TENGA, the "New Adult Concept" was created in Japan by Mr. Koichi Matsumoto to satisfy the needs of every man. Cosmetically elegant and stylish, TENGA produces the latest in disposable masturbation technology that stands out when compared to traditional male masturbation products.
TENGA promises a new level of sexual sensation to its users. Tenga's popular line-up of disposable masturbation products includes Tenga Onacups: (top row, from left-to-right) the Deep Throat Cup, Soft Tube Cup, Rolling Head Cup, and (bottom row, from left-to-right) interior view of the Deep throat Cup, Air Cushion Cup and Double Hole Cup.
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TENGA also produced the ultra popular TENGA Flip Hole, a line of reusable masturbators, and the next step in the evolution of male masturbation technology. With an all new set of interior structure including the Waving Ball, Cross Wall, Brushing Edge, and Moving Ball, it is designed to be different from the standard TENGA onacups and the original TENGA Flip Hole. Also as the second reusable TENGA product, it uses the the same revolutionary flip design for cleaning and the expandable mid-section for different sized girth. TENGA has included a mini set of 3 different lotions named “real”, “mild”, and “wild” for further customization of the ultimate experience.
Tenga's winning product is the Tenga Egg, an egg shaped disposable masturbator. It comes complete with everything needed for one masturbation session. The discreet Egg shaped packaging comes with one Egg masturbator and a lubricant packet. The Tenga Egg offers extra stimulation and joy to the traditional "hand job" for men that are busy and on the go.
The outside of the Temga Egg, looks like an egg. It is a very smooth and silky texture. The inside of the egg is packed with clusters rounded nubs. The entire egg is white and made of 100% Silicone. Silicone is free of Phthalates and Latex. It is food grade material and hypo-allergenic. The Egg is tasteless and odorless. The inside of the Egg is mildly sticky, but goes away once lubricant is applied.
The Tenga Egg comes packaged in a white plastic egg covered with a plastic wrap. The wrap has small silver designs on the package to show the texture of the masturbator. The front has the name on the product in English. The back of the packaging is in Japanese.
The plastic wrapping can be torn off. Next the plastic Egg pops open at the middle to expose the masturbator. The masturbator can then be removed from the egg. It has a small plastic spacer inside the egg to keeps its shape. And the lube package is placed inside the plastic spacer.
The Tenga Egg comes in six inside textures: Twister, Spider, Wavy, Clicler, Silky and Stepper. Each inside texture is unique and printed on the packaging.
Tenga uses a slick water-based lubricant that works well with the Tenga Egg. It is single use as is the Egg. Both work well together. There is about a tablespoon of lubricant in the package. It provides enough to cover the inside of the Egg. It lasts for about a 20-minute session.
It took years of engineering to develop the right design that delivers the ultimate experience. TENGA uses soft, skin-like materials in combination with soft foam creating not only the most comfortable, but the most ergonomically correct masturbator on the market. Massage nubs of different size and shapes are used in all the different models to create an unique experience for each model. Select a product below and find out how different they are.
COMMENTARY: Tenga is the first adult wellness company that has brought dignity and class to male masturbation. Masturbation is a natural human biological function that is often viewed as taboo, ridiculed and even frowned upon by some cultures and religions.
At the age of 34, Koichi Matsumoto, the founder of Tenga, left his job as a used car salesman to start his own company. With 10 million in yen he had saved, he began to work on designing his own products. After various ideas, he picks “This one! This is what I am going to revolutionize!” That product theme was adult goods.
Three years after becoming self-employed, with various trials and errors behind him and his self funding starting to reach an end, March 2005 saw the birth of TENGA Inc.
July 7th of that same year, the fruits of his blood, sweat and tears, the products which he put his heart and soul into, the original 5 types of “TENGA” were released.
Tenga became virtually an overnight sensation in Japan through its unique product designs. In its first year of operations, Tenga sold over 1 million units without media coverage or Japanese celebrity endorsements.
Tenga has really differentiated itself from competitors through the unique designs, shapes, colors, materials, textures, packaging and functionality of its products. For Tenga, "The Future of Masturbation is Now". Tenga has truly brought high-technology to male masturbation. Tenga is the first company to develop the single session or disposable masturbator.
Since 2007, the TENGA brand is available globally, and is now sold in over 40 countries worldwide, including among others, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Russia and Singapore.
TENGA Co., Ltd. has collaborated with Japan’s largest condom manufacturer OKAMOTO to produce the “OKAMOTO x TENGA” CUP series of products available in pharmacies and drugstores across Japan since September 2007.
In November 2010, TENGA Co., Ltd. collaborated with Japan borne clothing labels Roen, VANQUISH, SWAGGER, XLARGE® and roar for a Limited Edition product line up to raise money for the STOP AIDS fund for World AIDS Day.
Now in their seventh year, TENGA has sold over 15 million units worldwide, and is currently the number 1 brand of male masturbation products by units sold.
Of all of the Steve Jobs interviews, and believe me, there are not many videos of the King of Magical Devices being interviewed and put under the hot seat. Steve Jobs would never subject himself to that, or admit any wrong doing. However, Steve agreed to be interviewed by All Things Digital at the D8 Conference in 2010, about accusations of horrible sweatshop working conditions, unsafe working conditions, and 13 plant worker suicides at Foxconn International's plant in China, the company that manufacturer's Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod.
I would've loved to have had Steve Jobs "wired" at the time of the interview. And just to prove that I have balls, I would've wired the other end to myself. Everytime Steve lied, it would send a fiew volts of electricity that would give me a nice jolt. It would've been like the 4th of July. I would've litup like a candle, and I am sure Apple Evangelists would enjoy the spectacle. I wonder what other wonderful tidbits of information we could've learned about Time's "Person of the Year for 2010?"
Here's the video. Please, no more hateful mail or nasty comments.
