Category Archives: Medical School

Media Release 4 July 2012 For Immediate Use

Student Protestors Interrupt John Key at Medical School opening

A group of students has interrupted a speech from Prime Minister John Key as he opened the new Medical and Health Sciences complex at the University of Auckland yesterday.The students from protest group Blockade the Budget stood in the wind and rain chanting 'We're cold, we're wet, we're drowning is student debt!' - One protestor was able to make her way into the ceremony to address Key directly.

The protest was one of a series of demonstrations against the National Government's recent Budget cuts. The Student allowances will no longer be available for post-graduate study, and access will be limited to 200 weeks for longer courses, including many of the degrees on offer at the Medical School. Commenting at the protest, post-graduate student Wednesday Jones said 'Isn't it ironic that millions of dollars were spent on revamping the Medical School while thanks to his shortsighted, selfish and detrimental budget, the school will only ever be accessed by students from wealthy backgrounds.'

Health Sciences student Mark Nelson added 'There is always money for new buildings or public relations campaigns, but nothing to support students from less privileged backgrounds. We should be able to celebrate these facilities as a benefit for everyone, but we know that the business approach to education means that this is an elite facility that will be out of reach for most of us'

When asked about the protest action, Blockade the Budget replied with 'It's only a few weeks since 43 students were abused and arrested by police for protesting against the arrogance of this Government, now we have John Key up here cutting ribbons and acting like a great benefactor. We want people to know the truth, the National Government is destroying education.'

Students are planning a large public demonstration called 'Show and Tell' for the 21st of July. The issues that the group will be protesting against include $400 Million in cuts to early childhood education, the National Standards program, performance based pay for teachers, charter schools and education as a business, $13 Billion worth of Student Debt, cuts to the student allowance scheme and arts funding, the 7th highest tertiary fees in the world and 15% of tertiary students living in absolute financial distress.

Anyone interested in joining the rally against education cuts are encouraged to meet at 1pm on Saturday 21st July at Britomart, Auckland CBD.

ends

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Students Interrupt John Key at Medical School opening

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire -07/03/12)- Cloudera, the category leader that is setting the standard for Apache Hadoop in the enterprise, today announced that Cloudera Cofounder and Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher will be leading a revolutionary project with Mount Sinai School of Medicine to apply the power of Cloudera's Big Data platform to critical problems in predicting and understanding the process and treatment of disease.

"We are at the cutting edge of disease prevention and treatment, and the work that we will do together will reshape the landscape of our field," said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, The Mount Sinai Medical Center. "Mount Sinai is thrilled to join minds with Cloudera."

As a founder of Cloudera, Hammerbacher fully appreciates the technology's potential for solving previously intractable or even un-askable questions in medicine. In concert with Mount Sinai's clinical and academic community, he will help to develop solutions designed to enable performance scalable data analysis and multi-scale measurements in areas such as genotype, gene expression and organ health for medical research and discovery. The new software will also provide real-time feedback and guidance for treatment to improve patient outcomes.

"We can improve healthcare delivery and treatment through new technology and acquired knowledge," said Eric Schadt, PhD, director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai. "I am delighted that Jeff will be collaborating with the Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology and look forward to working together to dramatically change how we think about medical analysis and reporting."

Hammerbacher is enthusiastic about the implications of Big Data in medicine and, with support of Cloudera's Data Science team, will be dedicating a portion of his time to this collaboration. Areas of research include analysis of human and bacterial genomes, study of the metabolic pathways of normal and disease states in the organism, structure and function of molecules used in treatment of disease, and more.

"I'm excited to work closely with one of the world's best research and teaching hospitals, as we expand what it means to be in the Data Science field," Hammerbacher said. "The value of Hadoop lies not in the technology itself, but in the real world problems it can solve."

Solving practical problems is core to Cloudera's focus; recent examples include using Hadoop to gain new insights for the FDA on adverse drug reactions across up to four drug combinations, and helping Opower customers to be more energy efficient as a result of visibility and connections drawn from disparate data.

