RNs Sandy Goldstein & Pam Cowles Work on Electronic Medical Records

For the last few months, we’ve been working toward Electronic (computerized) Medical Records. Many of you have benefitted from phase-1, the prescription system. We’re now "easing" into phase-2, where the rest of the notes are put into the computers. Now we’ll be able to bring your care to a new level. We want "high tech, high touch!"

Enclosed with the March billing is a questionnaire which will help us update your records. Please try to complete it (looking up information if necessary) and return it before your next visit. We can then get your history into the computer for in time for your next appointment.

Please "bear" with us. This is quite a project for all of us. And we’re working to set the exam room computers so that we can face you during your visit. We do like to see your smiles.

Exercise: Big & Fit Beats Thin & Lazy! From the 17^th Annual Cardiovascular Conference at Hawaii comes news that exercise is the "vascular Fountain-of-Youth. So says Dr Robert Vogel, Chairman of Cardiology at the University of Maryland. And the kind of exercise that we need appears to be "interval exercise." When asked by this re-porter just what this might mean, Dr Vogel mentioned his favorite, tennis, and my favorite, dog walking. Other interval activities include dancing, hiking, swim-ming, gardening and the like. It turns out that high energy "burst" activity is better than long-duration activity such as jogging. The goal is 30 minutes, every day of something that gets the heart rate up. The lean and unfit have 2 & ½ times the heart risk of those who are fat but fit!

Dr Jonathan Myers and colleagues looked at exercise capacity and the death rate in 6000+ men who were sent for treadmill testing. Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, they found that fitness predicted who would live and who would not. Those who could walk 3 miles an hour, or engage in active gardening or anything else that generates 5 METs (metabolic equivalents) had ½ the risk of the least fit. The most fit had the least risk.

Lyme Vaccine Withdrawn: Saying it couldn’t make any money, GlaxoSmithKline has stopped making LymeRx vaccine. Concerns of possible side effects such as arthritis have lead to several law suits. A report from the Centers for Disease Control and a Harvard study both recently cleared the vaccine. According to the CDC, Lyme cases nearly doubled between 1991 and 2000.

UTI Vaccine on Horizon: A vaginal suppository designed to be self-administered by women cut urinary tract infections by ½ in a small study at the University of Wisconsin. The vaccine is made up of 10 heat killed urinary bacteria species. The best results so far have been with 6 doses, which decreased the infection rate over 6 months from 78% to 44%.

Medical Nutrition Therapy Works in Diabetes A report in the Journal Diabetes Care from the University of Virginia shows that nutrition therapy from an experienced registered dietician is clinically effective. Randomized studies have shown major changes in "glycohemoglobin" – about a 2% drop in newly diagnosed diabetes, cutting risk of side effects by 3/4 – with such therapy. And such therapy is available right here from our own Kathy Berkowitz RD MS CDN, CDE.