The 'feedstocks' for the lipids and what have you are probably there (although you have to deal with the blood-brain barrier). It's the cellular mechanisms to fix the damaged areas that seem to be lacking or at least don't do such a good job. It's going to be much harder than feeding salmon to shell shocked mice.
I would think most people would suffer memory loss and anxiety (among many other concomitant symptoms) after experiencing round after round of painfully loud explosions, watching their buddies get blown apart and having to kill other human beings, simply due to the unbearably intense psychological strain. Looking at it as purely a physical matter seems to be missing the point a bit. Is physicality causing the mental stress, or is the causation the reverse?
What makes you think that 'psychological stress', isn't physical at it's root? Unless you are proponent of some magical soul property, there have to be physical actions within the brain that trigger what we 'feel'.
It's possible that you could tune MRI signals to pick up a particular form of lipid. Certainly, different MRI interrogation techniques can show lipid rich and lipid poor areas.
Although homogenizing football players has a certain visceral charm.
Unless you get a horse that has been in the US racing circuit and has been fed steroids, antibiotics and bog knows what for most of it's life. I'd bet that the horsemeat in the British burgers was never tested for same.
The problem now is that the law has sort of caught up with computing networks. In the Good Old Days, people did indeed hack into systems, piss off security and make long distance phone calls. But it was on a one off basis. It didn't rise to the level that people thought they needed legislation to protect themselves. There was little legal precedent to go after people with. Then the Feds decided that hacking into systems was a 'crime' and defined it in a nebulous, overbroad fashion. Well, they ALWAYS do that. They define EVERYTHING in a nebulous, overbroad fashion because it's easier and sounds better.
Then, they managed to ramp up the General Paranoia Level (after 9/11) just a bit more. It had dropped a bit after the evil Soviets became more pathetic than evil but 9/11 gave them a golden (literally) opportunity to raise the ante. Coupled with the tendency of police units everywhere to emulate their big brother (the military), you get a legal system with over intrusive laws and overzealous prosecution, both in the field and in the courts.
So remember kids. Walk that nice straight line. No need for nonconformity anymore. We've changed from a race of individuals to a hive. And you thought the Borg were fictional.
Yeah, I was going to say pretty much the same thing. In high school, a friend and I had a running interaction with NASA security at the Manned Spacecraft Center (Lyndon B. Johnson Spacecraft Center to you modern folk). This involved penetrating the MSC by walking into places we *really* should not have walked into looking stupid / innocent. This was tolerated to a large degree until we found a place were we *** really *** should not have been.
Then we were politely told by security to cut it out. Enough fun. We weren't arrested. It was logged - when my friend went to get some high security clearance they brought it up (as well as asking for the every time we had done drugs since college - every time). Didn't seem to be a problem.
I hate to think what would have happened if we had done this in the past decade. We probably couldn't even get past the first gate now. We'd be in some high security prison somewhere learning really useful things like home made weapon production instead of being nominally useful members of society.
Those funny looking Taliban guys would like to disagree. You need 1) boots on the ground 2) better intelligence 3) the ability to blend in and 4) some sort of weapon - be it a gun, an IED, a Molotov Cocktail or whathaveyou. But first and foremost, you need a cause. And personal freedom is a pretty good 'cause'. The fact that many Americans view their government as something other than a benign being serves as the ground swell for a very strong cause. Guns are historically part of that and are ingrained in the culture. Take away the guns and a big whole is created in the 'personal freedom' mythos.
That, in part, is what the Government (big "G", but not for "Goodness") is trying to do with gun ownership. Sheep are much easier to deal with than coyotes.
There is some rational thinking behind parts of those policies:
- In general, having a patient directly give a doctor records makes tampering with the record a real possibility. No real way to ensure that the record hasn't been modified or simply trimmed of data that the patient didn't want anyone to know or just simply thought wasn't relevant.
- Some EHRs dump every cold and sniffle to the output. EHRs, especially on complex patients, suffer from a signal to noise problem. Unfortunately, the best way to deal with that is for a clinically trained person (doesn't have to be a physician) to review the chart and determine what's valuable. I can't see why you'd have to send the chart to each specialty to pull out the relevant data - that sounds like some committees got involved somewhere.
