DIY diagnosis of illness is dangerous trend, say pharmacists

People who diagnose their own illnesses by trawling the internet or talking to friends risk damaging their health, pharmacists have warned.

The growing trend of DIY diagnosis could lead to patients receiving the wrong treatment or buying drugs that could harm them, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) said.

“DIY diagnosis can be downright dangerous. You could be missing something a pharmacist or doctor would know was important. While there are good online sites, there’s an awful lot of nonsense out there too,” said Neal Patel, head of corporate communications at the society.

The warning has been prompted by the growing use of online information, symptom checkers and health apps for advice about ailments.

“There are significant risks with self-diagnosis. These include reading misleading information online and thinking you have a different problem to the one you actually have,” the society said.

“This in turn can lead to people buying the wrong over-the-counter medicines, which then fail to treat the problem or even make it worse.”

It is also alarmed by the apparent readiness of people to decide what drugs they need and to use friends’ or relatives’ medication without getting professional medical advice.

In a survey for the society, 43% of respondents admitted they had used painkillers that had not been prescribed to them after they had diagnosed their own condition.

The poll of 2,046 Britons, carried out by YouGov, also found that 78% had sought medical advice from the internet when they wanted to know what was wrong with them. It found that 51% of adults self-diagnosed their ailment when they were feeling unwell or exhibiting symptoms.

“It’s shocking that 43% of those who self-diagnose have borrowed pain relief medication prescribed for someone else to treat their own problem without advice,” Patel said. “These medications can be addictive and cause other serious side-effects.”

Severe pain should always be investigated thoroughly by a doctor, he said.

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency advises patients never to share with others drugs they have been prescribed.

It also said people with high blood pressure should be wary about taking Sudafed, an over-the-counter decongestant used by people with a blocked nose or head cold.

The RPS said many patients were not aware that the drug raises blood pressure. High blood pressure is a leading cause of strokes and heart attacks, which account for the second largest number of deaths in the UK.

Zafar Khan, a London-based community pharmacist, said patients commonly asked pharmacists to sell them medication to treat an allergy when in fact they had something more serious wrong with them, such as shingles.

He also said the growing number of people with diabetes should be careful about using sugar-coated tablets.

The Department of Health backed the RPS’s plea for patients to seek advice from a trained health professional rather than the internet or friends.

DIY diagnosis of illness is dangerous trend, say pharmacists

Clean eating trend can be dangerous for young people, experts warn

Mental health experts are warning of the risks of the increasingly popular “clean eating” dietary trend, which is leaving a growing number of teenagers very thin and even at risk of dying when taken to extremes.

One nutritionist said she had been contacted by a girl as young as 12 and people had got in touch on social media saying they wanted to be healthier, giving details of their existing diets.

Rhiannon Lambert, a registered associate nutritionist in Harley Street, London, has encountered people who obsess over where food comes from and some clients who will not drink water from a tap, because they normally stick to a brand of bottled water.

“They develop particular habits, or won’t eat food when walking, because they think that food can only be processed when they’re sitting down,” she said. “All this interferes with general life and becomes an obsession.”

The extreme form of this is a psychological condition known as orthorexia nervosa, the Californian doctor Steven Bratman has said. Experts have described it as a “fixation with righteous eating”.

Clean eating is promoted by some food bloggers, who are increasingly felt by a number of medical experts to be having a negative impact on certain vulnerable young people.

Having strict rules can mean that some people ‘worry all day about eating a biscuit,’ one expert says. Photograph: Catherine Shaw for the Observer

“Young people lose sleep over this and cannot afford the lifestyle needed to maintain it,” Lambert said. “Health bloggers can be unqualified and offer dangerous advice. Not all of them want to impose their lifestyle on others, but lots of them do and they often give advice on clean eating with no scientific backing.

“The books come along, the products come along and these people are now role models whose every word will inspire impressionable young people. I have clients who think they have to be vegan to be successful.”

There are no official figures for the number of children and young people following a clean eating regime, because orthorexia is not recognised as a clinical diagnosis. But psychologists and nutritionists have reported a recent surge in the phenomenon among younger clients, especially girls, and believe that it is gaining in popularity.

The eating disorders charity Beat told the Guardian that it had recently seen a rise in the number of calls to its helpline from young people who have experienced problems as a result of following the trend.

Ursula Philpot, a dietitian at the British Dietetic Association, said a fixation with eating healthily had been a noticeable route into eating disorders for vulnerable individuals in the past couple of years.

