Maine Legislature Passes Landmark Bill on Alternative Lyme Disease Treatments

Good news comes to Lyme disease patients living in New England -- the legislature of Maine has passed a bill that gives way more options to patients suffering from the disease. As The Global Dispatch reports:

A Lyme disease bill, which would require the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to link to alternative treatments for the bacterial disease, passed both houses of the Maine legislature this week and now goes to the desk of Gov. Paul LePage.

The bill, LD 597, directs the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to include on its publicly accessible website information about different alternatives for the treatment of Lyme disease. The bill also requires the center to include information about treatment guidelines recommended by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, which represents physicians, scientists and other health care professionals who specialize in infectious diseases.

The Maine CDC currently only links to the IDSA website, an organization where many physicians go to for treatment guidelines, which don’t recognize chronic Lyme as a condition or support long-term antibiotic treatment for the disease.

The original bill sponsored by Rep. Sheryl Briggs, D-Mexico went a step further saying:  A negative result for a Lyme disease test does not necessarily mean that Lyme disease is not present and if symptoms continue, the patient should contact a health care provider and inquire about the appropriateness of retesting or additional treatment. However, Briggs amended bill ended up requiring the health care provider to give a patient a copy of the results of a Lyme disease test.

Read more here.

Long-Term Benefits of Fitness Fight Cancer

Get off your butt! It could
just save your life!

According to a new report by NBC, fitness is vital to your long-term health. Great, we already knew that. But the protection from cancer that you receive can last up to 20 years down the road, just like we at Envita Medical Clinics have been saying for a long time. Need more reasons to get off the couch? Check out an excerpt of the article below:

Fitness can protect you from cancer -- even 20 or more years down the road, researchers report. And men who were the most fit in middle age were the least likely to die a quarter century later even if they were unlucky enough to get cancer, a new study finds.

Men who were the most fit at age 50 back in the 1970s were the least likely to develop lung or colon cancer 20 to 25 years later, the study, which will be presented next month at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, or ASCO, found. And among the men who did get lung, colon or prostate cancer, the fitter they were in their early 50s, the less likely they were to die of it.

This is good news for people who want to lower their risk of not only heart disease but cancer, says Dr. Susan Lakoski of the University of Vermont, who led the study. She’s a cardiologist who studies fitness and its effect on disease.

“Two things you can’t change are your genes and your age,’ she said. “But you can get more fit.”

Lakoski studied data on more than 17,000 men who attended the Cooper Institute in Dallas. Dr. Kenneth Cooper, who coined the word “aerobics”, founded the research institute in 1970. The men all took fitness tests on their first visits to the institute, and the institute later acquired their medical records.

Read more here.