates the patients were now better able to discriminate between different types of audio information and decide what is most important to listen to.

"Mom's voice telling them familiar stories over and over helped their brains pay attention to important information rather than the bell," Pape says. "They were able to filter out what was relevant and what wasn't."

The first 2 weeks were found to be the most important period for treatment and demonstrated the biggest gains. The remaining 4 weeks of treatment saw smaller, more incremental gains.

"This gives families hope and something they can control," Pape says of the treatment, recommending that families work with a therapist to help construct stories that augment the other therapies the patient may be undergoing.

Now, the team is analyzing the study data to investigate whether the FAST treatment strengthened axons - the fibers that make up the brain's "wiring" and transmit signals between neurons.

Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com