Archive | Medicine
Israeli children celebrate Autism Day
Israeli children marked the fifth annual World Autism Awareness Day today (April 2) with a colorful message.
Under the banner, ‘Every Child Can’, children from the scout movement together with autistic elementary school kids held an event to celebrate the differences and uniqueness of each autistic child.
Alut — The Israeli Society for Autistic Children hosted the event.
Israel is a leader in research in the field. The new global headquarters of ICare4autism, the world’s first global center for autism research and education, is scheduled to open in 2014 on the Mt. Scopus campus in Jerusalem.
“Millions of people are still suffering from autism,” Dr. Joshua Weinstein, Founder and President of ICare4Autism told ISRAEL21c. “And there are more people aware of autism today than 10 years ago, thanks to different education programs. We plan on integrating all the systems that work.”
Researchers from around the world are expected to come to Jerusalem this summer for the ICare4Autism International Autism Conference in August.
Source: Israel21c.org
Israeli Health Ministry not so into “HoneySex”
A new type of honey is out on the market in Israel. It’s called ‘HoneySex,’ and the company which markets it promises that it’s made only from natural ingredients and promises to improve your sex life.
However, a special announcement from Israel’s ministry of health this morning says that a review of the product found that it contains chemicals which are similar to those in Viagra, the pills which are used for treating men with erectile dysfunction. This chemical (sildenafil) is forbidden for people who suffer from changes in blood pressure or heart disease, as it expands blood vessels. Side effects include headaches, extended heart rate, and insomnia.
The Israeli ministry of health also announced that they are going to forward their lab results to the American FDA, as this product is an import from the US. “The active material in this product can cause death,” says Miki Arieli from the Israeli Ministry of Health.
Source: AbbaNibi.com
Israelis restore 2,000 people’s eyesight
Delegation of Israeli doctors sets up eye surgery camps in seven developing countries
Israeli doctors have recently restored the eyesight of more than 2,000 people in seven countries: Nepal, Myanmar, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Cambodia, the Maldives and Ethiopia.
The surgical operations were performed in special camps set up by MASHAV (Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, which is subject to the Foreign Ministry) in cooperation with the Eye from Zion organization and the Kahn Foundation. All surgeons were Israeli ophthalmologists.
Eye Camps is a special operation aimed at restoring the eyesight of patients in developing countries which have no infrastructure for eye surgery. Israel sends a team of ophthalmologists who for two weeks perform cataract, oculoplastics and sight restoring surgical operations on dozens of patients.
The Israeli physicians also provide professional training and guidance to local teams engaging in ophthalmology. The locals are responsible for selecting the potential candidates for surgery and gathering them in a central hospital or any other suitable site.
The equipment required for the operations and post-surgery treatments is purchased by MASHAV and flown to the different countries through diplomatic mail.
Source: Ynetnews.com
A hug a day (from a stuffed puppy) keeps the trauma away
A team of Israeli therapists has discovered that a little stuffed puppy named Hibuki can do wonders when it comes to comforting and engaging children who have experienced disasters, such as last year’s devastating tsunami in Japan.
In August, a somewhat unusual Israeli delegation landed at Tokyo airport. Three Israelis got off the commercial flight: Dr. Flora Mor, a psychotherapist and head of curriculum development for the Joint Distribution Committee’s Ashalim program for at-risk children and youth; psychologist Dr. Shai Hen-Gal, a project director specializing in trauma at Ashalim and the Education Ministry; and Daniella Hadassi, an art therapist who works on behalf of the Foreign Ministry. They brought with them 180 stuffed animals in rustling plastic wrapping. These little plush puppies, with their sad faces, have a proven positive effect on traumatized souls.
The first breath of the chilly Tokyo air was unsettling given the high levels of radiation that had been measured in the city (though the stuffed animals didn’t bat an eyelash ), but the team of therapists didn’t have time for such worries. They were greeted by their hosts, members of the Japanese Puppet Therapy Association, and by their translator Yishai Hika, and were off to the hotel.
The tsunami that struck Japan’s northeastern coast on March 11 took more than 20,000 lives and left nearly a million homeless. The tsunami also damaged the nuclear reactor at Fukushima and radiation that escaped from there threatened Tokyo and parts of northern Japan. Since then the national mood has been in the doldrums. Planned power outages were paralyzing the economy, foreign tourism was wiped out. In the Fukushima area, residents were shutting themselves inside their homes, isolated in their distress.