About The Mount Sinai Medical CenterThe Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Established in 1968, Mount Sinai School of Medicine is one of the leading medical schools in the United States. The Medical School is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service. Consistently ranked in the top 20 hospitals in the United States, Mount Sinai is one of 12 integrated academic medical centers whose medical school ranks among the top 20 in NIH funding and US News and World Report and whose hospital is on the US News and World Report Honor Roll. Nearly 60,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients last year, and approximately 560,000 outpatient visits took place. For more information, visit http://www.mountsinai.org/

About ClouderaCloudera, the leader in Apache Hadoop-based software, services and training, enables data driven enterprises to easily derive business value from all their structured and unstructured data. Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), available to download for free at http://www.cloudera.com/downloads, is the most comprehensive, tested, stable and widely deployed distribution of Hadoop in commercial and non-commercial environments. For the fastest path to reliably using this completely open source technology in production for Big Data analytics and answering previously un-addressable big questions, organizations can subscribe to Cloudera Enterprise, comprised of Cloudera Support and a portfolio of software including Cloudera Manager. Cloudera also offers consulting services, training and certification on Apache technologies. As the top contributor to the Apache open source community and with tens of thousands of nodes under management across customers in financial services, government, telecommunications, media, web, advertising, retail, energy, bioinformatics, pharma/healthcare, university research, oil and gas and gaming, Cloudera's depth of experience and commitment to sharing expertise are unrivaled. http://www.cloudera.com

Connect with ClouderaRead the blog: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/ Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cloudera Visit on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cloudera

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Cloudera Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher Teams With Mount Sinai School of Medicine to Solve Medical Challenges Using ...

In addition to this finding, this finding, this finding and this finding -- all of which came out in the past month or so -- a new coffee study is showing us yet another health benefit of being a regular brew-drinker.

Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have found that there seems to be a relationship between increased coffee intake (meaning the more, the better) and decreased risk of basal cell carcinoma -- the most common skin cancer.

But researchers cautioned that if you aren't an avid coffee drinker already, this study shouldn't convince you to try to increase your coffee intake for the sake of protecting against skin cancer.

"However, our results add basal cell carcinoma to a list of conditions for which risk is decreased with increasing coffee consumption," study researcher Jiali Han, Ph.D., an associate professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and Harvard School of Public Health, said in a statement. "This list includes conditions with serious negative health consequences such as Type 2 diabetes and Parkinson's disease."

This year in the United States, there are expected to be more than 2,000,000 new cases of nonmelanoma skin cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The Cancer Research study included analysis of 112,897 people who were in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Over a 20-year period, 22,786 people developed basal cell carcinoma.

Researchers not only found a link between increased coffee consumption and decreased skin cancer risk -- for example, women who drank three or more cups of coffee a day had a lower risk of skin cancer than people who drank less than a cup of coffee a month -- but also a link between overall increased caffeine consumption (like from coffee, soda, chocolate and tea) and decreased skin cancer risk. Meanwhile, there was no link between decaffeinated coffee consumption and risk of the skin cancer.

In addition, there was no link was identified between increased coffee or caffeine consumption and squamous cell carcinoma or melanoma, which are two other kinds of skin cancer.

"These results really suggest that it is the caffeine in coffee that is responsible for the decreased risk of basal cell carcinoma associated with increasing coffee consumption," Han said in the statement. "This would be consistent with published mouse data, which indicate caffeine can block skin tumor formation. However, more studies in different population cohorts and additional mechanistic studies will be needed before we can say this definitively."

However, there is such a thing as too much caffeine. The Mayo Clinic says that consuming heavy amounts of caffeine each day (500 to 600 milligrams a day, or more) can lead to muscle tremors, insomnia, irritability, restlessness and even upset stomach. But the Mayo Clinic did note that getting about 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine per day -- that which is in about four cups of coffee -- for adults is not a detriment to health.

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Coffee Skin Cancer: Caffeine Consumption Linked With Lower Risk Of Basal Cell Carcinoma

SANTA ROSA The Family Medicine Residency Program at Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa announced its incoming class of 2015, selecting 12 medical school graduates out of 618 applicants about half of the nations 1,200 plus applicants in family medicine.

The three-year program, one of 450 family medicine training programs in the United States, is affiliated with the UCSF School of Medicine and has trained hundreds of family physicians since its inception in 1938.

And its become an increasingly vital asset to the regions health care landscape, as the county, the state and much of the nation confronts a persistent and emerging shortage of primary care physicians.

The county faces a shortage of up to 200 physicians over the next 10 years, according to a study commissioned by the Sonoma County Department of Health Services and the Sonoma County Medical Association. The study said the county has some 350 primary care physicians, which is better than the ideal range of 60 to 80 doctors per 100,000 residents. Still, an estimated 22 percent of the countys primary care physicians expected to retire and another percent 6 to 8 percent planning on leaving the area.

In addition the shortage, the nature of primary care has changed dramatically, with more and more physicians joining larger, more coordinated systems versus running a private practice.

Health care is changing in this country and the old models of family medicine, where a physician sits in the office and waits for patients to come to them, are out-dated. In our recruiting, we have positioned ourselves as one of the innovators in the world of family medicine education, said Jeff Haney, residency program director.

