Posts Tagged ‘ Medicine ’

Drug Treatment Program Offers Medical Equipment and General Medicine

Friday, August 27, 2010 posted by admin 5:01 pm

People who are going through a drug treatment program not only need rehabilitation to get over their addiction, but also the long-term support of their families. This is especially true of individuals who require any medical equipment for a chronic disease or illness, such as diabetes. Family members play an important role in general medicine, by ensuring the patient gets their treatment and takes their medication. With friends and family to help out, patients should do better with a regimen of general medicine practices to achieve optimum health.

Today, health medicine is a first step in treat a variety of disease and chronic illnesses. Many family practitioners use a more holistic approach to diseases than ever before, realizing that lowering the number of medications a patient takes is helpful to their recovery. Patients who need to see a specialist or holistic practitioner for further treatment are referred to the appropriate physician. Alternative medicine is seeing referrals from physicians who have patients with chronic pain, stress related disorders and anxiety.

You should still get your yearly physicals and checkups with your family doctor who practice in general medicine. But seeking out an alternative medical practitioner like an accupuncturist with state-of-the-art medical equipment is becoming the norm. Patients using oxygen, are getting relief from bio-feedback and massage has shown to lower their stress levels. These patients are finding their daily activities are easier and more pleasurable after such treatments.
Whether you use traditional or a more holistic approach to keep your health at your best, is your choice. With proper preventative medical care, vitamins and your dedication to a healthier lifestyle, you can maximize your long-term health potential. Your personal contribution and focus on important health factors like good diet, exercise and plenty of rest will add years to your life. Regular preventative care combined with good personal wellness efforts can help sustain a healthy lifestyle.

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Category : General, Medication

More Vital Than a Masters Degree in Nursing

Sunday, August 15, 2010 posted by admin 8:11 am
Umbilical cord clamp used 1993. Picture taken ...
Image via Wikipedia

It is a foregone conclusion that a nurse that is worth their salary has got a few things on their belt at all times. A few pairs of rubber gloves (just in case) at the ready are a hallmark of an experienced medical professional. And a decent clipboard with a few bits of medical references on it (such as a CM ruler, pupil gauge and blood pressure charts) can be as good as gold to folks in the nursing profession. And obviously, a proper stethoscope would be worth what you paid for it even if it cost ten times what they do. However, there is one tool out there that pretty much trumps the rest.

While you don’t necessarily need a masters degree in nursing to appreciate the complicated tools in the medical profession, one of the simplest ones is also one of the best for a lot of situations that you are inevitably going to find yourself getting into. If you have not yet guessed what we’re talking about, it’s simple, everyday medical scissors. Do you need to clip a baby’s umbilical cord? Snip! Do you need to handle removing a bandage, or resizing it? Snip, yet again. If there is ever a need to cut something (which only happens about ten times in a slow day), a good, sturdy pair of scissors are a godsend for you.

While there are bent ended scissors designed for getting underneath bandages easily, some of the most important features are the materials your scissors are made out of, and whether they have additional attachments to facilitate getting things done a bit more easily. Obviously, you are going to want your scissors to be made out of stainless steel, because there is no room for rust in medicine. And in some very convenient cases, there are attachments on scissors for operations like handling and unscrewing IV tubes.

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Category : General, Medical Equipment, Medication

Is There Anything Sound Waves Can’t Do?

Friday, August 13, 2010 posted by admin 12:26 pm
Lydklip
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Sound waves are an incredible thing.  For one thing, they can be used to tell the police when someone is speeding (which might not be convenient if you happen to be the speeder, but it is nonetheless impressive), diagnose just about any kind of illness a person might have, and even take care of malignant growths inside of an internal organ.  These are the kinds of things that one would simply never suspect that the humble sound wave might be capable of doing.  For the most part, we typically just assume that sound waves let us hear things, and leave it at that rather cursory level of accomplishment.  But sound waves can do a whole lot more than just identify the basic goings on in the outside world.

Ultrasound technology has been in existence for decades, but seems to grow more effective with each passing year.  With an ultrasound device known as Doppler ultrasound, these extremely high frequency sound waves can pick up what is going on inside of your body at the very moment that it is happening.  Rather like a cop with a radar gun, this fantastic piece of equipment can tell a trained physician or technician how quickly blood is moving through your system.  This information can be in three dimensions, show the actual movement of the blood (and the organs that move the blood around), and whether anything suspicious or potentially dangerous exists (such as a blockage, blood vessel narrowing or malformed object like a tumor or congenital defect).