Don't get me wrong. I love Apple products, I think they are beautifully designed and engineered products that people absolutely lust for. Steve Jobs is without any doubt the greatest entrepreneur and technology innovator of the modern era even though he did get some help from alien technology along the way.
In a blog post dated March 29, 2012, I reported that Apple CEO Tim Cook had visited Foxconn International's plant in China, and he looked dapper in that yellow rubberized plant worker outfit, don't you think? I love it when the CEO of a major company "grabs the bull by the horns," and personally takes the time to visit the site of all the carnage and widespread pollution. If anybody knew what was going on over in China it was Tim, the architect of Apple's outsourced manufacturing model.
A NEW STUDY SUGGESTS SOME TERRIFYING RISKS THAT COME WITH EATING JUST A LITTLE RED MEAT. BUT RED MEAT IS AN ALARMINGLY LARGE PORTION OF THE AMERICAN DIET.
No meal seems quite so American--or even quite so mouth-watering--as a nice thick porterhouse steak, or a hamburger straight off the grill. The only problem is that these meals appear to be killing us.
That was the recent finding of a study that showed that with each additional 3-ounce portion of red meat you eat each day, you get a 12% greater risk of dying in a given year, a 10% greater risk of cancer, and a 16% greater risk of cardiovascular disease. Let me repeat that, because it’s absolutely crazy: A 12% greater risk of dying in a given year, a 10% greater risk of cancer, and a 16% greater risk of cardiovascular disease.
If you just saw a bunch of meaningless words and numbers in the paragraph above, here’s the gory details laid out in one infographic. (The numbers for early death and cancer are slightly different; this is presumably because the designers used an older study.) The truly scary part is that not only is red meat dangerous, but Americans, more than virtually every country on Earth, love red meat:
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Perhaps the most quietly alarming detail in the infographic above is the figures about processed meat. And it squares with the most recent study available--the same one I cited above found that the 12% risk of dying jumps to 20%. Your risk of cardiovascular disease rises to 21%, and your risk of cancer rises to 16%. That’s right: The cancer risk resulting from eating a hot dog everyday is 60% greater than from a hamburger.
The infographic then tries to posit a reason: Something called pink slime:
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This is where the data is starting to tip to shaky ground: Pink slime, though it does appear in many processed meats, hasn’t been thoroughly studied for its health effects. Nonetheless, that recent study about red meat has essentially caused a collapse in the industry. Which is something of a red herring (pun intended): I suspect that when the furor about red-meat dies down, we’ll all go back to our usual ways, happy to now avoid a little pink slime where we can. Not so fast. Red meat is really the problem.
COMMENTARY: I seem to recall that back in the 90's there was a red meat scare, and several steak houses like the Sizzler, and fast food restaurants serving hamburgers suffered declines in business, and some of them even had to close locations or shutdown. Well, it now appears that the warning that red meat is dangerous to us was all true.
Out of curiosity I researched the Average Annual Per Capita Consumption of Meat, and the following chart confirms that red meat consumption is down on a per capita basis, and chicken consumption is substantially up. That's a good thing, but red meat is so dangerous that even if you eat red meat just a couple of times a week, that's all it takes to do longterm damage to your health.
Courtesy of an article dated March 28, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
The doctors have tried to tell her every way they know how over the past three months: delicately, constantly, even urgently. But as Heather Parker sips coffee in her weathered clapboard house, she still isn’t buying that the Tourette’s-like twitches that have consumed her 17-year-old daughter, Lydia, since she woke up from an October nap are a product of a psychological disorder, not a physical one.
Says Parker about her daughter Lydia.
“I just can’t make sense of it, it’s just so obvious that something is really wrong in her body.”
Parker, a single mother with a ponytail and glasses who’s lived all her life around Le Roy, a town of 7,500 near Rochester, where, before a slew of teenage girls started reporting such tics, the only attraction of note was the Jell-O museum. Beside her sits Lydia, an unhappy-looking girl with coal-black dyed hair whose right arm swings like an orchestra conductor’s every five seconds or so. Lydia, a senior, hasn’t been in school since the tics started. She’s supposed to be going to her tutor, but often she can’t get herself out of bed, so now she may have to drop out and get a GED. Says her mother.
“She was going to be the first person in the family to finish high school, but because of what’s happened to her health, that doesn’t look good now.”
When the girls—there are more than 20 of them now, with four new cases last week alone—started reporting similar symptoms, it didn’t take long for the TV cameras to descend. Since January, there have been dozens of crews crowding the counter at places like Java’s on Main, the local coffee shop, clutching tripods and cappuccinos, hoping for footage of the girls and their parents. In the past few weeks, producers fromGood Morning America, The Today Show, Anderson Cooper 360° and HLN's Dr. Drew (see below) have swooped in, offering anxious moms a chance to go on air with their daughters, to beg for answers.
There have been several theories as to what is causing this mysterious illness which is affecting the teens of Le Roy, N.Y.
Toxins from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the natural-gas wells that ring the girls’ school.
On January 28, 2012,Erin Brockovich, the environmental crusader, appeared on HLN's Dr Drew, and believes that a 1971 train derailment that spilled one ton of cyanide and 45,000 gallons of Trichloroethylene (TCE) only four miles from Le Roy High School is the cause of the mysterious illness. Ms Brokovich has made a career out of investigating and litigating toxic spills, recently sent a trusted aide to the scene to dig up soil samples from the school grounds, there was reason to suspect a cover-up.
On February 6, 2012, Dr. Rosario Trifiletti, a New Jersey neurologist reported on HLN's Dr. Drew that he reviewed blood tests on eight of the upstate Le Roy, New York teens who are suffering from a strange tic disorder — which has affected 18 girls and one boy since last fall — and diagnosed them with Pediatric Autoimmune Illness Associated with Streptococci or PANDAS.