- And, unfortunately, you're right. It's often easier / faster to just repeat the tests. This is seen by the Higher Powers as an unmitigated evil and the Source of All Financial Improprieties. It's likely that the feds are making a bigger deal about it than reality would indicate. It's a problem. It's not the Big Problem or even one of the Big Problems.
The problem with your solution is that it requires patients to behave in a rational and appropriate fashion. Asking an individual to be responsible for their medical records just doesn't work on the whole. Too many people can't be arsed. Too many people would purposefully hide data. And there are many, many people who would simply find this to be impossible - my demented mother, for instance.
At present, there are many ways to keep track of important medical information. A piece of paper with your relevant history, drug list, allergy list and latest EKG does wonders for an ER doc. And some functional folks have been doing that for years. Of course, handing me a USB drive and expecting me to plug it into the hospital network gives my IT folks hives.
In your case, you (or someone in your family) had the relevant data - knowledge of a previous CT scan. A better system would be for the other hospital to be able to transmit the data to the new hospital without you having to resort to a sneakernet, but sometimes the old ways are the only ways it would work. The radiology issue is actually one that is pretty amenable to a good technical fix. There is an industry standard (DICOM) that is pretty well fine tuned. Most radiology systems are already on line. Most hospitals already have systems in place to transmit data between other hospitals that they routinely do business with (lots of exceptions, unfortunately).
The rest of the medical record is a bit more of a mess.
As a physician involved in this mess (and it's a mess), let me chime in and say that you're partially right and partially wrong (TL;DR - it's complicated).
Yes, lots of health care providers (doctors, nurses and ancillary personell) absolutely hate change. There are doctors who are perfectly happy scribbling down a paragraph of acronyms and abbreviations and calling it a day. Then they get mad at the nurse because she can't figure out just what the hell the doc meant.
Those people need to get put in a closet and only used in emergencies (fat chance). Then there are EHR providers that can't program anything harder than "hello world" without six months of testing. It should be fairly easy, for example, to input weights in pounds and convert it on the fly to kg (or stones or troy ounces for that matter). Instead you have input fields that are rigidly structured, and worse, fail in unspecified ways requiring you to re input the data. Those programmers need to be put in a closet an left there.
The problem with patient data is that you don't know the level of understanding that you are shooting for. Do you dump everything out in Doctor Babble? Do you try to make it read at a 5th grade level? Do both? Something else?
PDF is fine for data output that would be static - not so good if the patient wants the new provider to input it into another system. That's a difficult problem to solve. HL7 was supposed to be the standard that offered a solution to that, but, like most standards, it suffers from implementation problems.
And the new gem:
When individuals pay by cash they can instruct their provider not to share information about their treatment with their health plan.
is going to really jam things up. Now you have to sort data on a whole new metric - who can see it. I predict this isn't going to work out well, although I understand the rationale behind it. I also understand how this is going to be abused - your doctor / healthplan doesn't see the fact that you paid for a script for 150 Vicodan. You'd like some more.... Whatcouldpossiblygowrong.
One phone to rule them all, One phone to find them, One phone to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Google where the Shadows lie.
"Central Planets, thems formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule; a few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I'm Malcolm Reynolds, captain of Serenity. She's a transport ship, Firefly class. Got a good crew: fighters, pilot, mechanic. We even picked up a preacher for some reason, and a bona fide companion. There's a doctor, too, took his genius sister outta some Alliance camp, so they're keeping a low profile. You understand. You got a job, we can do it. Don't much care what it is."
Oh great. Now you've done it. All the dinosaurs will wake up and chip in about what ancient and obscure computing platform was in vogue when they became of age. Of course, I would never stoop to such foolishness, except to mention that toggle switches still trigger a brief rush of dopamine in my decrepit brain. Ahh, the blinky lights.
Imagine that. A computer priced at around $2000 outselling one priced close to $10000. I guess it wasn't all gold paved sidewalks, peace and free love back then.
Slashdot Mirror
The 'feedstocks' for the lipids and what have you are probably there (although you have to deal with the blood-brain barrier). It's the cellular mechanisms to fix the damaged areas that seem to be lacking or at least don't do such a good job. It's going to be much harder than feeding salmon to shell shocked mice.
I would think most people would suffer memory loss and anxiety (among many other concomitant symptoms) after experiencing round after round of painfully loud explosions, watching their buddies get blown apart and having to kill other human beings, simply due to the unbearably intense psychological strain. Looking at it as purely a physical matter seems to be missing the point a bit. Is physicality causing the mental stress, or is the causation the reverse?