She identified social media and the rise of healthy food trends and blogs as key drivers of the trend, but said it is difficult to blame them completely. “If it wasn’t health bloggers, then it could be something else that becomes the inroad, but it seems to be the route in now,” she said.

Orthorexia affects girls more than boys, although boys are much more affected than previously, she added.

The range of foods that people worry about eating has changed, Philpot said. “At the top of most people’s lists [of bad foods] is gluten and dairy. When you talk to young people more, you find out about their stringent rules – some will worry all day about eating a biscuit,” she said.

The condition starts out as an innocent attempt to eat more healthily, but those who experience it become fixated on food quality and purity, according to experts.

A Beat spokeswoman said: “We are concerned by the rising trend of ‘clean eating’ and the impact it could have on young people vulnerable to the development of an eating disorder. We are aware that contacts to our helpline are raising issues around orthorexia and clean eating.”

There may be several reasons for someone to take up clean eating, the spokeswoman said.

“Eating disorders are serious mental illnesses and their causes are many and complex. Research is telling us that they may be more biologically based than we previously thought, but social and environmental factors will also play a part in their development,” she said.

“Orthorexia does not have a clinical diagnosis and it would be for clinicians to determine whether it should, which may be helpful, because then it would have a clear clinical pathway of treatment.

“There is a view that it may be more closely connected to OCD due to the nature of the illness, although it does also share behavioural traits with anorexia. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.”

Deanne Jade, the founder of the National Centre for Eating Disorders, a counselling network, has also seen an increase in orthorexia. “A lot of younger people don’t think they need therapy and that the solution to bulimia and anorexia is to eat clean, but this can become an obsession and there’s now more pressure than ever to be healthy.

“There are too many messages in the media and especially social media. What worries me is that a lot of people promoting these ideas have no knowledge of nutrition.

“I don’t know what the solution is, but a lot of the time getting people to recover from an eating disorder means getting them to relax their ideas about clean eating.”

Clean eating trend can be dangerous for young people, experts warn

Greggs joins trend for healthy eating with sourdough pasties

It is the UK’s largest bakery chain, renowned for its sausage rolls and steak bakes and its north-east England roots as well as for famously putting the boot into George Osborne’s ill-fated pasty tax. But the lovers of puff pastry among the six million customers who flock to its 1,700 UK outlets are in for a shock this week.

Greggs is introducing “healthy” pasties, which come in at under 300 calories and contain up to a third less fat and saturated fat (9g rather than 25g). The two new products, with chicken katsu or Bombay potato fillings, use a crunchier sourdough-based shortcrust pastry (with a crumb topping) rather than traditional puff pastry laden with butter. That means they score green and amber – rather than unhealthy red – on the Food Standards Agency’s “traffic light” system.

Roger Whiteside, the group’s chief executive officer, said: “Greggs is well-loved for its traditional pasties and sausage rolls, but we recognise that our customers are increasingly looking for lower calorie and lower fat options.”

Greggs’ move is part of a wider push by brands to be seen to be offering healthier options. Amid concerns about high obesity rates in the UK – researchers recently predicted that by 2025 Britain will have the highest obesity levels among both men and women in Europe, at 38% – food and retail giants have been reformulating their products and encouraging consumers to consider healthier choices.

Pizza Express last week linked up with Iceland to debut its new Artisana range of frozen pizzas, including five that are made from a sourdough base instead of its conventional bread version. Earlier this year Italian eaterie Bella Italia became one of the first chains to introduce spiralised vegetables to its menus and McDonald’s introduced a new salad mix.

Malcolm Clark, coordinator of the Children’s Food Campaign, which is part of the Obesity Health Alliance, said the move by Greggs was a step in the right direction. “Providing healthy options is a good step, but making healthier food the standard promoted item and standard customer choice would be much better.

“Hungry customers’ good intentions may still often crumble at the sight of cheaper, less healthy savoury snacks and the rows of doughnuts and other iced goodies tempting them.”

Greggs began to bring in healthier options earlier this year – a strategy that appears to be paying off as its “balanced choice” products now account for 10% of sales.

But the latest move may incur the wrath of diehard fans of its steak bakes and sausage rolls who have set up a Facebook group where its 6,000 members post reviews of their culinary experiences.

Greggs joins trend for healthy eating with sourdough pasties

Why Cannabis is the Next Juicing Trend? How to Prepare it?

Cannabis, one of the world’s most beneficial vegetables, and its juice is too powerful. Cannabis is a flowering plant that is mostly found in Central Asia and South Asia region. Marijuana is obtained from the plant Cannabis therefore the Cannabis is also known as Marijuana. Its plant’s leaves and buds are actually loaded with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-cancer compounds. These compounds are known as cannabidiols (CBD) and they make cannabis so powerful.