Some folks on the Internet believe that vaccinations like Gardasil could be the source of the mysterious illness.
For months, the marquee on the front of the Living Waters Church on Main Street bespoke the community’s fears:
“We are praying for our h.s. girls.”
But amid the soundbites from contentious public meetings and the bustle of production assistants ushering red-eyed mothers to the makeup chair lies a very inconvenient truth: the cluster in Le Roy is, by all reasonable judgment, a mass hallucination. Aided by media of all sorts, what the girls are suffering from is perhaps the ultimate disease of our era.
Over the past months, even as health officials have methodically ruled out organic causes, the cases have stubbornly spread through this working-class community. Laszlo Mechtler, from the Dent Neurologic Institute, a leading neurologist in the area, at the request of the National Institute of Health, is investigating the mysterious illness for confirmation of PANDAS, and Dr. Mechtler has had 18 of the girls in his office says.
“It’s a very hard thing for parents, for people in general, to accept.”
Leaning forward in a leather chair at the end of a long day, he says that he and a female colleague recognized as soon as the girls started streaming into their office that they had “conversion disorder,” named because the mind unconsciously “converts” emotional disturbances into physical symptoms. In addition to the girls, one woman in her 30s and a teenage boy have also developed symptoms.
He says.
“This is nothing that people want to hear.”
Next door, in an examining room, a colleague is talking to yet another girl who tics uncontrollably as her mother stands by in horror. While as many as 15 percent of the people who come to him turn out to be suffering from a conversion disorder, “mass psychogenic illness,” as he refers to the cluster in Le Roy, is rare. When it does strike, it is almost always confined to groups of girls, often in rural areas. During the early 20th century it struck all-female factories; before that, nunneries, according to Timothy F. Jones, an epidemiologist who began studying the phenomenon after a similar outbreak in a high school in Tennessee in 1998. Mechtler says.
“This isn’t a sexist observation. It’s just a fact. These girls in this case are under an enormous amount of stress, and that has surfaced in this difficult way. The attention, the cameras, all the social media, it has made things much worse.”
Heather Parker doesn’t get all the talk about stress. She says
“Lydia didn’t even have a test in school the next day."
In fact, things had been looking up ever since 2009, when Parker had finally gotten up the nerve to kick out the kids’ father, who has done time for assaulting his daughter. That was a bad stretch, she acknowledges, but not as bad as what happened to another girl, whose mother had discovered that her boyfriend was secretly filming her daughter undressing in her bedroom. When the mother confronted him, the guy blew his head off, right in front of the girl and her mother. Mechtler says.
“The more you ask these kids about their lives, the more you find out. But if you ask them if there are stressors in their life they have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Treatment for conversion disorders includes therapy and medication for depression and anxiety. Some of the girls are already recovering, he says,
“The ones who’ve stayed off TV, whose parents are keeping them off Facebook.”
Some parents have persuaded Erin Brockovich to send an associate back to Le Roy on Feb. 20 (Brockovich did not respond to requests for comment). And Dr. Rosario Trifiletti, who has made a name for himself diagnosing PANDAS, is convinced the blood samples from some of the girls show that they have “triggers” for the disease. Dr. Tifiletti says.
"All eight girls tested show evidence of infection with at least one of these pathogens. Both of these agents have been associated with a PANDAS-like illness with the sudden onset of motor and vocal tics. Thus, a PANDAS-like illness is my working diagnosis, rather than a mass conversion disorder."
Although Trifiletti conceded that much about the disorder remains unknown, he said:
“I suspect that genetic, environmental factors provide an immune background where the PANDAS-like response is possible to common pathogens. The infectious exposure is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
About 40% to 60% of childhood tic disorders are believed to be initiated by infections, but the exact numbers aren’t known due to lack of research.
However, the report by the New York State Department of Health released at the end of January states flatly:
“None of the cases meet the PANDAS criteria.”
Furthermore, Laszlo Mechtler, from the Dent Neurologic Institute, the leading PANDAS expert from the National Institute of Mental Health said that’s unlikely, given that PANDAS is exceedingly rare and has never occurred in clusters like that in Le Roy, N.Y. Nonetheless, Trifiletti, who last week was on Nightline, is treating the girls with antibiotics. He did not return calls for comment. Mechtler says.
“It’s ridiculous, but maybe this will give some of the girls a way to get better without shame.”
There are many reasons for skepticism. Dr. Susan Swedo, branch chief of pediatrics and developmental neuropsychiatry at the National Institute on Mental Health, who is responsible for having named PANDAS, says she has not “personally evaluated any of the teens in Le Roy, so would not be able to determine if they have PANDAS or not,” but notes discrepancies between what is known about the Le Roy, N.Y., cases and about PANDAS.
For one thing, PANDAS doesn’t usually occur in clusters. Indeed, Swedo says that she is “not aware” of any epidemics of PANDAS ever occurring. The last epidemic of illness following strep infections — a cluster of rheumatic fever, which is an inflammatory disorder — happened in the 1980s. (Both PANDAS and rheumatic fever are caused by overzealous immune responses to infections; immune cells mistakenly attack particular organs or tissues, in addition to the infectious agents.)
Another red flag: strep is extremely common and PANDAS is very rare. Only about 1 in 100 children have OCD or tic disorders — and they aren’t all caused by infections. In contrast, Swedo notes, “In some school-aged children, positive titers [for strep] are found in 60% to 70% of kids at this time of year.”
Further, the fact that virtually only females have been affected by the tic disorder in Le Roy weighs against a PANDAS diagnosis. Swedo says.
“Tic disorders, like childhood-onset OCD, are about three times as common in boys as girls, so if you had a ‘tic epidemic,’ one would expect to see 40 to 60 boys, if 14 girls were affected.”
Consistent with the prevailing diagnosis of psychogenic origin, Swedo notes that tic disorders may worsen in the presence of stress (regardless of what caused the tics in the first place). She says.
