Choices Along the Way

 

In a publication of Web MD (Nov/Dec 2017), a review of facts indicates that healthy choices made during our regular daily routine help us to remain more vigorous and tend to assist us in aging more gracefully.

Your odds of living longer are increased by 50% if you have a strong social network.  Volunteering decreases your blood pressure by 40%.  Students who spend more than 5 hours a day using their smartphones have symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome.  Swapping saturated fats for healthy fat will lower your risk for heart disease.  People who experience chronic back pain find relief by performing regular yoga exercises.  Cooking your food at home helps you eat fewer “empty” calories and helps to save at least $100 a month. 1-7 young people ages 12 to 20 binge on alcohol.  That’s four drinks in 2 hours for females and 5 for males.  DRONES can deliver an AED to a person in need faster than an ambulance.  People who eat fried potatoes (chips, hash browns, tater tots, fries) 2 – 3 times a week are 11% more likely to die than those who eat them one once a month or less.  Men now account for 40% of the 40 million Americans who are caregivers. Men tend to be reluctant to seek out support for themselves in the caregiving process.  If you get a good night’s sleep you feel better.   Frequent exercise can slow the aging process by 9 years.  It does this by lengthening the telomeres – the protein caps on the ends of our chromosomes.  Healthy eating lowers the risk for obesity.

These are all choices we can make along the way.

 

 

Fingerprints

Fingerprints are generally described as: impressions forming a pattern made by pressing the tip of a finger on a surface taken for the purpose of identification, (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus). We are familiar with the physical prints used to determine identification.  Such information is gathered when public agencies determine someone’s true persona or we need to prove our own identity.

Forensic marks, small pieces of nature that we interact with in our daily lives, also leave a trail for others’ to follow when attempting to analyze our interactive history.   If we touch a flower we pick-up and deposit bits of the pollen.  When we walk through the woods we crunch a variety of leaves on the forest floor.  These bits and pieces of debris attach to our shoes and socks and eventually fall off onto other places on which we place our shoes, i.e. bedroom rug, kitchen floor, car mats, gym equipment.  They tell everyone that we have been walking in the woods.  This evidence can even pinpoint the types of trees and flowers that were growing in the area.

There are also psychological fingerprints that we leave on others’ lives when we interact with them.  These imprints don’t fade from the lives that we touch.  The consequences of these interactions, these fingerprints,  linger after we communicate with the people in our lives.   These ripples of our interactions are like a shower that rains down evidence of our emotions, feelings, actions, motives and hidden agendas all of which tells, anyone who is astute enough to examine the debris that is left from the exchange, what our true intentions are when initiating the encounter.

Tracing this psychological evidence is a science.  Matching the ridges of physical fingerprints is a science. Analyzing the impressions is a specialty.  Your prints on others’ lives are lasting whether they be physical, forensic or psychological – it’s your job to make them either famous or infamous.

Patents

Patents are an official documents conferring a right or privilege.  This document secures to the inventor a term of years exclusive rights to the invention.  According to a report by PHARMA there are a number of prescription drug patents set to expire in 2018.

The National Pharmaceutical Services, the FDA’s Orange Book, Drugs.com, and The Center for Biosimilars lists over 26 nationally known brand name medications that are targeted to “go off patent” in 2018.

As we all know, there is a high cost related to medication today in the field of health care.  So, how much money is actually involved in this process?  The EvaluatePharma – World Preview 2017, Outlook to 2022 report, states that $194 billion (that’s billion) in brand-name sales are at risk during this period.  The companies that patent and sell these medications will probably forfeit $31 billion (that’s billion) in sales.

As you go to your medical provider this year and he/she writes you a prescription for medication, take a moment to ponder on the “behind the scenes” industry connected to the words written on that little piece of paper.

Medications, and the patents for them, are a big business.  It doesn’t matter if they are targeted toward generics, pain relief, easing respiration, erectile dysfunction, curing cancer, biosimilars for autoimmune diseases or diabetes management all are researched, developed, marketed, distributed, patented and sold by someone.  They are targeted to you and your medical provider to improve the quality of life.  Use them wisely but remember that there is a business behind the benevolence.