News Blog

Has Silicon Valley acupuncturist Ted Ray come up with the cure for jet lag?

Come and dig my herbs.

(Credit: FlyRight )

FlyRight is an herbal concoction that Ray says will ameliorate the effects of jet lag. Jet lag is often caused by the disruption in a person's circadian rhythms--the rhythms an individual establishes with the day/night cycles where they have been living.

But there are other causes--canned, recycled air; stress; dehydration; and poor blood circulation. All of these symptoms can be attenuated by the various herbs in the liquid, he says. Ginkgo? Good for swelling and fatigue caused by poor circulation. Linden works on circadian clock disruption. Avena? Helps take away the wooziness caused by that recycled air. The ingredients also can help fight off the risk of catching a cold from someone on a plane, the creator of the product says.

"Is there a perfect solution to flying? Not really, but if you can solve 80 percent of the problem, you're ahead of the game," he said. "If you get to Germany at 10 a.m., you don't want to be sleeping in your suit by 3 p.m."

Doubters exist the medical value of herbs, but, as Ray points out, every CEO at every pharmaceutical company has scientists trolling around the Amazon looking for natural medicines.

A $14 2-ounce bottle is good for a round-trip flight within the U.S. or a one-way international flight. The 2-ounce limit makes it small enough to carry on a plane. You can mix it with vodka too, but vodka will dehydrate you, so some of the benefit will wear off.

"Can you eat Big Macs and go to the gym? Sure, but it might make more sense to have a turkey sandwich," he said.

Ray, an acupuncturist and herbalist, developed the product after continually hearing complaints about jet lag from his customers. If FlyRight takes off, you can expect to see a lot of it on the San Jose-Taipei red-eye, which itself is sort of like a 14-hour meeting.

He's got a whole list of testimonials on his site too. But next week, on a trip to Japan, I'm going to try it out and give you a review.

A new study shows that children with type-1 diabetes exhale significantly higher levels of methyl nitrate when their blood sugar is high. That might not sound like earth-shattering news, but it could mean that diabetics have a noninvasive way to check their blood-sugar levels down the road.

Breath samples were taken from 10 children while they were in a hyperglycemic state and at intervals after they were given insulin. Those samples were then sent to a lab that normally studies air pollution. Their research allows them to detect trace chemicals in the atmosphere. They tested the breath samples for more than 100 gases at parts-per-trillion levels and found that concentrations of methyl nitrate were up to 10 times higher in children with high blood sugar.

We're still a long way from diabetics being able to measure their blood sugar with a handheld device and a puff of air. But discovering that correlation between blood sugar and exhaled chemicals is a solid first step in finding new, pain-free ways to monitor blood sugar throughout the day.

"Breath analysis has been showing promise as a diagnostic tool in a number of clinical areas, such as with ulcers and cystic fibrosis," said Pietro Galassetti, a diabetes researcher with the General Clinical Research Center at the University of California at Irvine. The research was conducted by the GCRC's Galassetti, Dan Cooper and Andria Pontello, along with UC Irvine chemists F. Sherwood Rowland and Donald Blake, and is set to appear in this week's online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(Via Reuters)

The United Nations and a group of U.S. organizations including Microsoft are working together to bring the latest medical information to health professionals in poor countries free via the Internet, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The U.N. and librarians from Yale and Cornell Universities have teamed up with journal publishers to create the Internet service, which will help hospitals in developing countries gain access to otherwise expensive articles and research on medicine. (The project is run by the U.N.'s Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative, among other U.N. groups.) Microsoft is contributing to the effort by offering servers and security software designed to help protect the journal material from unauthorized distribution outside the project.

According to Randy Ramusack, Microsoft's U.N. technology adviser and who was quoted by the Chronicle: "The challenge is to blend this powerful technology used by the world's leading publishers with the 10-year-old technology used by the developing world."

Electronic records hold the potential to improve medical care by flagging problems such as drugs that shouldn't be combined, but a study by Stanford and Harvard medical school researchers has concluded that so far they haven't improved the quality of outpatient health care.

The researchers studied a database of 1.8 billion doctor visits in 2003 and 2004 and examined performance on 17 indicators of quality. The results were mediocre, according to Stanford.

"In essence, we found little difference in the quality of care being provided by physicians with electronic health record systems, compared to those without these systems," Dr. Randall Stafford, a Stanford associate professor of medicine and senior author of the research, said in a statement. The research is scheduled for publication Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The issue isn't necessarily that electronic records don't help make better decisions. For one thing, many systems just transferred previously paper records into electronic form without adding extra abilities such as checking for negative drug interactions. For another, doctors often don't necessarily take advice from an electronic system.

Electronic records didn't make a difference in 14 areas, such as avoiding drugs that could be inappropriate for older patients and prescribing appropriate antibiotics. In two areas, doctors with electronic records systems did better than otherwise, and in one, they did worse, Stanford said.

Update:This posting has been changed to correct the results in the three tests where doctors with the electronic records system did better or worse than those without.

I don't have an image to show you of fullerenes (gotta love that name), but they are small. Too tiny for my digital camera. Each fullerene is a nanoparticle also known as "buckyball" and it contains about 60 carbon atoms. Those are arranged to form tiny hollow cages.

Now nanotechnologists at the Virginia Commonwealth University have used fullerenes to stop allergic reactions--not just treat allergy symptoms but prevent them and leave you with a clear head, which is more than you ever hoped for. The little carbon cages interrupt the basic process of the mast cells. Those guys are all over your body and release histamines when in contact with some allergenic substance. The fullerenes will prevent the histamines from getting loose and causing the usual allergic havoc we all know too well.

No word on how soon we might get our first chance to inhale these little fullerenes. But I, for one, am holding my breath.