“Tics increase in times of stress and decrease during rest for most people, though sometimes the opposite occurs.”
As for Lana Parker, she disregards the talk of PANDAS. She and her daughter have accepted that the condition will remain a mystery, at least to them. For now, Lydia is on disability and Medicaid. Parker says.
“Overall I’m really proud of the way she’s handling it.”
On Main Street, the townspeople seem to be wearying of the whole affair. They tolerated the media when things looked dire, “and we certainly got a lot of extra business with all the crews,” says Melissa Lytle, who works behind the counter at Java’s on Main. But as the environmental fears subside and the cases keep mounting, tempers are starting to fray. At the back table of the coffee shop, a clutch of older men working the crossword together regard with obvious disdain a Swedish producer flipping madly through a local phonebook in search of girls who’ll go on air. “If they’d just go away, maybe this would all pass,” says one of the men in a fierce whisper.
At the Living Waters Church, as a light snow begins to fall, a worker emerges to silently slide the letters off the marquee out front. In minutes the prayer for the girls is gone. In its place: “Le Roy: Still a Great Place to Live.”
COMMENTARY: Whatever is causing the mysterious tic illness that has now afflicted 20 high school students in Le Roy, N.Y., appears to be localized in Le Roy, N.Y. This is good news for the medical profession.
However, there appears to be broad differences of opinion as to what is really the cause of this mystery illness. Hopefully, the medical profession and health institutions will come together compare results, and conduct more conclusive research into the illness.
I am inclined to believe that it is not mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, but a combination of the effects of environmental toxins stemming from the railroad derailment that released the cyanide and TCE into the ground, contaminated soil used in the construction of Le Roy High School, and PANDAS. These toxins could've weakened the autoimmune systems of the young victims enough to allow a Strep infection to trigger PANDAS. That's just my theory. Dr. Toy has said his peace.
Courtesy of an article dated February 12, 2012 appearing in The Daily Beast, an article dated February 6, 2012 appearing in Time Healthland
Broken bones in humans and animals are painful and often take months to heal. Studies conducted in part by University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center researchers show promise to significantly shorten the healing time and revolutionize the course of fracture treatment.
‘Fracture putty’ to repair broken bone in days
A team of University of Georgia researchers created a new "fracture putty" to speed healing of bone fractures. From left to right are Steve Stice, Jennifer Mumaw, Erin Jordan and John Peroni. (Click Image To Enlarge)
Steve Stice, an animal and dairy scientist in the UGA College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and director of the UGA Regenerative Bioscience center of the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent School says,
“Complex fractures are a major cause of amputation of limbs for U.S. military men and women. For many young soldiers, their mental health becomes a real issue when they are confined to a bed for three to six months after an injury. This discovery may allow them to be up and moving as fast as days afterward.”
Stice is working with Dr. John Peroni to develop a fast bone healing process. Peroni, an associate professor of large animal surgery in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine and a member of the RBC said.
“This process addresses both human and veterinary orthopedic needs.”
Peroni and Stice are leading a large animal research project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DARPA). The project includes scientists and surgeons from the Baylor University College of Medicine, Rice University and the University of Texas, who conducted the early studies.
Engineering New Bone
Peroni said.
“Healing of critical-size defects is a major challenge to the orthopedic research community. Large-bone defects must be stabilized and necessitate technologies that induce rapid bone formation in order to replace the missing tissue and allow the individual to return to rapid function. To date, no single material can suffice.”
The group they lead is a multidiscipline and multi-institutional group actively working on bone tissue engineering.
Stice said.
“Our group has been working productively together on numerous projects through the last several years. So, a collegial relationship and successful collaborative working relationship is already established.”
Between 2009 and 2011, the collaborations received a $1.4 million grant from the DOD for the use of stem cells in fracture healing to be tested in sheep.
Stice said.
“In our experiences with large animal models, following the guidelines established by our animal care and use committee, we have been successful in formulating a product that contains mesenchymal stem cells and allows them to survive in the environment of the fracture long enough to elicit the rapid formation of new bone.”
This year, the group showed bone can be generated in sheep in less than four weeks. The speed in which bone is formed is one of the truly unique features of this study.
Fracture Putty
To start the bone regeneration process, the RBC used adult stem cells that produce a protein involved in bone healing and generation. They then incorporated them into a gel, combining the healing properties into something Stice calls “fracture putty.”
With Peroni’s assistance, the Houston-based team used a stabilizing device and inserted putty into fractures in rats. Video of the healed animals at two weeks shows the rats running around and standing on their hind legs with no evidence of injury. The RBC researchers are testing the material in pigs and sheep, too.
He said.
“The small-animal work has progressed, and we are making good progress in large animals.”
More work is needed to get to human medical trials, but the threat of losing federal funding for biomedical work through the DOD means they will have to find new ways to fund the project.
Next Steps
Peroni said.
“The next step is to show that we can rapidly and consistently heal fractures in a large animal, then to convert it to clinical cases in the UGA [College of Veterinary Medicine] clinics where clinicians treat animals with complex fractures all the time.”
Once they have something that works for animals, it will be passed over to the DOD for human use.
Peroni, who is chairman of the North American Veterinary Regenerative Medicine Association, is hopeful this material will be promoted to the veterinary and human medical fields through the educational efforts of NAVRMA and the RBC.
However, the RBC isn’t the only group working on a faster fix for broken bones.
Stice said.
“Our approach is biological with the putty. Other groups are looking at polymers and engineering approaches like implants and replacements which may eventually be combined with our approach. We are looking at other applications, too, using this gel, or putty, to improve spinal fusion outcomes.”
One of the best hopes for the fracture putty is in possible facial cranial replacements, an injury often seen on the battlefield.
The project ends in mid-2012. Stice said.
“By then we are to deliver the system to the DOD.”