Sound waves can even allow a previously barbaric process of removing malignant (cancerous) cells from the walls of a man’s prostate to be elevated into the modern age.  If you are a man whose prostate is under threat, the notion of your own cells threatening your masculine power is scary enough – but the idea of a doctor shoving a metal tool in there and scraping off those cells could be a nightmare.  A better method actually uses extremely high frequency sound waves to essentially liquify (or cavitate) the cells into getting out of there.  Yay sound.

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Category : Diagnose, General

Ultrasounds are for More than Just Babies

Thursday, August 12, 2010 posted by admin 4:25 pm
Doppler ultrasound analyzer of blood velocity ...
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If you or someone you know has ever been pregnant, you have undoubtedly heard of (and possibly even seen) the use of an ultrasound machine as a method of identifying how well a baby is developing inside of its mother.  An ultrasound involves using very high frequency (extremely high pitched) sound waves, in order to examine in real time what is going on within a body without having to resort to using radioactive waves like x-rays.  A trained physician can tell an awful lot about what is going on inside of a body, using only an ultrasound image.  And ever since the old two dimensional ultrasounds were replaced by three dimensional ones, and even four dimensional versions (where one can see the movement of internal organs and blood, right as it is happening), the field has opened up to an event greater extent.

The ability to evaluate the flow of blood through your body’s veins and arteries is a process referred to as a Doppler ultrasound.  There are three different types of Doppler ultrasound currently in use in the medical field: Color Doppler, Power Doppler, and Spectral Doppler.  Color Doppler uses a computer to turn the various measurements in a group of different colors, so as to visualize the speed and direction that blood flows through any given blood vessel.  Power Doppler provides a more sensitive, detailed read out of the blood flow.  It can not tell the direction of blood flow, however.  Spectral Doppler provides a graphical display of blood flow instead of a visual one, displaying how much distance blood travels per given unit of time.

With all of these sophisticated ultrasound techniques, a lot of information can be figured out.  Symptoms can be quantified, such as pain, swelling and the effects of an infection.  Any internal organ can be checked out, such as the heart, liver, gallbladder, spleen, kidneys, pancreas, bladder, eyes, thyroid, scrotum and various female parts of a patient.  Pretty much any part of a person’s body can be seen in three dimensions, during the exact moment that it is working on doing its thing.

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Category : Used Medical Equipment

Catheters and Sitting in Misery

Wednesday, August 11, 2010 posted by admin 8:23 am
Coming to terms with your catheter
Image by Compound Eye via Flickr

The word "catheter" actually comes from the ancient Syrian word for "to sit."  The Syrians made the first catheters, which were simply reeds.  Using these reeds to "sit" inside of bodily orifices like plugs, they were a medical tool which could be used to drain out that which should not be in the body any longer.  By inhibiting the body’s ability to close up a wound, and essentially "irrigating" out fluids of some sort, these tubes serve a valuable purpose to medical practice.  However, they can also cause a great deal of suffering to those into whom they are inserted.  After all, catheters have the potential to be very damaging to the people who have them inside their bodies.

A lot of people essentially go to hospitals to get even sicker than they originally were.  And catheters are no exception to this dubious rule.  As a catheter is essentially a foreign object sticking out of (and holding open) a human body, it is pretty much a guaranteed breeding ground for bacteria, as well as a highway by which this bacteria may have easy access to that body.  It has been speculated that of the tens of thousands of deaths due to the "super bugs" (infectious agents which are highly resistant to antibiotics, which breed like rabbits in a hospital setting), a very large number are due to catheters.  In the treatment of urinary catheters, especially, lies the potential for a great deal of infection.  It is in direct, constant contact with bodily waste, after all.

But of course, catheters can be useful, and most likely do save some lives due to their intended "drainage and irrigation" functionality.  Urinary catheterization is useful in the removal of the aforementioned body waste, and can also drain urine from the kidney by percutaneous nephrostomy.  Catheters can also collect fluid, as in cases such as abdominal abscesses.  They can also be used in veins, such as during angiograph, balloon sinuplasty, angioplasty and balloon septostomy.  A catheter can also be introduced into a vein or an artery, and used to measure blood pressure or intracranial pressure.

