The Government Health Care Plan Covers “Wellness Visits” And Preventative Care

The New Year has brought some positive changes to those who receive Medicare benefits. Now, in addition to covering doctors’ visits when you are ill, the government sponsored health care plan also covers ‘wellness visits’ and other preventative care measures. According to the new guidelines which went into effect on January 1st, 2011, most preventative care will be 100% covered by Medicare with no deductible or co-payments.

People with traditional Medicare coverage can now take one free ‘wellness visit’ to their doctor every year. At this check-up they can discuss all kinds of issues with the goal of preventing disease from arising, including evaluating the patients family history, other health-care professionals the patient is seeing, and the medications he is on.

The doctor will also make sure the patient is on schedule with cancer screenings, vaccinations and other preventative tests. And not only is this visit free, but the screenings and tests, such as a mammogram or colorectal cancer screening are completely covered by Medicare as well. Even the doctor-recommended pneumococcal -a vaccine, which at the moment over 40% of seniors do not get, will be free of charge. If everyone at risk received this vaccine, many, and perhaps all of the 40,000 Americans who die each year from pneumonia, would live.

New Cancer-Detecting Technology

A new cancer-detecting method is currently being developed, in a study conducted by Veridex, Johnson & Johnson and Massachusetts General Hospital. The new blood test uses CTC (circulating tumor cell) technology to capture, count and identify tumor cells which circulate in a patient’s bloodstream. These cells are found at very low levels.

Cancer-cell“This new technology has the potential to facilitate an easy-to-administer, non-invasive blood test that would allow us to count tumor cells, and to characterize the biology of the cells,” explained Robert McCormack of Veridex in a press release issued by Johnson & Johnson. “Harnessing the information contained in these cells in an in vitro clinical setting could enable tools to help select treatment and monitor how patients are responding.”

Today, patients must undergo painful biopsies in order to be diagnosed. The samples do not determine the correct treatment for the patient, and many experimental treatments are administered in order to identify which is the most effective. The process is often very slow and many patients do not survive the wait. If the new research is successful, the CTC technology will enable doctors to provide an immediate, more accurate diagnosis, as well as more personalized treatments for the patients.

“Mindfulness Meditation” Part II

Florian-RuthsDr. Florian Ruths believes that when Mindfulness Meditation is practiced properly, in a clinical setting, it can benefit the practitioners in three ways.

First, “it teaches us to immerse ourselves deeper in the present rather than worry about things we can’t control in the future- will I have a job? Will I be ok in five years’ time?- or dwell on something in the past that we can’t handle either,” he says.

Second, he explains that it “teaches us something about the validity of thoughts and emotions. When we are in a difficult state we believe several things: it will never end, it says something about us being flawed, and we need to get out of it now. Mindfulness helps us see that emotions change and that if I have a though, it is not necessarily the reality, it is just a thought.”

Third, “mindfulness is an act of kindness, of compassion. It teaches us about directing the capacity for compassion that we all have at ourselves. That in itself is something new.”

Hope for New Device in Helping to Find Cancer Sooner

The new cancer cell detection device, whose development was announced on Monday by Johnson & Johnson and its inventors from Massachusetts General Hospital , could change the way doctors test for and treat cancer.

Today mammograms, colonoscopies, etc are the only, ways that we have to screen for a variety of different cancers. The hope is that this new device, which can find one cancer cell among millions of healthy cells, will bring better screening procedure for these deadly diseases.

“There’s a lot of potential here, and that’s why there’s a lot of excitement,” said Dr. Mark Kris, lung cancer chief at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Sloan-Kettering is another one of the four cancer centers which will be studying the test this year.

Presently, many cancers are diagnosed through needle biopsies which often do not give a large enough sample to determine the biochemical pathways or the genes that control the tumor’s unimpeded growth. Alternatively, the sample may no longer be available when the patient gets to the specialist who will prescribe his treatment.

This new tool actually captures the cancer cell, which is then available for study. Doctors can easily follow a patient’s response to drug and/or radiation therapy by looking for even just one cell, in the blood. Dr. Haber of Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the developers of this test said, “If you could find out quickly, ‘this drug is working, stay on it,’ or ‘this drug is not working, try something else,’ that would be huge.”

New Test To Detect Cancer When It Starts

Medical products giant Johnson & Johnson is planning to announce today that they, together with researchers in Boston, are planning on marketing a test so sensitive that it can detect the presence of just one cancer cell among a billion normal cells. Four large cancer research centers are planning on beginning studies to assess the usefulness and accuracy of the test and will be using it on an experimental basis this coming year.

According to many doctors, having a stray cancer cell lurking in your blood is an indication that the tumor that you already have, but which has gone un-diagnosed until now, has spread or is getting ready to spread. Doctors believe that having such a test on hand can dramatically alter the way care is delivered to patients. A large number of cancer types, including breast, prostate, colon and lung cancers can be detected with this new test .

Dr. Daniel Haber, the chief of the cancer center at Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the inventors of the test explained its usefulness. “This is like a liquid biopsy which avoids painful tissue sampling and may give a better way to monitor patients than periodic imaging scans.”