COMMENTARY: Compound bone fractures are very difficult to treat; a frequent battle field occurrence, they often require multiple surgeries and long healing and rehabilitation times. DARPA would like to see an alternative to today's standard treatments, which often lead to further complications, and are not fully load-bearing, which can adversely affect the immediate transportation of patients.
The goal of the Fracture Putty program will be to develop a dynamic putty-like material which, when packed in/around a compound bone fracture, provides full load-bearing capabilities within days, creates an osteoconductive bone-like internal structure, and degrades over time to harmless resorbable by-products as normal bone regenerates.
If successful, Fracture Putty could rapidly restore a patient to ambulatory function while normal healing ensues, with dramatically reduced rehabilitation time and the elimination of infection and secondary fractures.
Specific technical challenges for the program include novel bioresorbable adhesives which bond preferentially to bone vs. soft tissues, with bone-like mechanical properties, in the wet biological environment; load-bearing biomaterials with high mechanical strength and high porosity that match the mechanical properties of bone; biomaterials which create hierarchical bone-like internal structure; and biomaterials which adapt to biochemical cues
I really do hope that the researchers at the University of Georgia who are working on developing fracture putty can obtain the necessary funding to take their research to the next level--fracture putty for human beings.
Courtesy of an article dated February 3, 2012 appearing in UGA Today
AS A COUNTRY, WE'RE TOO HAPPY TO BELIEVE THAT PRESCRIPTION DRUGS WILL ALWAYS CURE US. AND DRUG COMPANIES, DOCTORS, AND INSURANCE COMPANIES ALL PLAY A ROLE IN KEEPING THAT MYTH GOING.
There are few things as private as the medicines we take. You can imagine asking a decent acquaintance who they voted for in 2008, who they’ve dated in the past year, and which family member they hate the most. But I’ll bet it makes you feel queasy to imagine asking them, "Hey! That little blue pill I saw in your bag. What’s that for, anyway?"
It’s no wonder then that America’s problem with overmedication hides in plain sight. While we’re all dimly aware that we take a lot of pills, we have no intuition of how big the problem is. And when you lay out the stats, the figures are nothing short of terrifying, as this infographic shows. While it suffers from rhetorical bombast, the tensions suggested by the chart are stark: Even though we take tons of pills, they seldom actually work. So while 1/2 of all Americans take a prescription drug and 1/4 of women take an anti-depressant, prescription drugs only seem to work 30% of the time. Meanwhile, 85% of new drugs have been found to have little or no benefit. And those miracle anti-depressants? They don’t even outperform placebos:
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As you might have guessed, the authors of this infographic lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of the drug companies, which spend far more money pushing their drugs with doctors than they do on research, and the FDA, which allows them to market the drugs they sell despite their limited effectiveness.
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Doctors, in the meantime, straight up get paid to prescribe new drugs. If you’ve ever wondered why so many young, energetic women are making $250,000 a year to be pharmaceutical representatives, there’s your answer.
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No doubt, doctors and pharmaceutical companies make for troubling dance partners. Without their cozy ties, perhaps the problem of overprescription wouldn’t be so bad.
But the infographic also misses the most important part of the story. While drug companies indeed have a vested interest in marketing their drugs to whomever will buy them, even if they don’t work, they’re abetted by our profoundly screwed up insurance system. In short, it creates some of the worst, most irrational incentives imaginable.
Think about the process behind a drug prescription from the viewpoint of each person involved. For many doctors, the cost of a drug is totally invisible: They don’t prescribe them with any concern for cost-effectiveness or even clinical efficacy--indeed, when I’ve asked a doctor how much something costs, I’ve often gotten a snippy reply, as if asking about money were some kind of moral insult. Instead, there’s merely the doctor’s own vague sense of what usually works. If they’re told about something that’s new and supposedly better, why wouldn’t they prescribe it? If it costs 10x more than a previous generation of drug, who cares? Likewise, patients with insurance don’t pay the costs of medications, so they’re only too happy to take one more drug, under the assumption that it can’t hurt.
The insurance companies, meanwhile, are in a tricky, low-margin business. Try as they might to wring bargains from pharmaceutical companies, they can also earn more profits simply by increasing their reimbursements--which they in turn pass along to consumers as premium increases. The point being, no single actor in this farce is trying to do bad. But none of them has any real incentive to say, "Hey, does the patient really need this? And is it worth the money?"
But there is also a deeper problem within ourselves that drives all of this behavior: Magical thinking. We’re only too happy to believe that we can go to the doctor and simply get a pill that’ll fix us up. Indeed, I imagine that if you went to the doctor about some ailment and were told to eat more vegetables, get more sleep and exercise, and take a few Tylenol, you’d think that doc was a fool. You’d never go back.
Doctors know that. They know what’s expected of them. They know that telling someone, "Hey, your problem will probably go away on its own in three weeks," is a good recipe for going out of business. The question is, will our belief in a little magic pill ever go away, even when the pills lose their magic?
COMMENTARY: The pharmaceutical industry is one of my favorite industries to hate because of the outrageous prices that they charge for drugs, and the tricks they use to sway consumers to use their prescription drugs, when a less popular brand or generic would do just as well. The fact of the matter is, the doctors and the pharmaceuticals are in bed with each other, and its been this way for years.
Pharmaceutical salespeople are among the highest commissioned paid salespeople of any industry other than perhaps what some stock brokerage firms pay their brokers. The system is rigged top to bottom, and this ads layers of costs to the prices we pay at the drug counter.
Who's kidding who here, the cost to make a pill isn't that much. The chemical compounds that go into the pills generally don't cost hat much per pill, and they are made by machines, bottled and labeled all at the same time, but when you ad marketing and sales costs, amortization of new drug development costs, patents, attorneys and FDA approvals, the costs can balloon, but there is a lot of controversy whether the average cost for a new drug, about $250 million, is really accurate or just a scheme by the drug companies to skim us.