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Category : General

It Wants to Suck Your Wounds

Tuesday, August 10, 2010 posted by admin 1:18 pm
Armscar
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It is far too true in our society that more often than not, the fanciest, more ridiculously over complicated way to solve a problem is often the most favored manner. Too often, if you did not know better, you would actually think that we were making a concrete effort to inhibit our own effectiveness and progress, by passive aggressively making tons of rules and spending tons of unnecessary time and money on solutions that are of only a moderate level of effective value in combating the problem that they supposedly do. With that being the case, this is the kind of solution that pretty much blows one’s mind, from a standpoint of societal convention.

If you have ever been wounded, you know how nasty a wound can get in a hurry. Puss and bacteria are just parts of the game, especially when you received your injury in a dirty place (such as during a natural disaster, where it may have been hours of filth before you could receive any sort of medical treatment). There is a type of pump which is used to accelerate the healing process and reduce the frequency with which bandages need to be changed – that costs at least $100 a day to rent, and weighs 10 pounds or more (partially because of its batteries). But of course, thanks to an MIT PhD candidate named Danielle Zurovcik, that bit of expensive, heavy nonsense is done with. Her version of the pump costs $3, weighs half a pound, and can be charged up with a hand pump.

This is roughly analogous to a luxury car costing less than $1,000, getting a few thousand miles to the gallon of gasoline, and being small and light enough that you could comfortably carry it around for awhile. In this passive aggressive era, where it seems as if every new medical breakthrough has got to be huge, expensive and unbelievably complicated, this is the kind of innovation that all medicine cries out for more of. What could be next? Are there going to be heart catheters that work just like plumbing augers?

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Category : General

Get Backboards and Collars From Used Medical Equipment Providers

Thursday, August 5, 2010 posted by admin 5:45 am

If someone is in a serious accident and has a serious injury, it’s crucial for them to remain immobile until they can get to a hospital where they are checked on by an experienced professional. One way to keep a person from moving after an accident is to put them on a long spine board (LSB), also known as a backboard.This is a medical device that is used to transport patients with potential spine injuries. The boards help prevent any movement of the spine, which could lead to permanent injury. Paramedics and EMTs are trained in the usage off the backboard.

Another type of equipment that helps support the spinal cord and head in an injured patient is a cervical collar, also known as a neck brace. Medical professionals place a collar on a victim to prevent further damage, paralysis, and death. Although cervical collars are used in emergency situations, they can also be used for therapy, helping realign an individual’s spine and relieving pain. They are also used for sprains, strains, and whiplash.

To keep costs down, consider purchasing backboards and collars from used medical equipment providers. These are specialized stores that refurbish equipment, often on their own premises in their own warehouses, and re-sell the equipment to the public and professional medical personnel at discounted prices. Cervical collars are common items one might pick up from a used medical equipment supplier.

If you are looking to purchase a long spine board from a used medical equipment supplier, there are several points you want to consider. Generally, spine boards are made of plastic or wood. Modern medicine is shifting towards the plastic over the wood due to the maintenance that is required to keep the wooden boards in optimal working condition. Cracks and other imperfections in the wood can harbor bacteria so it’s critical to keep it well maintained. Some medics invest in short spine boards, however this is also becoming passé since modern medicine shows that it’s better to walk a patient with a cervical collar around their neck then to use the short board.

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Category : Hospital, Medication

Splinting in Medical Situations

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 posted by admin 5:43 am

When an emergency responder gets to the scene of an accident and finds a victim with a swollen, painful, deformed extremity, this generally means that the individual has a fractured bone, which must be splinted. The concept behind splinting is to stabilize an individual so they don’t move around and cause more injury to the damaged area. Remember to splint not only the actual fracture, but also split the joints below and above the injury. Emergency medical technicians are trained how to use a splint properly.

Use a traction splint if a fracture or break is isolated to the femur and if there are no other traumatic injuries to the mid-thigh. The traction splint should be used to treat severe femur fractures. If you suspect a distal fracture, avoid splinting. You want to avoid splinting an injury that is close to the knee, pelvis, hip, ankle, or the leg where the distal limb is connected by marginal tissue.

