Obesity has always been an issue in America–but now the number of people over 300 pounds needing hospital treatment has created a growing market for special equipment, including patient lift devices.As baby boomers age, so does the average age of nursing staff–whose greatest incidence of injury is from lifting and moving large patients. A Texas-based hospital supply company said “its members bought $847,000 worth of patient lifts in 2001. Last year that number was up to $43 million.” And with the increasing popularity of bariatric surgery to help obese patients lose weight, some hospitals are now buying whole suites of specially designed beds, walkers and commodes.

How ironic that as more and more health issues are connected with serious overweight, the occurrence of it is increasing so much. Perhaps it’s just a case of numbers–there are more obese people now because there are just more people–all those baby boomers–hitting that age when losing weight becomes more and more difficult.

So even as holistic approaches to healing have begun to attract serious dollars in the marketplace–and some hospitals are followin the money by adding things like Reiki to treatment options for certain diseases–so now obesity cures are becoming serious revenue sources, too. It’s not just for pill-hawkers anymore…

Hypnosis is about becoming relaxed–all the way to your core. And because a calm state of mind is helpful for so many medical treatments, a researcher in Israel–where the procedure is very popular–decided to try it for in vitro fertilization.

Of course, in this study they had to choose women who were already good candidates to be hypnotized (they don’t say what those specifications are, but a quick search indicates experts say it’s basically anyone who’s willing). The success rate (twice as many of the women who were hypnotized became pregnant in a single cycle of treatment) points up the power of a peaceful mind.

The hypnosis was introduced at a “crucial point of the treatment…the point in which the embryos comes in contact with the womb of the woman”–which is the most stressful part of the treatment. The stress is said to be so extreme that the uterus may begin having tiny contractions which would make it difficult for the embryo to attach itself–and might even expel it even as it’s being introduced.

Mantras. Meditation. Massage. Deepak Chopra and an increasing number of other highly respected research scientists and medical practitioners recommend them all. Happily, the conjoining of medical wisdom from east and west grows ever closer.

Visit Don Iannone’s ED Futures e-newsletter for an excellent list of bio news resources. Because of the tremendous potential the industry holds for improving economic development in regions, Iannone covers lots of interesting items that relate to biotech and biomed–they’re on everyone’s lips these days. Let’s face it bio is the hottest industry in the world right now. And maybe, between that and nanotech, this will remain the future for a long time to come.

One of his recent entries gives extensive information about the bio industry from another excellent news sources you should check out: Bio.org This is essentially a lobbying group for the industry…as well as for researchers, many from small innovative companies. They’re about making the climate in Washington favorable to those who are out there struggling to give birth to cutting-edge developments.

Hmmm. Looks like I’d better add that one to the resource list, too.

Clearly recognizing that extreme differences in position still exist, the government has called for reconsidering its position on human cloning for purposes of stem cell research.Seeing that many other countries are changing their attitudes–including England’s latest move to open research for a year–they are concerned about losing residents. “Simitis warned that a type of ‘bio tourism’ might develop within the EU and that German researchers would immigrate to Great Britain if Germany did not rethink its stance.”

Just as women began shopping for the right cleric–meaning the cleric with the ‘right’ attitude about it–when birth control became easily available many years ago and yet was banned by the Catholic Church, this fear of people going elsewhere to get more advanced medical care is not unrealistic.

Biomed has surpassed software for the first time in attracting VC money–and it’s filling the gap, at least partially, that the dot.com bust created. In the last year high-tech investors have switched to supporting biotechnology and medical device companies — to the tune $241.7 billion in Silicon Valley alone. Biomedical companies create jobs and spending that can help smooth out a region’s rough spots.

“The Bay Area’s biomedical sector is getting one of every four venture capital dollars — compared with one out of 16 in the year 2000’s frenzy of high-tech investment.”

The article goes on to say that rate of payback is speeding up, and bio investors don’t have to quite so patient anymore. No wonder everybody’s in such a race for bio-tech-med favor

Gotta post this here, too. I put in Blog for Business because it’s such good news for business people. A technique for reading DNA has now been applied to reading and isolating spam emails.This is a sign of things to come.

“Instead of chains of characters representing DNA sequences, the research group fed the algorithm 65,000 examples of known spam. Each email was treated as a long, DNA-like chain of characters. Teiresias identified six million recurring patterns in this collection, such as ‘Viagra.’

