Precision Motion Medical Devices – A Medical Manufacturing Innovation

Over the years the medical industry has been demanding more precise, smaller, less invasive and more portable medical devices. And it now seems that their wishes may have been granted with new developments in motion-based components and subsystems.

The medical device industry can make use these cutting-edge technologies to power motors, pumps, subsystems in several different ways. At the forefront of these innovations has been one of the world's largest providers of motion actuators, Johnson Electric.

Solenoids: A number of compact solenoids can enable machine and process automation functions right from the most basic on-off function to extremely complex sequencing. In fact, they are best suited to medical applications and medical tools such as medical carts, blood analyzers, medical instruments sterilizers and pharma pill dispensers.

Motors: Speaking of which, a large number of brush and brushless, synchronous and piezo-ceramic motors can help manufacturers to overcome a variety of obstacles such as accurate positioning and motion in surgical assist medical devices, precise movement in MRI environments and silent operation of sleep apnea treatment applications.

Subassemblies/Subsystems: A range of design, rapid prototyping and manufacturing services for medical device subsystems can help companies to reduce supply chain complexity and get products to market by up to 50 percent faster. Reportedly, innovations from the manufacture house a variety of subsystems and subassemblies, including multi-axis stages for precision lens positioning in microscopes, robotic surgical assist, and long-life switch assemblies for medical applications.

Pumps: Pumps that are small, light and possess features viz. adjustable speed and reverse flow capabilities, are apt for use in a variety of drug delivery and variable flow applications for medical, pharmaceutical and laboratory applications.

Meanwhile, other advancements helping the medical industry have been reported to. For instance: Innovation To Vanquish Biotechnology Products Deficit and Self-Assembling Hydrogel - A New Drug Delivery System. At the same time and for the industry, there are challenges too. See: How Pharma Drugs Can Harm Pets and When Hospital Beds Bite!

How Pharma Drugs Can Harm Pets

When a medic reaches out for that pack of generic heparin from her pharmacy shelf, does she know who produced the drug and how was it manufactured? If she doesn't know this, then she wouldn't know whether its contaminated or not, and using it could be harmful.

The FDA recently found a number of tainted batches the drug heparin. Since, adulterated pharmaceutical drugs are everywhere, it's quite a possibility that many drugs sold as veterinary pet products are tainted too.

Whatever be the intention of the drug suppliers and manufacturers of these bogus drugs, most often it's the greed to making big money, the moot point is to ensure a safe pet supplies of these medicines.

Not to far back, a couple of months, a news network busted a drug manufacturer in China trying to make counterfeits of some popular drugs by mixing arsenic, road paint and what not, severely tainting them, which would have had serious repercussions for consumers.

Also, in 2007, and as the Wall Street Journal reported, the FDA ran 31 domestic counterfeit-drug investigations, which could include products with ingredients manufactured overseas. Similarly, in in 2006 there were 54 investigation and in 2005 the number was 32.

Hence, it goes without saying that if fake drug products have found their way in human bodies, can the pets bodies be insulated. Most of the supply of tainted products land up in the US from overseas, and many pet supplies for drugs are procured wholesale, just as pet accessories are.

On the face of it, it might appear that goods brought from overseas are to blame. But it might not be the case, because a lot of supplies from outside are properly produced. More important thing, perhaps, is to choose the right sources of veterinary supplies.

When Hospital Beds Bite!

About 2.5 million hospital beds are in use in the US today. Designed to help patients recover, sometimes the beds themselves become a device that cuts their life short.

Take for instance the statistics of injury associated with this invaluable piece of hospital furniture. Reportedly, between the years 1985 and 2008, there were about 772 incidents where patients were either caught, trapped, entangled, or strangled in beds with rails. About 460 of these patients died, 136 were injury, and 176 were saved from injury as the hospital staff intervened in time. However, the average patient who became a victim was frail, elderly or confused. Meaning that some of their own medical condition contributed to the accidents.

On the one hand rails of hospital beds have a number of benefits including helping the patients turn or reposition, serving as a hand-hold to get out of bed, inducing a psychological feeling of security, preventing patients from falling over, and offering fast 'n' easy access to bed controls and patient utilities. On the other, this precious healthcare furniture may cause accidents such as strangling or suffocating patients, causing injury when a part of their body gets stuck between the rails, leading to minor injuries such as bruises, cuts, and scrapes or the like.

While the hospital bed rails will persist as long as the hospital beds do, healthcare provider in collaboration with the patient and their families can reduce the risk by a big margin.

Experts suggest the following measures that can go a long way in reducing these risk.

• The healthcare providers and the patients or their family can discuss and assess whether the bed rails are necessary.

• The healthcare personnel can offer assurance to patients and their families that bed rails aren't necessary in all cases, and that many at times the patients are safe even without them.

• The professionals shoud assess the need for bed rails on a regular basis at short intervals, and removing them when they're not needed.

On the whole hospital beds are priceless pieces of medical furniture, but they do need to be used with care so as to avoid accidents and mishaps.

Making the Most of Alcohol Hand Sanitizers

Alcohol hand sanitizers have been in use in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. Beginning with the food industry they have trickled down to being cleanroom supplies and for use in pharmaceutical applications. Further, a large number of businesses in most sectors are making generous use of the product to protect their employees and cleanroom equipment alike. However, just because you've used a sanitizer it doesn't mean that you're completely free of germs.