Cannabis plants actually produce cannabinoids in their acidic forms only, which are then converted to THC and CBD after being heated or aged. Decarboxylation is the chemical reaction responsible for this conversion.

Read: Study: Passion Flower Found to be Effective as Synthetic Drugs for Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD)

Health Benefits To Juicing Marijuana

According to Dr. William Courtney, juicing cannabis is the healthiest, most beneficial way to consume this amazing plant. He claims that many of the same illnesses that are treated with cannabis can actually be prevented through the regular consumption of raw cannabis juice and has treated over 7,000 patients using this method. It is useful in treating-:

– Diabetes
– Asthma
– Free radicals
– Arthritis
– Lupus
– Hypothyroidism
– Infection
– Chronic Inflammation
– Cancer Cells
– Autoimmune Disorders
– Cellular Dysfunction

Read: Astragalus- Herb That Stops Aging, Decomposes Cancer, Repairs DNA & Fights Type 2 Diabetes

How To Prepare Cannabis Juice?

In order to juice cannabis it must be fresh.

-When it comes to juicing, as with any vegetable, the fresher the better.
-Cannabis that has been dried and prepared for smoking is not suitable for juicing.
-Dr. Courtney recommends that patients juice 15 leaves, and 2 large raw buds per day.
-Raw buds are flowers harvested when the THC glands are clear rather than amber.
-It is recommended that you mix in another vegetable juice to cut the bitterness of the raw cannabis.
-A popular choice is carrot juice, and a ratio of 1 part cannabis juice to 10 parts carrot juice is a good rule of thumb.
-Split the drink into 3 parts and drink with each meal, or store for up to 3 days in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator.

Sources:

1) https://www.hellomd.com/health-wellness/cannabis-juicing-a-new-health-trend

2) http://www.davidwolfe.com/stop-smoking-cannabis-start-juicing/

3) http://www.foxnews.com/health/2015/07/13/is-juicing-raw-marijuana-next-green-drink.html

4) https://www.hellomd.com/health-wellness/cannabis-juicing-a-new-health-trend

Read: Cabbage Juice- Fights Cancer, Inflammation & Boosts Brain Function! How to Prepare it?

Why Cannabis is the Next Juicing Trend? How to Prepare it?

In spite of Obamacare Rules, Employer Expense Trend Slows In 2015

Health benefit costs for large employers are expected to rise 6.5 percent next year, a slower rate of increase than this year as companies implement myriad new ways to mitigate medical inflation, according to a new analysis.

The National Business Group on Health, an association of about 400 large employers, said companies are dangling more incentives in front of their workers to stay healthy, using “narrow networks” known to limit doctor choices and increasing cost-sharing via higher co-payments and deductibles for worthers. The national business group said the rate of increase was 7 percent this year and could even be lower next year, falling to 5 percent if employers implement various cost-containment strategies.

Many of these changes are being implemented to comply with the Affordable Care Act, particularly an excise tax that will be implemented in 2018. The tax, also known as a fee on “Cadillac” health plans is levied when benefits exceed a predetermined threshold. Here’s one insurer’s more detailed explanation of such plans linked here.

“Despite the many distractions that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has created, large employers haven’t lost sight of the fact that rising health care costs remain a significant issue that needs to be constantly addressed,” said Brian Marcotte, president and chief executive officer of the National Business Group on Health in a statement accompanying the new analysis.

NBGH’s membership is diverse, including employers like Boeing Boeing (BA), Pfizer Pfizer (PFE) and Coca-Cola Coca-Cola (KO) along with health insurers Aetna (AET), Humana (HUM), UnitedHealth Group (UNH) and most Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans. Most of the members surveyed, or about 83 percent, are companies with more than 10,000 employees.

English: Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Many employers are, in fact, taking necessary steps to rein in costs,” Marcotte said. “This includes partnering with workers to engage in health care decisions and educating them to be better health care consumers, as well as sharing more costs with workers and narrowing their benefit options.”

For example, more than half, or 57 percent of employers are expanding consumer-directed health plans. These plans often come with a high deductible and a contribution from the employer for employees to put toward their costs. But they generally lead to lower costs when employees, faced with the financial implications of their health benefit choices, tend to shop for better deals.

National Business Group on Health said the survey showed a “nearly 50 percent increase in the number of employers that plan to offer a (consumer-directed health plan as their only benefit plan option next year.” All told, 32 percent plan to offer a consumer-directed plan in 2015 compared to 22 percent this year, the business group said.

