"Disease Creep"

Patients with mild hypertension have been receiving the same kind of treatment for patients with severe hypertension, with only marginal benefits or, in some cases, with highly adverse results. According to this article in Slate, this medical phenomenon is known as "disease creep," in which patients are grouped together based solely on their ailments or diseases, rather than the degrees of their severity, and a new medical concept known as "predisease" has led to pre-emptive forms of treatment that may actually harm patients. The results of the study, conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration, may be inconclusive, at least according to some doctors and medical experts, but there seems to be compelling data that the indiscriminate, or universal, treatment of patients with hypertension may have little effect on curing or mitigating hypertension.  

How to Fix the Shortage of Primary Care Physicians in the U.S.?

Medical student Ben Gallagher writes in The Atlantic that we best way to ensure that more medical students go into primary care is for the federal government to shrink the vast pay gap between primary care physicians and specialists. 

The Affordable Care Act will provide health insurance coverage for over 30 million Americans at a time when there's already an acute shortage of primary care physicians in this country. Gallagher suggests that more medical students would choose primary care, rather than specialized medicine, if additional, and better, incentives were given to them to help pay off their student loans sooner and increase their salaries. 

Intelligent Food?

A recent study from the University of Adelaide, in Australia, found that a healthy diet for babies may promote slightly higher IQs by the time they're eight years old. Interestingly, 6-month-old children who were fed pre-made baby foods had slightly lower IQs than children who were given pre-made baby foods at the age of 2. 

Click on the link here to Momtastic's wholesome baby food for ideas on homemade baby food recipes. 

Does Chronic Snoring Affect a Child's Behavior?

Yes, and, according to this study, it can lead to hyperactivity and depression. In fact, children who didn't snore or snored only occasionally (once or twice a week) were significantly less likely to display at-risk behavior. Moreover, children who nursed for longer than 12 months seldom snored, whereas children who had never breast-fed or had breast-fed only briefly were chronic snorers.