It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com

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It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave – NYTimes.com.

One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree. According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.

Read the entire article for a lesson in how to put a positive spin on our new Culture of Dependency.  Watch the slideshow of a dose of reality.  Then read the reader comments and decide for yourself if this “new and permanent life stage” is truly a “potentially thrilling economic evolution”.

Or not.

Managing the “Invisibles” – Harvard Business Review

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What Does It Mean to Be an Invisible?

Many of the Invisibles I met with are at the top of their fields; some are in charge of complex operations and of scores, even hundreds, of workers; many are well remunerated. I wanted to know: How is it, in an age when seemingly everyone is aggressively self-promoting, when we’re told that in order to get ahead we must have a brand or a “platform,” that these people—consummate professionals all—are satisfied with anonymity? How can they have the confidence to do their demanding jobs and yet not the ego to want to be widely known for their work? Despite the diversity of their careers, I found that all Invisibles share certain traits, with three in particular at the core.

Ambivalence toward recognition. We all do work that is anonymous to some extent, but most of us strive for recognition. That is how we feed our sense of self-worth. Invisibles take a different approach. For them, any time spent courting praise or fame is time taken away from the important and interesting work at hand. In fact, their relationship with recognition is often the inverse of what most of us enjoy: The better they do their jobs, the more they disappear. It may only be when something goes wrong that they’re noticed at all.

via Managing the “Invisibles” – Harvard Business Review.

Johns Hopkins Health Alert – Updated Guidelines for Knee OA

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Updated Guidelines for Knee Osteoarthritis

Many nonsurgical treatments are touted as being able to ease the symptoms of knee osteoarthritis, but which ones really work? Last year, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) issued revised recommendations, updating its 2009 guidelines. The group made two important changes that may affect the way you manage knee osteoarthritis.

  • First, if you use acetaminophen (Tylenol) for osteoarthritis pain relief, take no more than 3,000 mg per day. The AAOS formerly advised not exceeding 4,000 mg daily. The change was made to reflect the Food and Drug Administration’s current guidelines for safe use of acetaminophen.
  • Second, the AAOS found insufficient evidence that intra-articular hyaluronic acid provides significant symptom relief for knee osteoarthritis so the organization no longer recommends the therapy.

The AAOS continues to give a thumbs-up to some familiar commonsense strategies, such as exercising and a minimum 5 percent weight loss for people whose body mass index (BMI) is greater than 25.

Other highlights: The AAOS is unable to recommend for or against the use of bracing, growth factor injections and/or platelet-rich plasma knee osteoarthritis. In addition, although acupuncture continues to grow in popularity, there is not sufficient scientific evidence to support its use in patients with knee osteoarthritis.

Published online in Treatment of Osteoarthritis of the Knee. Evidence-Based Guideline, 2nd Edition, May 18, 2013

Click to access TreatmentofOsteoarthritisoftheKneeGuideline.pdf

Here’s the link if you want to download the entire set of guidelines in pdf format.

Demystifying the Congenital Long QT Diagnosis

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Demystifying the Congenital Long QT Diagnosis.

The incidence of the congenital long QT syndrome is about 1 in 2500 births. This is likely an underestimate as sudden death with a normal autopsy may be the first and only presentation. There are 12 genes responsible for 3 main types of c-LQTS. The presentation is one of aborted sudden death or brief arrhythmia. This usually manifests as sudden, without warning syncope, near syncope or prolonged syncope with seizures. Many are misdiagnosed with seizure disorder or vasovagal syncope.

Most Emergency Room Super Frequent Users Have Addiction Disorder – MedicalResearch.com

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Most Emergency Room Super Frequent Users Have Addiction Disorder | Medical Research News and Interviews: MedicalResearch.comMedical Research News and Interviews: MedicalResearch.com.

MedicalResearch: What are the main findings of the study?

 

Answer: We found that within our group of 255 known Emergency Department “super-frequent users,” 77% had with some type of addiction disorder, and 47 percent visited the Emergency Department seeking narcotics for pain. Women were more likely to be narcotic seeking. Using our individualized Electronic Medical Record care plan intervention, created and overseen by our multidisciplinary team (comprised of Emergency Department staff physicians, a psychologist, residents, nurses and support staff), we found that our plan significantly decreased annual rates of visits by these super-frequent users and those who sought pain-relief narcotics and other super-frequent users.

How Does Music Benefit the Brain? – Medical News Today

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I work from a home office located in Edmond, OK.  At the AHOU meeting several years ago in San Antonio, I met up with an underwriting professional whom I hadn’t seen in years.  He asked what I was doing.  I told him I worked from home.

I’m not surprised.  You always talked about working from home.

I listen to music all day long while working.  The music is mostly classical, occasionally acoustic guitar, sometimes jazz.  I didn’t realize I was feeding my brain.

How does music benefit the brain? – Medical News Today.

But music can do so much more, notes Michael Huckabee, professor and director of the University of Nebraska Medical Center Division of Physician Assistant Education.

In an article about the benefits of music on human health, he writes:


”Music does something beyond our understanding. We can call it an endorphin release or a distraction, but it goes much deeper than that. Somehow music just does us good. And the good it does was just proven to be better.”

He speaks of a finding from researchers in Taiwan, who recently reviewed over 360 published studies on music therapy and concluded the data from these studies suggest cancer patients who routinely listen to music exhibit significantly fewer symptoms of depression, pain, fatigue and anxiety.