AN INFOGRAPHIC LAYING OUT THE SURPRISING SCIENCE BEHIND WHY CARBS MAKE YOU FAT, WHILE FAT DOESN'T
One of the most utterly surprising scientific findings of recent decades has got to be that fat isn’t so bad for you after all. (Apart from, you know, potentially bringing on serious heart conditions.) In fact, if you’re looking for a reason for America’s ballooning girth, you’ve got to lay the blame on carbohydrates--in other words, bread and pasta, the very things that the government once advertised as the foundation of a healthy diet in the food pyramids we all grew up with.
The funny thing is, though, that those low-carb diets, at this point, probably feel like another fad. The Atkins rage came and passed, after all. So it’s worth recounting the science behind how carbs make you fat, and it’s all laid out in this infographic created by Column Five for Massive Health, and based on Why We Get Fat by noted science writer Gary Taubes.
The first panel illustrates some basic food science that I’ll bet you didn’t know in much detail. Namely, the long chain of events that leads to you porking up:
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The biggest culprits seem to be carbs. But does reining in carbs actually make you skinnier? Yes: Even compared with traditional calorie restriction diets, low-carb regimes like the Atkins diet make you lose far more weightwhile keeping calories the same. Decreasing fat, meanwhile, does nothing to lower your weight:
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But what’s so wrong with carbs themselves? In short, they cause our insulin levels to go haywire, and that, in turn, causes our cells to pull in more fat:
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It’s crazy enough that carbs, long thought to be pure and wholesome for so many years, turn out to be the devil--especially since it just seemed to make so much sense that eating fat would make you fat. With that in mind, you’ve got to wonder how many surprises science still holds for us when it comes to food.
Click here for our coverage of Massive Health’s new food app, which uses crowdsourcing to help you make better food decisions.
COMMENTARY: Suddently I don't feel as guilty about eating eggs and sausage anymore. Great information, don't you think?
Courtesy of an article dated January 30, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
If you’ve ever felt like everyone else on Facebook seems to be having more fun than you, well, you’re not alone, according to a new study by Utah Valley University sociologists Hui-Tzu Grace Chou and Nicholas Edge, published in an academic journal called Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
The study, titled “‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives,” is based on a survey of roughly 425 college students asking them about their own lives and the lives of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. The students were also questioned about their use of Facebook, including frequency, time spent, and common activities.
The survey revealed that students who spend a lot of time on Facebook are relatively more likely to perceive other people as having better lives than themselves. According to the authors,
“Those who have used Facebook longer agreed more that others were happier, and agreed less that life is fair, and those spending more time on Facebook each week agreed more that others were happier and had better lives. Furthermore, those that included more people whom they did not personally know as their Facebook ‘friends’ agreed more that others had better lives.” Meanwhile, people who spent less time on Facebook and more time in “real” socializing with friends tended to be happier than subjects who used Facebook intensively.
This isn’t the first academic study to find a correlation between social media use and mental health issues including low self-esteem and depression. In March of last year I wrote about another study, published in Pediatrics, the official publication of the American Academy of Pediatrics, detailing a mental health phenomenon called “Facebook Depression” by pediatricians. In addition to obvious threats like cyber-bullying, by allowing some individuals to present idealized images of their own lives, social networks can subtly build unrealistic expectations in users of all ages, but especially among impressionable younger users who are still asserting their own identities. The AAP noted:
“Acceptance by and contact with peers is an important element of adolescent life. The intensity of the online world is thought to be a factor that may trigger depression in some adolescents.” What's more, the AAP warned that “parents may lack a basic understanding of these new forms of socialization, which are integral to their children's lives.”
In the same vein, in November 2010, Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine published a study warning that excessive use of social media -- specifically, “hypertexting” (sending more than 120 messages per school day) and “hypernetworking” (spending more than three hours per day on sites like Facebook) -- is linked to dangerous health problems and antisocial behavior in teens. Hypernetworkers were:
60% more likely to have four or more sexual partners;
62% more likely to have tried cigarettes;
69% more likely to be binge drinkers;
69% more likely to have had sex;
79% more likely to have tried alcohol;
84% more likely to have used illicit drugs;
94% more likely to have been in a physical fight.
Of course none of these studies showing correlation between social media use and mental health issues prove that there is a deeper, causal relationship -- meaning, that social media is actually the source of mental health issues. It’s equally plausible that people already suffering from low self-esteem and depression are more likely to spend excessive amounts of time on social networks, for example simply out of boredom.
COMMENTARY: I am not entirely sold on the idea that if you spend an exorbitant amount of time on Facebook, that you you are unhappy person or lack self-esteem. Furthermore, a lot of what "appears to be" on a social networkers page, may "not actually be" the true situation with that social networker. A lot of people have been known to exaggerate or outright lie. I don't think you can generalize that heavy social network use creates mental health issues. I actually get a lot of enjoyment out of blogging, then discovering that I received a lot of great feedback from my readers. When I am on Twitter, I am often retweeted. Sometimes, I create a new blog fan, and that is hardly making me feel bad. My traffic has gone from 15,700 visitors per month in mid-September 2011 to 38,800 visitors per month on January 22, 2o12, so I am very pleased with my efforts. I was more depressed after the 49ers lost to the New York Giants. That depression lasted about one hour. I have learned that it's just a game. Better luck next year. How about you. Do you feel depressed spending hours on Facebook or Twitter? Let me know by posting a comment.
Courtesy of an article dated January 23, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Publications The Social Graf
Apple Inc. disclosed a comprehensive list of its major suppliers for the first time, along with a detailed report on factory inspections, moving to combat an array of criticism about working conditions in its supply chain and the company's transparency about it.