There are different types of traction splints on the market, and if you are looking to purchase a traction splint, you might want to consider consulting a used medical equipment supplier. The suppliers make it their business to know and understand the latest technology in health medicine. They can help you find the splint that meets your specific needs. There are two basic varieties of traction splints. One is a bed that is used to support the injured leg. The other is a single post with an interior post, which telescopes out towards a patient’s feet.

Used medical equipment is generally just as good as new equipment since companies refurbish items such as splints, ensuring that they are an optimal working order. Before applying a splint, stabilize the area below and above the fracture and check the area for distal pulse, sensory and motor function. If more than one rescuer is available, one should stabilize the patient while the other one applies the splint.

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Category : Hospital, Medication

Purchase Used Equipment for Laparoscopic Procedures

Sunday, August 1, 2010 posted by admin 5:39 am

In health medicine a century ago, if an individual needed surgery on their pelvis or abdomen, a surgeon would make an incision that was long enough to reach into the patient and fix the problem. After the surgery was done, the surgeon would stitch up the incision, and the patient would recover not only from the procedure itself but also from the cut. Laparoscopy is a more modern means to achieving the success of an operation without making a huge incision. This type of operation is performed through tiny incisions, and uses the aid of a camera to locate problems in the patient. The camera is used to diagnose and inspect medical conditions, and they are used to perform surgery.

A surgeon who wants to use laparoscopic procedures in the operating room will have to stock up on the proper medical equipment. One way of doing this is by purchasing used medical equipment, which keeps costs down. The surgeon will want to purchase a laparoscope. There are two types on the market. One is a telescopic rod length system, which generally connects to a video camera. The other is a digital laparoscope end, which has a charge coupled device on the end that eliminates the rod lens system. It also has a fiber optic cable system attached, which connects to a cold light source that is xenon or halogen. This illuminates the operative field.

The benefits of using microscopic equipment include a reduced recovery time, reduced pain, and a reduction in hemorrhaging occurrences. Patients recover more quickly because of the small incisions. When stocking a surgical unit with used equipment from a reliable supplier, in addition to the aforementioned lower-cost, a medical technician knows that they are using recycled materials that are refurbished to their top performing condition. Talk to a customer service representative to find out which equipment would best suit your purposes.

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Category : Hospital, Medication

Stock up Surgical Inventory With Used Laryngoscopes

Friday, July 30, 2010 posted by admin 5:37 am

When you are stocking up on your medical equipment inventory, you might want to consider purchasing used medical equipment such as laryngoscopes. A laryngoscope has several different uses. The tool is handy when administering general anesthesia or for assisting mechanical ventilation. It can detect causes of voice problems such as a weak voice, a breathing voice, a hoarse voice, or no voice at all. The laryngoscope can detect the source of ear pain and throat pain. It helps evaluate what is wrong when an individual has difficulty swallowing such as mucus with blood or a continuous sensation of a lump in an individual’s throats. The laryngoscope detects injuries or strictures to the throat as well as obstructive masses in the airway.

Legitimate used medical equipment suppliers have their thumbs on the pulse of the health medicine industry. They know the most current and most popular equipment that will help your lab run smoothly. As you look over the inventory at a used medical equipment supplier, you might notice that there are different types of laryngoscopes on the market.The rigid laryngoscope is used for intubation for anesthesia, critical care, and pulmonary purposes. It generally has a handle which incorporates two batteries and in interchangeable blade that has a bulb light source. The black lightbulbs enhance phosphorus illumination in vocal cords. A laryngoscope might have different types of blade. The two most common types of blade are the straight Miller and the curved Macintosh.

The direct line is used if the patient is lying on their backs. It’s inserted into the patient’s mouth on the right, and is then flipped over to the left in order to trap and move the tongue out of the line of vision. The Transnasal Flexible Laryngoscope is used in office diagnostics where patients remain awake. This instrument is generally used to observe the vocal fold during singing or speech. It does biopsies on suspicious masses. When looking at different types of laryngoscopes, consider the ways you plan to use the equipment. Consult with a used medical equipment supplier to find the optimal tools for your specific purposes.

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Category : Hospital, Used Medical Equipment