“Each pattern represented a common sequence of letters and numbers that had appeared in more than one unsolicited message. The researchers then ran a collection of known non-spam (dubbed “ham”) through the same process, and removed the patterns that occurred in both groups.”

Rate of error–deleting a genuine email–was 1 in 6000. How much time do you waste deleting emails? Is it worth that risk?

I’m sure that as scientists you have long noticed that patterns exist everywhere we look. Here’s another illustration of how a technique from one discipline can have direct transferrability to another–if you only jog your thinking enough.

Using the in vivo technique which is conducted in natural environments (as opposed to in vitro which are done in labs) the Korean scientist who cloned the first human embryo from stem cells early this year has received big funding for the experiment using surrogate cow mothers, some of which he’s reportedly hand picked. And there’s more.

“The Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) yesterday said it would pour 7.7 billion won [if my calculations are correct that’s about US$6.65 million] to build the Korea National Primate Research Center by next year. The center, which the KRIBB plans to complete midway through next year, will focus on studying stem cells to produce next-generation medicines based on advanced biotechnology.

Earlier last month, Kyonggi Province and the Ministry of Science and Technology decided to shell out 7.8 billion won to set up a facility for miniature pigs, which can provide human organs for transplants.”

Hwang’s successful cloning may have been the beginning of a new era–unrestricted research that uses stem cells to find treatments for many chronic diseases. I personally know two people who have overcome two different almost-always fatal varieties of cancer by having had stem cell implants using their own stem cells. My guess is investors all over the world are already dumping lots of money into this research–wherever it’s being done.

Using a patient’s own stem cells, scientistis can replace certain areas of damaged heart tissue. Using bone marrow taken from the hip. doctors isolate stem cells, and in a new study, they plan to inject 30 million of them into one patient’s heart (the 6th in the country to receive this treatment). Chief of Cardiology at the Texas Heart Institute says some of the stem cells become new blood vessels, some new heart muscle cells. “Other cells fuse, latch onto existent heart muscle cells in sort of a blob and they exchange nuclear material.” Doctors believe this fusion process allows the injected cell to rescue the injured cell. In Tokyo researchers pulled stem cells from a leg muscle and grew a cardiac patch.

This is great news for potential heart transplant patients who may eventually not have to undergo the invasive procedure. But for those with other types of heart disease, such as problems with valves, this work gives hope that one day their own stem cells might help heal or even replace the dysfunctional parts.

Wow. This truly gives new meaning to the old admonition “Heal thyself”…

Indian health officials declare waves and radiations from mobile phone towers potentially dangerous to the hearts and/or brains of those in the vicinity. Officials from India’s Health Services %28DHS%29 and head of the Neurology Department at PGI%2C raised the safety issue at a public meeting that included, among others, the country’s Air Force and its Department of Telecom %28DoT%29.

The neurologist said that the horizontal area within 30 meters (about 100 ft.) of the towers is not safe, and that protective gear must be worn by anyone going within 3 meters (about 10 feet). Some U.S. scientists disagree: Here’s a report on ElectroMagnetic Fields and Human Health by a professor of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Where does the truth lie? Like everything we discover and put to good use (who could live without cell phones nowadays?), there are often hidden costs against life that we a) don’t catch at all, or b) seriously underestimate.

Walking the middle line and keeping the balance is all we can ask of our scientists, inventors and investigators.

Quinton Cardiology Systems will sell Cardiac Science’s Professional Model AED Under Burdick Brand Name A company with a powerful distribution system agrees to sell another company’s product–a good partnership idea. Mutually beneficial collaboration–rather than every entrepreneur for herself–is surely a strong way to lower costs, increase efficiency, and gain greater market share–all the stuff all companies want to do.

This new model, CardioVive DM(TM), lets medical professionals see the patient’s heart rhythm on a built-in high resolution color electrocardiogram (ECG) display. Professional users can deliver defibrillation shocks either semi-automatically or manually if the patient has a sudden cardiac arrest. Other cool features include “continuous cardiac monitoring capability via an ECG patient cable, multiple rescue data storage, clear and comprehensive AED and CPR voice prompts, infrared data transfer and optional rechargeable battery.”

Voice prompts–I like that–that’s a trend, I’ll wager. Tech writers in future will be writing scripts instead of long, stuffy sets of documentation.