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Topics: Kaiser Permanente, physician residency, physicians groups, Santa Rosa Community Health Centers, Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency, Sonoma County, Sutter Medical Center of Santa Rosa | Categories: Employment, Health Care and Senior Living, Industry News, North Bay News, People, Position, Sonoma Report, Spotlights and Profiles, Top News Stories

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12 new medical residents are selected as region tries to address physician shortage

Med school applicants from rural areas are among those who can claim disadvantaged status.

Many premedical students have encountered some form of hardship. So when medical school applicants see the category "Disadvantaged status" on the American Medical College Application Service (AMCAS), they may wonder what a disadvantaged status really means.

Officially, AMCAS states that applicants determine whether to designate themselves as disadvantaged. Each medical school has its own policies on how it handles applicants who self-declare the disadvantaged status, or whether it treats those applications differently. AMCAS also provides certain categories for guidance in determining status:

Underserved: If you grew up in an underserved or rural area up until the age of 18, AMCAS states that you can identify yourself as a disadvantaged applicant. When you generate your AMCAS application, you can mark your county of residence as rural (R), medically underserved (U), or both.

[Learn what to consider when applying to med school with a low GPA.]

Immediate family: If you have a situation involving your immediate family that affected your educational opportunities or social circumstances, you can self-designate as disadvantaged.

State and federal assistance programs: If your family received state and federal assistance because of socioeconomic other circumstances, it would be considered appropriate to self-designate as disadvantaged by AMCAS.

If you think there are other circumstances that have contributed to your disadvantaged statues that are not listed on the AMCAS page, don't feel constrained by the above. In addition to requesting family financial data, AMCAS provides the opportunity for a 1,325 character statement explaining why you feel you should be considered a disadvantaged applicant.

In June 2009, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) published a compendium of examples of disadvantaged applicant statements, as well as other data that characterized admissions statistics of that group.

[See why minorities still don't feel completely comfortable in medicine.]

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What It Means to Be a ‘Disadvantaged’ M.D. Applicant

Pinoy Kasi By: Michael L. Tan Philippine Daily Inquirer

The commencement exercises were held last June 2, somewhat atypical in the Philippines, where these rituals are usually held in April. The togas and capes were different, too: as befitting the medical graduates, they had the color green, but this was combined with gray, associated with a business degree.

The graduating class was from the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health (ASMPH), the first of a unique program that allows these new doctors to add MD as well as MBA (master of business administration) after their names.

The brain behind the medical school was Dr. Alfredo Bengzon, who wanted a new medical curriculum that would produce not just excellent clinicians but also public health experts and administrators. It was a 21st-century vision that began in the 20th when Bengzon was building up Medical City from a small hospital to the large medical complex that it is today. Other ideas came in when he was health secretary, the first after the 1986 Edsa revolt, when he had to fight many battles around inefficiency and corruption.

Our panganay (eldest), said Dr. Ma. Eufemia Yap, one of the associate deans, with pride and a bit of relief. It wasnt just taking care of the students through the five years of medical school, but also the many years of planning that went into the medical school.

The Ateneo Board of Trustees approved the creation of the school in 1997, after much discussion. But it was to take another 10 years before the school opened its doors to this first batch. There were numerous meetings and workshops all through those years, literally from one millennium into the next, to discuss how this medical school would be different, and what dual degrees could be offered. An MPH (master of public health) was considered, as well as an MM (master of management). In the end, the choice of the MBA was partly out of convenience: Ateneo already had years of experience with its MBA programs offered in its Makati campuses, including degrees specific for health professionals with strong exposure to public health and management.

I was roped (or, I felt at times, lassoed) in to help think of the inputs for the social sciences and to train teachers and mentors to lecture, with the aim of developing cultural competence, which isnt just sensitivity to peoples cultures but also the ability to harness peoples own knowledge, and practices, to keep healthy and fight disease.

MBA oath

I was initially uncomfortable with the MBA degree, in part because of public perceptions that an MBA produces business people, and that doctors are already too good at making money. But interactions with the Ateneo MBA staff have convinced me that we need more of these MBA programs for other professionals as well, to run government as well as private companies. The trajectory of todays MBA is well summarized in an MBA oath first crafted by the 2009 graduates of Harvard Business School and which has since been signed by thousands of other MBA graduates around the world, including, I hope, the new ASMPH graduates.

The oath begins with a recognition of MBA graduates role in society: first, to lead people and manage resources to create value that no single individual can create alone, and second, that their decisions affect the well-being of individuals inside and outside [their] enterprise, today and tomorrow. The oath has several promises concerning ethical conduct and the protection of human rights and dignity in the pursuit of value creation. How appropriate, I thought, for todays physicians, who create value by keeping people healthy.

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Medical pioneers