Japan had begun to slowly recover from the disaster, but while the recycling plants were busy grinding up the rubble for use in new infrastructure projects, in another sensitive area they were struggling to find relief: The Japanese psyche remained trapped between the national code of restraint that requires that one to go one with “business as usual” and avoid public displays of emotion – and the terrible trauma it had undergone.
Many of the worst affected were children in the disaster zone: The world they knew had collapsed, some lost their homes as well as their loved ones. Doctors in the region were reporting symptoms that indicated serious emotional distress. Many children had stopped laughing or crying. Their facial expressions were frozen and they weren’t interested in playing.
The authorities have encountered great difficulty in trying to provide such children with psychological assistance. There are hundreds of thousands of affected children, spread over a vast area. Nor is there a very highly developed mental health system as one would expect to see in the West. There are not enough psychologists, psychiatrists and educational counselors to reach all the children and give them the attention they need. And direct mental health assistance from foreign countries isn’t available either. Foreigners don’t know the language, and Japanese law prohibits anyone who didn’t study medicine in Japan from providing medical aid to a local resident. The Israeli delegation was an exception, because of its experience in treating victims of mass trauma.
Five years before the tsunami in Japan, Israel endured a barrage of rockets in the Second Lebanon War. Thousands of residents of the north abandoned their homes and found temporary shelter in the tent city set up by Arcadi Gaydamak in Nitzanim. Thousands of children roamed the camp unsupervised. The psychological counseling service of the Education Ministry eventually sent a delegation there, including Hen-Gal.
“One of the challenges was to quickly diagnose thousands of children and offer them a suitable intervention plan,” he recalls. “Some were fine and others had suffered trauma of one degree or another.”
Children are just as vulnerable to trauma, caused by catastrophic events or shocking and painful incidents, as adults – perhaps more so. Children who have experienced stress and trauma are liable to direct destructive behavior at others and at themselves, and to suffer learning difficulties, dissociative problems, somatic problems and distortion in self-perception and their perception of others. They can even develop chronic behavior patterns that show minimal involvement in what is going on, plus an excessive preoccupation with the past.
“Traumatic conditions in children entail a terrible sense of loneliness that can include subjective feelings such as ‘I don’t want to be different than other children,’ or ‘I don’t want to burden everyone with my story,’” explains Hen-Gal, adding that often the adults around an affected child will avoid direct mention of his distress.
Clinical tool
Back at Nitzanim, it wasn’t possible to offer standard therapy because the families left there after a short stay, so the team had limited time, and thus needed a quick and effective tool. Hen-Gal contacted his professor from Tel Aviv University, clinical psychologist Avi Sadeh.
“He invited me and we met at the camp,” Sadeh recounts. “I offered to volunteer but he explained that they had enough volunteers, but needed some sort of strategic solution. I suggested an approach that I use in treating children in a private clinic: I recommend that parents buy a stuffed animal and then I teach them how to use it.” And thus Hibuki (“Huggy” ) was born.
Truth be told, Hibuki – a soft, sad-eyed puppy, made in China – began life in Israel as a failure; the importer didn’t understand why parents weren’t buying it. Sadeh came across it by chance. “I was wandering the toy stores looking for a plush toy and finally I came to one place where I saw this one and knew right away that it was what we needed. I used the research money I had left over to buy the first 70 stuffed animals.”
The sad face that kept parents from embracing Hibuki turned out to be just right for Hen-Gal and Sadeh’s purposes.
“A traumatized child identifies more with a sad animal because it’s easier for him to project his own sadness onto it,” Hen-Gal explains. “One of the first questions we asked the children was why Hibuki was sad, and the child would say: ‘Because a Qassam fell on his doghouse.’ Or, ‘He doesn’t have any friends.’ Another advantage of this stuffed animal was its human expression, plus the long arms with Velcro at the ends that can hug the child and cling to him. The child hugs the puppet and the puppet hugs him. That’s where the name comes from.”
The two psychologists distributed the stuffed animals in the camp and asked parents and staff to encourage the kids to “take care” of them. The results were astounding. Making the child act like a caretaker prompted him to shift his focus from his own problems to those of the little animal, as it were, and thus indirectly helped the child take care of himself. The parents were also given a very valuable means for reconnecting with the child and understanding how he was doing, via indirect questions about his relationship with Hibuki.