The report said Apple found continued problems in areas such as working hours, overtime pay and handling of hazardous waste. For example, the report said Apple's suppliers were in compliance with the company's code of a maximum of a 60-hour work week only 38% of the time. The company said factories fared better in other areas like fair treatment.
In one of his first interviews as Apple Chief Executive, Tim Cook said the Cupertino, Calif., company has long aimed to be more transparent and believes the steps it is taking—including nearly doubling the number of supplier audits it does—are "raising the bar" for the industry.
Tim Cook, Apple CEO, and previously Apple's chief operating officer who oversaw its supply chain said.
"I have spent a lot of time in factories over my lifetime and we are clearly leading in this area. It is like innovating in products. You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem."
Apple's list of 156 companies came along with a major report—one of the company's largest ever—divulging the results of its recent factory inspections. While the company has long revealed some of its top suppliers, the new list covers those that represent 97% of its materials and manufacturing spending.
Apple Production Suppliers List 2011
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The list includes a range of global technology companies, such as Sony Corp. to Intel Corp., along with niche regional businesses such as Tianjin Lishen Battery Joint-Stock Co. Ltd.
The report makes several references to one of Apple's biggest manufacturing partners, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. The company, also known as Foxconn, combated a spate of employee suicides at a facility in Shenzen, China, in 2010 and an explosion that killed four workers at plant in Chengdu, China, last year. Apple said it has put in place new requirements for firms dealing with combustible dust.
The report found 108 facilities didn't pay proper overtime wages and 93 facilities had records that indicated more than 50% of their workers exceeded the 60-hour work week. The audits also found 5 facilities had incidents of underage labor.
Tim Cook said.
"Working hours is a complex issue. I am confident the company can improve in the area by monitoring these plants at a very, very micro level. I know this is a journey."
The report also found 24 facilities conducted pregnancy tests and 56 didn't have procedures to prevent discrimination against pregnant workers. Apple said that at its direction, the suppliers have stopped discriminatory screenings for medical conditions or pregnancy.
Mr. Cook said Apple has been sharing more of its findings about working conditions in its factories over time, but this year's update represents its most detailed. It comes as the drumbeat of criticism against practices across the company's ballooning supplier footprint has grown from prominent Chinese environmental activists and others. Many of those have taken aim at the company's prior unwillingness to disclose all the suppliers it works with.
The report said Apple has taken new steps to better monitor and improve conditions at factories, including increasing audits in Malaysia and Singapore and expanding its worker education program.
Apple said it found 112 facilities that weren't properly storing, moving or handling hazardous chemicals and 69 weren't recycling or disposing of hazardous waste as required by law, including one that had a pipe dumping waste into a nearby farm.
The Fair Labor Association, a prominent labor standards non-profit, also said that Apple would join the group, opening it up to independent monitoring. In a statement, Apple's senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams said it was "extremely proud to be the first technology company admitted into the group."
COMMENTARY: In a blog post dated October 12, 2011, I introduced you to Foxconn International, one of Apple's major Chinese production suppliers for the iPod, iPhone and iPad. Foxconn has been in the news quite a bit over reports of how it treats its production workers, appalling working conditions, 15-20 hour work days, and 11 employees committing suicide in 2010.
In a blog post dated October 15, 2011, I reported that Foxconn International planned on replacing workers with one million robots over the next three years. Rising labor rates in China are the culprit, and its better to replace human beings with robots because they don't complaint, and you can work them 24/7, 365 days a year if you need to. Labor problems solved.
In a blog post dated November 7, 2011, I reported on the findings of China's Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) , the equivalent of America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about dozens ofheavy metal poisonings that have occurred in China since 2009. According to the IPE, after several months investigating these environmental poisonings throughout China, Apple's suppliers came up again and again. The head of IPE saod.
"We found violations of wastewater standards and water pollution, air pollution, air emissions problems, and hazardous waste disposal problems. The volume of hazardous waste generated by the supply chain is amazing. In one case, we found that a single factory generated 110,000 tons of hazardous waste a year."
When the IPE confronted Apple directly about these violations of hazardous wastes, it refused to confirm that the guilty production suppliers even produced Apple products. Apple has always been very secretive about its product producers, and its policy was to refuse to disclose its suppliers. The IPE largely knew who Apple's suppliers were (from talking to locals, following delivery trucks with outgoing shipments, and monitoring media reports).
I was so pissed off at the hazardous wastes being spewed by Apple's Chinese production suppliers into the environment, rivers and canals, that I called Apple's headquarters and was given a "no comment." That's what prompted me to write the above blog post, and I am glad that I did.
It is apparent that IPE's aggressive investigation of Apple's Chinese production suppliers has forced Apple's hand, and the above Apple Production Supplier List for 2011 and Apple Production Supplier Report - Progress Report For 2012 are the result.
I have always been impressed with the simple, minimalist design and elegance of Apple's products. That has been its trademark and secret to success. However, you would think that a company that prides itself on product quality would take adequate measures to insure that its production suppliers are complying with local labor laws, fair labor standards and disposing of hazardous wastes properly and taking proper measure to protect the environment against pollution. Apple has been growing so rapidly, that it apparently ignored all these bad signals until now and the magnitude of violations listed in its Apple Production Supplier Report is clear indication of this.
Actor Karl Urban played the part of a young Dr. Bones McCoy in the movie "Star Trek 9."
In the future, you’ll be able to figure out what’s wrong with you (or your child) simply by scanning them with your cell phone. In the present, two companies are racing to make the first prototype.
The medical tricorder, a handheld device in the Star Trek universe used to diagnose diseases and keep track of vital signs, once seemed a sci-fi impossibility alongside teleportation and alien encounters. Not anymore. The $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, officially announced this week, challenges entrants to create mobile platform that can accurately diagnose 15 diseases across 30 patients in three days. We caught up with two startups--Senstore and Scanadu--that think they can pull it off.