Wondering how Obamacare will affect your the cost of your health care? The Forbes eBook Inside Obamacare: The Fix For America’s Ailing Health Care System answers that question and more. Available now at Amazon and Apple.

In spite of Obamacare Rules, Employer Expense Trend Slows In 2015

A New Report Paperwork How Smoking -- and its Consequences -- Has Become Largely Confined to the Poor -- A Trend Which Was Pointed Out Forty Many years In the past!

A effective write-up in final week’s New York Occasions describes how, fifty many years right after the initial U.S. Surgeon General’s report on smoking and health, the patterns of cigarette use by social class have shifted dramatically.  In the many years following Globe War II, smoking took hold among the properly-to-do in the U.S.  (At that time there was a renowned correlation between cigarette consumption and sales of silk stockings.)  Today, as the report states, “Smoking, the top result in of preventable death in the nation, is now increasingly a habit of the poor and the functioning class.”

More than the past half century, due to education campaigns by the federal government and organizations like the American Cancer Society American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association, warning labels on cigarette packages, enhanced taxes, and restrictions on smoking in public, the proportion of smokers in the population has plummeted from 50 percent to underneath twenty %.

The Times report draws on a new evaluation put out by the Institute for Health and Metrics and Evaluation, which evaluated federal survey data from 1996 to 2012 to generate smoking costs by county.  As the article can make clear, smoking patterns vary drastically by geographic spot and by class.  Poorer counties have seasoned a lot smaller sized declines in smoking than far more affluent counties.  Some of the highest charges are found in bad counties in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. And these places skilled the smallest declines in smoking in excess of the 16-yr time period.

The authors of the Instances report Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff visited Clay County in eastern Kentucky, which has the distinction of currently being the county with the highest smoking rate (among counties with a population of at least 15,000) in the United States: 36.7%.

Between people interviewed is a 51-year-outdated worker – captured in a striking photograph dragging on his cigarette – who says that several of his close friends have died of lung cancer, and that he has attempted to quit but so far has not succeeded.  “I want to see my grandson increase up,” he confides.

“Since 1997, the smoking fee for adults has fallen 27 % [for the country as a entire], but amid the poor it has declined just 15 percent… And amid grownups residing in deep poverty in the South and Midwest, the smoking charge has not transformed at all.”

The article paints a vivid picture of life in these isolated and impoverished locations. Some of these interviewed refer to the unusual pleasure afforded by smoking and imply that mere smoking is benign compared to the scourges of drugs and alcohol abuse in their communities.

All of this is presented as if the findings relating to the deep-going disparities in smoking, cash flow and education that translate into massive disparities in overall health outcomes were a new phenomenon.  And the post notes that “Health experts say this finer understanding of who still smokes displays that public wellness officials require to refocus antismoking efforts on the bad and the operating class.”

In truth, that the trend towards smoking becoming predominantly a habit of the much less educated and the poor was evident forty many years in the past!  Survey information going back to the 1970s showed that smoking charges among those with a college training have been drastically lower compared to rates amongst those who had not graduated from large school.

And in a 1974 paper published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the authors Ernst L. Wynder, Lirio Covey, and Kiyohiko Mabuchi concluded, based on the observed smoking patterns by sex and educational degree, that, “tobacco-related illnesses will grow to be more and more much more frequent amid decrease educational groups than amid increased educational groups.”

In a 2nd paper published in the American Journal of Public Wellness in 1983 Covey, Margaret Mushinski, and Wynder concluded, “These findings stage up the restricted effectiveness of public well being schooling about smoking in reduced socioeconomic groups, and propose that in the long term, lung cancer and other illnesses for which smoking is a key risk issue will be increasingly social class relevant conditions.”

(Ernst Wynder was a key figure in public overall health who, as a healthcare pupil, in 1950 published the 1st research in the U.S. demonstrating that smokers had a drastically elevated chance of creating lung cancer.  Disclosure: I worked and published with Wynder for 15 many years).

In other phrases, the toll of smoking in these isolated, impoverished, and far more vulnerable locations has extended been foreseeable. And the inescapable corollary is that individuals have been dying of smoking connected-conditions at significantly greater costs in these forgotten areas than in the mainstream society.

Geoffrey Kabat is a cancer epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine and a contributing editor at STATS (Statistical Evaluation Services) at George Mason University.   He is the writer of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Every day Daily life and the Science of Epidemiology.

A New Report Paperwork How Smoking -- and its Consequences -- Has Become Largely Confined to the Poor -- A Trend Which Was Pointed Out Forty Many years In the past!