What makes you think that 'psychological stress', isn't physical at it's root? Unless you are proponent of some magical soul property, there have to be physical actions within the brain that trigger what we 'feel'.
It's possible that you could tune MRI signals to pick up a particular form of lipid. Certainly, different MRI interrogation techniques can show lipid rich and lipid poor areas.
Although homogenizing football players has a certain visceral charm.
And how do you know that we weren't searching for the Texas version of Area 51?
(Well, we weren't but we could have been).
Sawdust. 100% Natural.
At least that what it seems they use in the US.
Unless you get a horse that has been in the US racing circuit and has been fed steroids, antibiotics and bog knows what for most of it's life. I'd bet that the horsemeat in the British burgers was never tested for same.
The problem now is that the law has sort of caught up with computing networks. In the Good Old Days, people did indeed hack into systems, piss off security and make long distance phone calls. But it was on a one off basis. It didn't rise to the level that people thought they needed legislation to protect themselves. There was little legal precedent to go after people with. Then the Feds decided that hacking into systems was a 'crime' and defined it in a nebulous, overbroad fashion. Well, they ALWAYS do that. They define EVERYTHING in a nebulous, overbroad fashion because it's easier and sounds better.
Then, they managed to ramp up the General Paranoia Level (after 9/11) just a bit more. It had dropped a bit after the evil Soviets became more pathetic than evil but 9/11 gave them a golden (literally) opportunity to raise the ante. Coupled with the tendency of police units everywhere to emulate their big brother (the military), you get a legal system with over intrusive laws and overzealous prosecution, both in the field and in the courts.
So remember kids. Walk that nice straight line. No need for nonconformity anymore. We've changed from a race of individuals to a hive. And you thought the Borg were fictional.
Thermite!
The day goes brighter with a little bit of Thermite!
Dunno. We were stupid, but not that stupid.
Yeah, I was going to say pretty much the same thing. In high school, a friend and I had a running interaction with NASA security at the Manned Spacecraft Center (Lyndon B. Johnson Spacecraft Center to you modern folk). This involved penetrating the MSC by walking into places we *really* should not have walked into looking stupid / innocent. This was tolerated to a large degree until we found a place were we *** really *** should not have been.
Then we were politely told by security to cut it out. Enough fun. We weren't arrested. It was logged - when my friend went to get some high security clearance they brought it up (as well as asking for the every time we had done drugs since college - every time). Didn't seem to be a problem.
I hate to think what would have happened if we had done this in the past decade. We probably couldn't even get past the first gate now. We'd be in some high security prison somewhere learning really useful things like home made weapon production instead of being nominally useful members of society.
You Must Like Capital Letters.
Those funny looking Taliban guys would like to disagree. You need 1) boots on the ground 2) better intelligence 3) the ability to blend in and 4) some sort of weapon - be it a gun, an IED, a Molotov Cocktail or whathaveyou. But first and foremost, you need a cause. And personal freedom is a pretty good 'cause'. The fact that many Americans view their government as something other than a benign being serves as the ground swell for a very strong cause. Guns are historically part of that and are ingrained in the culture. Take away the guns and a big whole is created in the 'personal freedom' mythos.
That, in part, is what the Government (big "G", but not for "Goodness") is trying to do with gun ownership. Sheep are much easier to deal with than coyotes.
I'm allergic to Facebook.
There is some rational thinking behind parts of those policies:
- In general, having a patient directly give a doctor records makes tampering with the record a real possibility. No real way to ensure that the record hasn't been modified or simply trimmed of data that the patient didn't want anyone to know or just simply thought wasn't relevant.
- Some EHRs dump every cold and sniffle to the output. EHRs, especially on complex patients, suffer from a signal to noise problem. Unfortunately, the best way to deal with that is for a clinically trained person (doesn't have to be a physician) to review the chart and determine what's valuable. I can't see why you'd have to send the chart to each specialty to pull out the relevant data - that sounds like some committees got involved somewhere.
- And, unfortunately, you're right. It's often easier / faster to just repeat the tests. This is seen by the Higher Powers as an unmitigated evil and the Source of All Financial Improprieties. It's likely that the feds are making a bigger deal about it than reality would indicate. It's a problem. It's not the Big Problem or even one of the Big Problems.