Scanadu has been working on a non-invasive, non-contact, non-sampling (no saliva, urine, stool sample necessary) tricorder since before the X Prize challenge was announced. The startup, which raised $2 million in November, was only founded last January. But co-founder Walter De Brouwer set up a research lab in Belgium--Starlab--in the late 1990s, where he prototyped a tricorder-like device. It was too far ahead of its time. Scanadu co-founder and COO Misha Chellam explains.
"It was the size of a backpack. It was an interesting idea but not really workable."
Then, in 2006, De Brouwer’s son suffered from a traumatic brain injury and was hospitalized for three months. The tricorder idea resurfaced. This time, De Brouwer, Chellam, and the rest of the nine-person Scanadu team (including two ex-NASA scientists and three bioengineers), are working on a sensor-filled medical tricorder that can be integrated into a smartphone.
The tricorder can be viewed broken into a few component pieces:
Biological sensor input (i.e. exhaling your breath to allow the chemical components to be analyzed).
Vital signs - Heart beat, blood pressure and temperature.
Imaging components (used to identify a rash, for example).
AI software that can make sense of all the inputs.
Chellam claims that a prototype will be ready by the end of 2012, and a commercial device will be ready in three years. How can Scanadu build such a futuristic concept so quickly? Much of the technology is already available or in the works--it’s mostly a matter of getting FDA approval, gaining consumer trust, and, of course, putting it all together without draining the smartphone’s battery,
Scanadu plans to first market the device to parents who want to manage their children’s health. The device--which Chellam speculates could cost around $199--could, for example, be used to detect whether an infection is bacterial or viral and monitor temperature while the user is asleep.
Despite its quick pace of development, Scanadu is still looking to collaborate. Chellam says.
"There’s a lot of innovation in this space, and we certainly don’t think we can build this thing on our own."
That brings us to Senstore, another startup that’s working on a medical tricorder--but one that will be open source. Senstore got its start atSingularity University's 2011 summer graduate program, where the current Senstore team took on the challenge of using sensor technology to solve global health problems.
The team was inspired by a Singularity University talk from Chris Anderson of DIY Drones, a community of thousands of enthusiasts working on unmanned aerial vehicles. Notes Senstore co-founder Rachel Kamar.
"It’s easy to see why people would want to build drones because playing with quadcopters is fun. We were less convinced that people would be interested in hacking our tools for health. We spent a lot of time trying to validate that."
Whereas Scanadu is building its tricorder in house, Senstore is creating a platform where people can collect sensor data and apply diagnostic algorithms. Kalmar says.
"The idea is that people closest to problems are going to have a set of tools that make it easy for them to prototype solutions."
It’s possible, then, that people will build multiple versions of the tricorder on top of Senstore’s platform--perhaps a malaria-specific tricorder or a tuberculosis tricorder.
Unlike Scanadu, Senstore probably won’t have a true tricorder prototype ready by the end of 2012. But the startup was recently accepted to the Rock Health accelerator, and in the spring, Senstore plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign to build something "a little more consumer oriented, making it easy for people to get data from wearable sensors and stream it to the cloud," explains Kamar. Senstore hopes to have sensor kits available for people to experiment with by May.
It’s all a stepping stone along the path to creating a tricorder. When a polished version is finally built, don’t be surprised if it’s a mishmash of ideas from both Scanadu and Senstore. Kalmar says.
"We would like to collaborate."
A sickbay (see below) that uses space-age technology to diagnose diseases ranging from stomach bugs to cancer has been unveiled at a British hospital.
The first of its kind, it contains a bewildering array of equipment, including probes designed for missions to Mars.
The gadgets in the million-pound unit can detect illness without the need for painful and invasive tests. They combine information about the sight, smell and ‘feel’ of a disease to produce a diagnosis.
The unit is described as the first step towards the tricorder scanners that Star Trek’s Dr McCoy waved in front of patients’ bodies to diagnose and treat illness in the crew of the Starship Enterprise.
COMMENTARY: Launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, $10 million Qualcomm Tricoder X Prize is designed to challenge researches to come up with the technology or tricorder that is capable of diagnosing “key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases” from the sick and must be light enough for a person to carry, so a maximum weight of 5lb (2.2kg) has been set.
I have a feeling that we will be seeing a variety of medical diagnostic and biofeedback apps running on today's mobile devices like smartphones and tablets carrying out the functions of a medical tricorder. Diagnostic sensors could be connected to the mobile device, and those sensors making contact with the patients skin to record vitals and make other pathogenic diagnosis. Being able to diagnose 15 diseases on one device will be the challenging part.
In Star Trek, the medical tricorder is technology that belongs to the 23rd Century. It was a device used by Dr. McCoy, Spock and his medical/science team as far back as the first episodes, giving the crew the ability to diagnose a patient by scanning his physical body.
Similar such devices already exist but not in such a small form. Prof. Jeremy Nicholson, the head of department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London said to the BBC that the devices that exist now detect chemical signs of illness to aid patient diagnosis and claims creating one that is Trek-like tricorder size is a huge challenge and doesn’t think anyone will be able to achieve it.
Professor Nicholson said.
“The most likely sort of technology would be something that detects metabolites. What we use in our laboratory is big – the size of a Mini. The challenge is sticking it all into one device."
As a final tribute to Star Trek, here's a short video clip of actor Karl Urban as Dr. Bones McCoy in Star Trek 9.
Here's a very interesting background video of Karl Urban and how he more than measured up with DeForrest Kelly's "Dr Bones McCoy" in the original television Star Trek series. Actor Chris Pine, who played cadet James T. Kirk said that Urban's Dr. McCoy role was "spot on." I agree.
Courtesy of an article dated January 12, 2012 appearing in Fast Companyand an article dated January 12, 2012 appearing in What Cultureand an article dated September 1, 2011 appearing in Mail Online
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