Why are Magazines So Old in Doctor Waiting Rooms?

It certainly is a complaint in our practice... Why is it that magazines in doctor waiting rooms (including ours) tend to be so outdated??? And not just old, but the "boring" ones? One factor is that an office staff member has been negligent in replacing old magazines with new ones. Another is that... gasp... patients are stealing the new ones??? Researchers in New Zealand set out to study this common complaint and did find that new magazines tend to "disappear" resultin…

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What is the BEST Way to Disinfect a Toothbrush?

In my previous blog article , I discussed the debate over whether a toothbrush becomes "contaminated" leading to the practice of throwing them out after a strep throat infection. Although the answer is still ambiguous whether it helps or not, the fact that even NEW toothbrushes contain harmful bacteria brings even more confusion on what to do. Going on the assumption that bacteria on a toothbrush is harmful and if a new or old toothbrush contain such bacteria, perhaps the best …

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Should Toothbrushes be Thrown Out After Strep Throat?

As with so many things with medicine, this question which sounds so straightforward unfortunately has no straightforward answer. After all, there have only been a few studies that have specifically looked to answer this question. And the answer is decidedly ambiguous as the few studies done so far either support or disprove this practice. Two studies have found no difference in recurrent infections whether one keeps using an old toothbrush or replaces it with a new one after a strep th…

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Why Do Humans Have Weak Sense of Smell

Compared to nearly all other animals, humans have the weakest sense of smell. You would think that humans and our closest evolutionary cousins (chimpanzees, apes, etc) would have similar sense of smell, but humans still have a much weaker olfactory sense. Why might that be? Well, research from Karolinska Institutet have discovered that humans are the ONLY mammals whereby no new neurons are formed in the olfactory bulb after birth. Or if there is any, it is VERY little. In all other …

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Steroid and Anti-Histamine All-In-One Nasal Spray!

Meda Pharmaceuticals has announced a new nasal spray "Dymista" that contains both a steroid and an anti-histamine active ingredient. Why is this significant? It's because it's the first and only one to do so. Of course, it's not available yet until the FDA approves it, but at least it has shown effectiveness in Phase 3 clinical trials. At this time, nasal sprays as it relates to nasal allergies come in two separate flavors: 1) Steroid Nasal Spray (flonase, nasonex,…

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A New Method of Allergy Testing (Multi-Array Chip Technology)

A MIT researcher has developed a new and possibly more accurate blood test for allergies using multi-array chip technology. The paper is titled " Multidimensional analysis of the frequencies and rates of cytokine secretion from single cells by quantitative microengraving " and is published in the journal Lab on a Chip. This chip technology uses a microscopic engraving process to create thousands to millions of tiny wells (or multi-array) on a chip where a different "blood tes…

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