The problem with your solution is that it requires patients to behave in a rational and appropriate fashion. Asking an individual to be responsible for their medical records just doesn't work on the whole. Too many people can't be arsed. Too many people would purposefully hide data. And there are many, many people who would simply find this to be impossible - my demented mother, for instance.
At present, there are many ways to keep track of important medical information. A piece of paper with your relevant history, drug list, allergy list and latest EKG does wonders for an ER doc. And some functional folks have been doing that for years. Of course, handing me a USB drive and expecting me to plug it into the hospital network gives my IT folks hives.
In your case, you (or someone in your family) had the relevant data - knowledge of a previous CT scan. A better system would be for the other hospital to be able to transmit the data to the new hospital without you having to resort to a sneakernet, but sometimes the old ways are the only ways it would work. The radiology issue is actually one that is pretty amenable to a good technical fix. There is an industry standard (DICOM) that is pretty well fine tuned. Most radiology systems are already on line. Most hospitals already have systems in place to transmit data between other hospitals that they routinely do business with (lots of exceptions, unfortunately).
The rest of the medical record is a bit more of a mess.
As a physician involved in this mess (and it's a mess), let me chime in and say that you're partially right and partially wrong (TL;DR - it's complicated).
Yes, lots of health care providers (doctors, nurses and ancillary personell) absolutely hate change. There are doctors who are perfectly happy scribbling down a paragraph of acronyms and abbreviations and calling it a day. Then they get mad at the nurse because she can't figure out just what the hell the doc meant.
Those people need to get put in a closet and only used in emergencies (fat chance). Then there are EHR providers that can't program anything harder than "hello world" without six months of testing. It should be fairly easy, for example, to input weights in pounds and convert it on the fly to kg (or stones or troy ounces for that matter). Instead you have input fields that are rigidly structured, and worse, fail in unspecified ways requiring you to re input the data. Those programmers need to be put in a closet an left there.
The problem with patient data is that you don't know the level of understanding that you are shooting for. Do you dump everything out in Doctor Babble? Do you try to make it read at a 5th grade level? Do both? Something else?
PDF is fine for data output that would be static - not so good if the patient wants the new provider to input it into another system. That's a difficult problem to solve. HL7 was supposed to be the standard that offered a solution to that, but, like most standards, it suffers from implementation problems.
And the new gem:
When individuals pay by cash they can instruct their provider not to share information about their treatment with their health plan.
is going to really jam things up. Now you have to sort data on a whole new metric - who can see it. I predict this isn't going to work out well, although I understand the rationale behind it. I also understand how this is going to be abused - your doctor / healthplan doesn't see the fact that you paid for a script for 150 Vicodan. You'd like some more.... Whatcouldpossiblygowrong.
Bad tempered crazy Sky God is going to zap you with a thunderbolt for saying that.
Or not....
You sound a bit suspicious to me, Citizen.
May I see your passport, please?
And further, now that I've been arsed to actually RTFA, your quotation, although clearly from TFA, is still at the handwavy, vapor stage.
I will be very suspicious of Google's motives (and, for that matter anyone elses') until I can see the fine print and / or code.
Sir, are you actually suggesting that we should read the fine article? If so, I'm ashamed of you.
Not that I would believe Google (or anyone else for that matter) when something says they are 'independent'.
One phone to rule them all, One phone to find them,
One phone to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Google where the Shadows lie.
Don't be evil!
Wait. What?
Where'd the twitter thing come from? Have we been invaded? (Grabs tinfoil).
I hate birds.
"Central Planets, thems formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule; a few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I'm Malcolm Reynolds, captain of Serenity. She's a transport ship, Firefly class. Got a good crew: fighters, pilot, mechanic. We even picked up a preacher for some reason, and a bona fide companion. There's a doctor, too, took his genius sister outta some Alliance camp, so they're keeping a low profile. You understand. You got a job, we can do it. Don't much care what it is."
Yeah, I like Western's too.
Oh great. Now you've done it. All the dinosaurs will wake up and chip in about what ancient and obscure computing platform was in vogue when they became of age. Of course, I would never stoop to such foolishness, except to mention that toggle switches still trigger a brief rush of dopamine in my decrepit brain. Ahh, the blinky lights.
Imagine that. A computer priced at around $2000 outselling one priced close to $10000. I guess it wasn't all gold paved sidewalks, peace and free love back then.