This is cool. A Ph.D. has invented a mechanism for reading the electromagnetic current that comes from your throat when you’re just thinking about saying words. It’s called subvocal speech recognition and I can see the future: people dictating notes to their computers or talking on their cell phones without disturbing anyone else, even in a crowded meeting room or a bus or airplane.

One guy in Japan is even working on a subvocal cell phone that works by putting sensors on your fingers and thumb against your face. And I just saw on Animal Planet that they’ve inserted a piece into a deaf dog’s skull and attached a hearing device to it–the dog can hear again. I remember joking last year that one day we’d be exchanging thoughts through metal plates in our heads.

Judging by this stuff, that day’s not far off.

Your cells put up a protective barrier when you get stressed–and that’s good. Now scientists have discovered a protein that can speed up the return to normal–which is also an essential part of good health. They managed to clone this protein back in 1999 and have been experimenting with it ever since. Stress causes proteins to unfold within your cells, and this protein (CHIP) helps them fold back up. They found that mice who lacked the CHIP protein were more susceptible to lots of stressors–including fever and heart attacks.

Fascinating that chronic stress can cause the same symptoms (protein unfolding) as serious neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s. I wonder how long it will take us to figure out a better way to manage stress? The HearthMath people have the answer–it’s all in the heart.

But despite their simple methods for calming the heart, it still takes great focus and tremendous commitment–both of which many of us stressed-out people have a hard time summoning.

Accountability is tough in health care–so many variables affect both process and outcome that setting benchmarks is tough. Apparently, the federal government wants to try anyway. They’ve announced a new tool called the State Snapshot Web tool. Here’s what it provides for state policymakers:

* A ranking of 15 representative measures of state health care quality.
* Summary measures of the quality of types of care for each state.
* Comparisons of each state’s summary measures to regional and national performance.
* Performance meters that show a state’s performance relative to the region or nation.
* Data tables for each state’s summary measures that show the NHQR detailed measures and numbers behind the performance meters.

Diabetes is an area of special concern as the percentages of occurrence keep rising across the U.S.–they’re measuring quality of care, differences in treatment by group, and money saved by managing the disease better. They’re also working on a guide to go with the tool.

It’s a good start. Once health care providers must begin meeting standardized performance measures, maybe next we can break the stranglehold insurance companies have on who gets what care.

Studies have shown that social support and friendships are critical to optimal life span and social support helps elderly adapt to stress.

A new study says marital status–read: happily married is good–affects how well flu shots work in older people. Sorry, but my reaction to this is, ‘duh.’ If social support is good for people, it’s a no-brainer that a happy marriage would also be. There’s no better source of social support in the world than a loving spouse.

Now if only we can discover how to help more modern people get and stay happily married, we will undoubtedly save billions in health care costs.

I’m all for the environment–my kids think I’m insane because I try to conserve water, reuse paper, and so on (okay, I was raised by depression-era parents, but it’s really my conservationist leanings that motivate me)–and preserving our animal kingdom. But the U.S. government investing $10 million dollars to help Cornell scientists confirm (or deny) a report that a thought-to-be-extinct species of woodpecker has reemerged seems like a skewed decision in a world where that money could be used for so many other good purposes–too numerous to mention.

Given all the people projects–medical research and other things–in our country that need funds, this report almost makes me think the U.S. government believes it has unlimited money. But that’s just me.

An advisory panel is meeting today to debate whether the FDA should allow drugmakers to begin marketing Tysabri again. Patients have found Tysabri effective in reducing the progression of disability in MS and also the risk of relapse. Despite its roughly 50% improvement in these areas, the drug did cause a severe reaction in a few patients, two of whom died.

Other patients who had found the drug dramatically helpful were devastated when it was taken off the market. Given the serious quality-of-life issues for MS patients, this seems to be a case of let the patient decide whether to take the risk. As with many cancer and other drugs, when it’s their best hope, many will choose to undergo risky treatments.

There are nearly a hundred federally approved clinical trials in process right now testing various aspects of treatments for multiple sclerosis.

It is in no small part through these personal risk/reward decisions that the body of medical knowledge grows.

Great idea in this book. Let’s subject all our proposed healing methods to the same rigorous testing.

You’ve heard how back in 1970 the Nobel prizewinning scientist Linus Pauling touted large doses of vitamin C as a cure/palliative treatment for cancer, right? This author examines the history of that proposal as an example of how standard medicine, by failing to thoroughly test any treatment option that smacks of “alternative,” manages to maintain the status quo. He says the National Academy of Science actually broke its own publication rules when it refused to publish Pauling’s paper.

Looks like a telling account of how selective vision can slow us human beings down.

One of my favorite natural substances, nitric oxide, gets further kudos, this time for helping regain movement for the stiffened, immobilized blood cells that are responsible for a lot of the nasty and life-threatening complications of diabetes. They’ve known for a long time that NO helps relax blood vessels, which can help movement. But it seems this latest discovery indicates nitric oxide actually restores mobility, and it can do so both when administered within the body and when applied to cells while extracted from your body but then returned after treatment.

Good news for the 4.1 million Americans and countless millions of others with this life-changing disease. It’s not easy to drastically change your lifestyle to accommodate this disease, but it’s critical to do so–or suffer severe consequences. The government has recommendations for how to control diabetes here.

California voters two years ago approved the idea of the state supporting stem cell research–though federal legal wrangles have been holding things up. Now a couple of philanthropists have given the University of Southern California $25 million to build a stem cell center.

Federal law authorizes states to do what they want with stem cell research (you can read all about the NIH’s position on this issue in their FAQs here)–unless it decides to issue a ban on what they decide.

So with this separation of powers, we have states that pass laws and then have to engage in battles with specific groups of citizens and legislators about whether they can use embryonic stem cells in addition to adult stem cells. This battle is being waged along the fine line between legislating “morality” and hampering American scientists and researchers–I say hampering and not stopping because, in fact, they can do research with embryonic stem cells if they go to a non-federally funded laboratory to do the work. And of course they have to invest a bunch of time studying the minute fine points of how stem cell funding must be applied for and used.

Almost makes it look like lip service that we’re objecting to using embryonic stem cells. And the fact that legal, legitimate in vitro fertilization labs are already freezing and eventually discarding lots of unused embryos also makes writing all these convoluted regulations seem a bit like creating a tempest in a teacup…and possibly even a less-than-ideal use of taxpayer dollars.

But oh, well. How often do people agree on anything anyway? Each person wants to defend his position against the “other” –and so it goes.

Sorry for the protracted failure to post. Been doing the overworked-entrepreneur-cum-road-warrior thing lately…

Following the latest trend toward non-invasive tests and procedures, Mayo Clinic researchers made an exciting discovery, albeit with a small test population. They found that a simple “aortic pulse wave velocity test” was able to detect stiffness in arterial veins “after adjusting for age, male sex, total cholesterol, HDL, diabetes, history of smoking, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and use of hypertension and statin medications.”

Whew. They sure eliminated a lot of variables there.

As our knowledge expands and our technology grows ever wiser and kinder, it may be that our hearts will have more room for recognizing the spiritual/emotional aspects of illness–and discover that they are often the first line of defense against the germs and viruses that make us sick.

If you haven’t seen the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?” yet, set aside an hour and a half. It’s an eye-opener. And check out this book, Molecules of Emotion, by Candace Pert, one of the participants in the movie. You’ll love her description of her discovery that emotions actually reside physically within our bodies (riding around on items called neuropeptides).