Hen-Gal: “It was clear the parents were afraid to confront reality head-on. They didn’t know what to say to the children, and also felt guilty that the kids were paying such a heavy price. As a result, the children were exposed to vast loneliness, accompanied by anxiety. Our intervention made [parents] see that children are affected much worse when they aren’t able to speak about their anxiety, and we helped them to get the children talking and to answer their questions.”
In the past 15 years, mental health research has found that the healing powers of people who are in the children’s natural surroundings – parents, teachers, counselors, etc. – are greater than that of an outsider, no matter how skilled he or she may be. Rather than the magnitude of the disaster, it has been found that it is the ability of such adults to mediate the experience for the child that affects the extent of their psychological damage.
“Even children who are exposed to very severe trauma can heal efficiently if their parents and others around them are able to mediate the distress for them,” says Hen-Gal.
Sadeh and Hen-Gal show that treatment with the Hibuki toy is suitable for 95 percent of children exposed to stressful and traumatic events, and that within just a few days, incidents of stress-related behavior such as bedwetting, nightmares, anxiety and violence were reduced by 40 percent. Plus the therapeutic effect was apparently long-lasting.
As the rocket barrages continued, and with funding from the Israeli JDC and from Jewish communities in North America, Hen-Gal returned to the importer with an urgent request that he bring over as many stuffed animals as possible. The importer was able to find 250 in warehouses, but since there were thousands of children in need, other toys were tried, Hen-Gal recalls: “We tried to use a green frog but it didn’t work. We asked the kids, ‘Why is the frog sad?’ But it didn’t look sad to them and the kids didn’t understand what we wanted from them.”
Israel to include cancer, AIDS medication in 2012 health basket
Israel committee on subsidized healthcare to include new, more expensive treatments intended for a smaller group of patients.
Israel’s committee on subsidized healthcare announced its decision Thursday to include 77 new medications and cutting-edge medical treatments into next year’s subsidized health basket.
The decision came after 600 requests were placed for new medicines, with a cost of over NIS 2 billion. According to a senior official in Israel’s public health system, the committee decided that as opposed to previous years, next year’s basket will include more expensive medicines intended for a smaller group of patients.
The most expensive medicines included in next year’s basket are Yervoy and Zelboraf, two medicines used to fight skin cancer, constituting a medical breakthrough that may lengthen the average life of a patient by up to six months. The treatment is intended for 162 Israeli melanoma patients per year and costs between NIS 262.1 thousand and NIS 369.7 thousand per patient.
Three separate treatments that help fight AIDS are also to be included in next year’s basket.
However, next year’s basket will leave out Nuchal scans for pregnant women, as well as amniotic fluid tests for women over 35. The antidepressant Cipralex was also left out of the list, as the committee decided that it was not as effective as other similar psychiatric treatments.
Source: Haaretz.com
Israelis develop cancer ‘cluster bomb’
 keeps the trauma away on http://sizedoesntmatter.com){kind=link}
Tel Aviv University medical researchers say they have come up with new technique for blasting cancer tumors from inside out, reducing risk of disease returning after treatment
Israeli medical researchers say they have developed a new technique for blasting cancer tumors from the inside out which reduces the risk of the disease returning after treatment.
Tel Aviv University Professors Yona Keisari and Itzhak Kelson are about to start clinical trials of a pin-sized radioactive implant that beams short-range alpha radiation from within the tumor
Unlike conventional radiation therapy, which bombards the body with gamma rays from outside, the alpha particles “diffuse inside the tumor, spreading further and further before disintegrating,” a university statement quoted Keisari as saying.
“It’s like a cluster bomb – instead of detonating at one point, the atoms continuously disperse and emit alpha particles at increasing distances.”
The university said that the process takes about 10 days and leaves behind only non-radioactive and non-toxic amounts of lead.
“Not only are cancerous cells more reliably destroyed, but in the majority of cases the body develops immunity against the return of the tumor,” the statement said.
The wire implant, inserted into the tumor by hypodermic needle, “decays harmlessly in the body,” it added.
It went on to say that in pre-clinical trials on mice, one group had tumors removed surgically while another was treated with the radioactive wire.
“When cells from the tumor were reinjected into the subject, 100% of those treated surgically redeveloped their tumor, compared to only 50% of those treated with the radioactive wire,” it said.
“The researchers have had excellent results with many types of cancer models, including lung, pancreatic, colon, breast, and brain tumors.”
It added that the procedure would begin clinical trials at Beilinson hospital, near Tel Aviv, “soon.”
Source: Ynetnews.com