Prescription Plan
  Free Medicine

  Prescription Card
  United Project
 

Click here to add your site to Health Resources

Canada, US Immigrants Have Less Health Care Access Than Natives
In spite of Canada’s universal medical coverage, immigrants to that country have less access to health care than native-born Canadians for certain procedures, a new study finds. In fact, immigrants have about the same access as immigrants to the United States who depend on private health insurance or Medicaid and who have less access than native-born Americans. Canada and the United States take in a large number of immigrants every year. Even though the health systems in each country differ vastly, the study gives policymakers on both sides of the border an opportunity to examine what works, what the other side is doing better and how to improve overall performance for its newest arrivals. The study appears online in the journal Health Services Research.

Detroit, Los Angeles most stressful US cities-poll
Detroit, Los Angeles and Cleveland are the most stressful cities in America, according to a new study. “Detroit has a lot of things going against it. It topped nearly all our standards for our stress test, although it was rarely number one,” said Portfolio.com editor J. James Moss. “Across the board, it was bad.” Riverside in California and St. Louis in Missouri rounded out the top five stressful cities. Portfolio.com, a national business and news website for small business executives, looked at unemployment rates, personal finance data, environmental, health and living standards and crime rates to compile the ranking of 50 cities.

Bigger low-birth-weight babies need extra iron too
Babies at the larger end of the low-birth-weight spectrum are at risk of iron deficiency, and should get iron supplements, according to a Swedish study published Monday in Pediatrics. These “marginally” low-birth-weight infants tip the scales at 2000 to 2500 grams (4 pounds, 6 ounces to 5 pounds, 8 ounces) when born. They represent a large percentage of newborns; for example, 5 percent of babies born in the US every year are in the marginally low-birth-weight range. While iron supplements are recommended for all low-birth-weight babies, these recommendations aren’t always followed for the infants who fall into the marginal range, Dr. Magnus Domellof of Umea University in Sweden told Reuters Health. There is “large variation between different clinics and different hospitals, and there is a lack of guidelines,” Domellof said.

Report says obesity surgery can save health costs
Providing surgical treatment for people who are morbidly obese could save British taxpayer-funded health services and the wider economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year, leading surgeons said on Wednesday. In an economic impact assessment of obesity surgery, Britain’s Royal College of Surgeons and the National Obesity Forum said the financial toll of unemployment, welfare payments, hospital costs and prescriptions caused by obesity could be cut drastically if more patients had weight-loss surgery. The report was written by an independent consultancy called the Office of Health Economics and funded by the health firms Allergan and Covidien, both of whom make medical equipment used in weight-loss, or so-called bariatric, surgery.

Half of ‘untreatable’ asthma cases may be treatable
Good news for kids with treatment-resistant asthma: Their breathing troubles just might be treatable. Approximately one in every 10 kids in the U.S. has asthma. And about one in 20 has a severe form that doesn’t respond to standard therapies. But after thoroughly evaluating the evidence to date, Drs. Andrew Bush and Sejal Saglani of the Imperial School of Medicine, in London, think that the true number of problematic asthma cases may be far lower. A lot of children, they say, carry a misdiagnosis of severe asthma or are simply not taking their medications correctly.