Alcohol sanitizers, available as hand rubs, gels or rinse sanitizers, foams, atomizing sprays, etc are disinfectants comprising at least 60 per cent alcohol. Though washing hands with warm water and soap does remove dirt and reduces germs on your hands, alcohol sanitizers can serve as an additional agent to kill germs further or when it's not possible to wash hands with soap and water. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) considers alcohol hand sanitizers as an acceptable alternative to soap and water for hand hygiene.

Making the most of sanitizers, when used as clean room products entail at least some technique.

The following are tips to keep in mind while you prepare to enter a cleanroom facility.

• Clean grime and dirt from your hands by soap, as sanitizers only deactivate viruses and kill bacteria. They're not meant to clean dirt.

• Get the sanitizer to all the areas of your hands where the transient flora resides. Don't neglect the nails and cuticles at the cost of just palms.

• Also, in cleanroom environments and applications, sanitizers should be coupled with a gamma radiation treatment, as alcohol doesn't destroy bacterial spores.

In the beginning the medical and the health care industry in the US lagged behind in implementing handwashing programs using alcohol hand sanitizers, for the most part due to the fear that it may lead to a fall in handwashing compliance, incrasing the risk of nosocomial infections. But later, evidence from Europe and Japan showed that including sanitizers actually helped the cause, that's when alcohol sanitizers became a commonplace for use in cleanrooms by the cleanroom staff as well as companies engaged in cleanroom services

Homeopathy - Rise Of The Phoenix

Homeopathy is a 250 year old form of alternative medicine and is becoming popular by the day with an ever growing number of people who use and find it helpful internationally. For example, people from around the globe 'Trust' homeopathy, viz. India 62%, Brazil 58%, Saudi Arabia 53%, to name a few. At the same time a slew of articles on homeopathy published in newspapers, magazines or online appear to relish criticizing the so called "pseudoscience," as some refer to it, while completely skipping all the positive research conducted on this system of alternative medicine. While discussions, debates, research and practice of homeopathy continues, homeopathy dies the day anything against it is heard, and is born again when that turns out to be false, behaving much like the mythical bird, the phoenix.

Read More At, Themedica

Innovation To Vanquish Biotechnology Products Deficit

Nanotechnology researchers are often troubled by lack of availability of biotechnology products. However, now research itself is being claimed to have found a solution.

Nanotechnology research is an ever growing area of science, and scientists working in its realm use a variety of substances to build atomic scale structures. To solve their problem of shortage of raw materials, scientists at the Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute plan to use cells as manufacturing units to make DNA based nanostructures in a living cell.

Historically, biotech products have been produced by biotechnology companies by chemically synthesizing all of the products from scratch. And much of the process entails using different toolboxes to make varied DNA nanostructures and get them to attach and organize with other molecules viz. nanoparticles and other biomolecules.

However, now it is has been found that artificial nanostructures can be replicated using the mechanisms already present in live cells. The best part is that, you don't have to manufacture cells, and also that nature itself has endowed them with the ability to make copies of double stranded DNA. The only thing scientists have to do is to get them to make complex DNA nanostructures like a copier machine does.

When going about brainstorming for a solution, scientists thought of using the cellular system, as simple DNA can be easily replicated in a cell. But the problem was that they didn't know whether the cells' replicating mechanism would tolerate single stranded DNA nanostructures that house complex secondary structures or not? In the end it did.

Just the beginning though, this research appears to be quite exciting as in the future it may be used in synthetic biology applications. Perhaps as the technique is perfected, and when biotechnology companies and the biotech pharmaceutical industry implements the research full-on, there won't be any dearth of biotechnology products for scientists and the medical industry.

Also another innovation recently came up in pharmaceutical raw materials, Self-Assembling Hydrogel - A New Drug Delivery System and do you know who's happier: Physcicians or Veterinarians.

Are Veterinarians Happier Than Physicians?

These are tough economic times, and a common sense hunch is that those who earn better would be happier. But are physicians, though better paid, really a happier lot than veterinarians?

Well, going by the common sense hunch hunch they should be, but if a recent AVMA study is to be believed then that's not the case. In fact, the medics who deal with veterinary instruments are happier than physicians. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) study, veterinarians have a very high level of job satisfaction (3.55) as compared to physicians, who's score is (3.47).

And that's not all, veterinary medics are happier than lawyers (3.33) too. However, they are not on top, and professionals superseding vets in job satisfaction are the Clergy (3.79), teachers (3.61) and psychologists (3.59).

The results aside, what exactly is the reason for the higher job satisfaction of medics who's job entails providing health care to animals of all sorts using veterinary products, drugs and instruments.

Perhaps, vets love their jobs! - kidding. But if experts are to be believed then the profession of veterinary medicine is abundantly diversified, more than other of its kind. And as a result it offers veterinarians a myriad opportunities to find their favorite area of practice. The choices are endless and could range from a working as a small animal vet to being a corporate vet doctor, or even associate with a university as a professor and do research. Hence, with so many outlets available, it's unlikely that a vet would ever find herself trapped.