Website to
help doctors explain to patients in Bengali
A
new website will help bridge the language barrier that often impedes doctors’
efforts to explain diagnosis to patients in Bengali. The site www.bangla.net.in
will be a key tool for medical professionals from other states who are working
in Bengal or are looking after Bengali-speaking patients in any part of the
world to ‘know just enough Bangla to understand patients better’.
‘The
website is a universal platform and it helps medical professionals serving
Bengali patients all over the world… It is also helpful to those who are
serving Bengali patients in hospitals of other states and aboard,’ said A.G.
Ghoshal, medical director, National Allergy Asthma Bronchitis Institute
(NAABI), at the launch Sunday.
The
portal is an Asthma Awareness Trust (AAT) initiative in association with NAABI
and the Indian Medical Association. The user-friendly interface of the website
enables health workers to register themselves and take three stages of the course.
‘First is related to organs, i.e. what are these called in Bengali. Second
stage covers all the symptoms and third makes a user familiar with expression
of symptoms.’
‘A user has to clear all the three
stages one by one. He or she gets the result through a SMS alert in his or her
mobile automatically. We provide certificate for the course later,’ said Raja
Dhar, research and education director, NAABI. There are plans to expand the
programme in other languages.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
18.08.2014
New drugs can
dissolve kidney stones
If
you have gone through that excruciating pain from a kidney stone and are prone
to develop more, here comes good news. According to a new study, a class of
drugs approved to treat leukemia and epilepsy also may be effective against
kidney stones. The drugs are histone deacetylase inhibitors or HDAC inhibitors.
Researchers
found that two of them – Vorinostat and trichostatin A – lower levels of
calcium and magnesium in the urine. Both calcium and magnesium are key components
of kidney stones. ‘We are hopeful this class of drugs can dissolve kidney
stones because its effects on reducing calcium and magnesium are exclusive to
kidney cells,’ said Jianghui Hou, an assistant professor of medicine at
Washington University’s school of medicine in St Louis.
In
the mice, they achieved dramatic effects at a fraction of the dosage used to
treat leukemia and without significant side effects. Some people are
genetically prone to developing kidney stones and they naturally release too much
calcium into the urine. Typically, doctors recommend drinking lots of water to
help pass kidney stones from the body. In the new study on mice, Hou and his
colleagues showed that small doses of Vorinostat reduced calcium levels in the
urine by more than 50 percent and magnesium levels by more than 40 percent.
Similar results were noted for
trichostatin A. ‘We now want to test the drug in clinical trials for patients
with kidney stones,’ Hou concluded. The research appeared online in the Journal
of the American Society of Nephrology.
Source: www.thehealthsite.com
18.08.2014
When the wrong people leave your life, the right things start
happening
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