Electron Beam Computed Tomography  added 01/07/02
Article in Wall St. Journal questions the false positives and false negatives  

Electron Beam Computed Tomography & High Speed CT Scanner  links  added 10/30/01
  http://my.webmd.com/content/article/1728.55434    scam?
  http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9902/16/heart.scan/   critics
  http://www.heartpoint.com/ultrafastct.htm   1999 overview
  http://heartdisease.about.com/library/weekly/aa081500a.htm   Scam?

Electron Beam Computed Tomography appears to provide the earliest detection of blocked arteries, but costs $550 added 10/14/01 FAQ from Hearttest   http://www.hscan.com/full-body-scan.html has the following: "Other traditional exams, such as treadmill stress tests, look for blockages of blood-flow, whereas the full body scan looks at the amount of calcium in the coronary arteries. By the time heart disease shows up on a treadmill stress test the arteries are usually more than 70 percent blocked. This percentage of blockage indicates advanced heart disease and the patient may already be experiencing chest pain or has had another cardiac event. Full body scanning can detect heart disease when the coronary arteries are only five percent blocked. The large majority of heart disease detected can be stabilized through simple lifestyle changes or minimal medications. Since the heart disease can be detected so early in its cycle, a physician can take aggressive action to prevent a patient from ever becoming symptomatic". 1999 Journal abstract said EBT was similar price to treadmill test, but provided much better diagnosis. A cautious meta-analysis. 15 or so abstracts on ECBT   A dissenting. 

In Jan 2001 Canada gave cigarette companies of choice of the following 16 fairly powerful warning labels to be put on packages: Cigarettes are highly addictive; Children see, children do; Cigarettes hurt babies; Tobacco use can make you impotent; Don't poison us; Tobacco smoke hurts babies; Cigarettes cause strokes; Cigarettes cause mouth diseases; Each year the equivalent of a small city dies from tobacco use; Cigarettes leave you breathless; Cigarettes are a heart breaker; Cigarettes cause lung cancer; Idle but deadly; Where there's smoke, there's hydrogen cyanide; added 10/XX/01

eMedicine - web site claiming to have largest collection of medical review articles in the world (for doctors).  updated 10/16/01 Includes International Emergency Medicine, Stroke - ischemic, Transient Ischemic Attack, Circadian Rhythms and emergency medicine, arterial fibrillation, EMS and Cardiac Arrest, Automatic External Defibrillation, etc.

Off topic: Workplace deaths in British Columbia over 11 years: 59 fishing, 86 road building, 94 heavy manufacturing, 104 construction, 126 trucking, 252 logging, and 4,070 secondhand smoke (lung cancer and heart disease) which is 16X larger than the second cause of workplace death    from nice web site:  http://www.airspace.bc.ca  It has a link to many links to anti-tobacco sites  added 08/21/01

US Maps of Rural regions, Death rates, Auto deaths, Critical Care Hospitals, etc.  added 06/24/01

America is getting fat quickly .  added 09/27/01
Popular Science April 2001 has two US maps on page 41. 
1991 map shows just 4 states with more than 15% of population being obese.   
1999 map shows >40 states with the same level of obesity - 15%.
        data from the Center for Disease Control

Off subject: Obesity creates a health risk greater than smoking, drinking, or poverty added 6/25/01

Hip Fractures:  updated 5/06/01
340,000 in US annually
95% caused by falls
Average cost $37,000
Leading cause of injury death for those over 65
10X higher rate for those over 85
20% of women over 65 will fracture a hip during their lifetime
Only about 25% of patients will make a full recovery: 
    40% will require nursing home care
       50% will need a cane or walker
            20% will die within one year after the fall.

Telemedicine supersite    added 4/29/01

Telephone medical advice could help save thousands of lives  added 06/17/01

Some countries, such as Canada and Norway, may not permit supplementary health insurance.  Skyaid service might be considered a supplementary health insurance in come countries.  updated 4/11/01

Life Insurance: Roughly 1 in 5 Americans who are now 20 will die before age 65*.  Some Americans buy life insurance to alleviate the financial consequences for their family of a premature death.  Other Americans get life insurance coverage as part of their employment package. The average total for individual life insurance over a 20 year time period is $2,000.  We can speculate how much people will pay to decrease by 50% the chance of death for that time period with Skyaid. * from Principles of Risk Management and Insurance, 6th edition, 1998  added 5/20/01

Future hospitals?  Digital Hospital from April 2001 issue of ECompany  added 3/18/01

Close description of Skyaid Watch in A Picture of Health, Technology Review magazine March 2001    added 3/02/01

How We Die This great book includes excellent descriptions of heart attack (similar to getting a charley horse) 
and stroke (with hints toward 'silent strokes')       added 2/17/01

AgePower by Ken Dychtwald, 
Excellent book on eldercare, health problems of elderly, longevity, retirement, etc, reviewed by Henry Lahore 3/01/01

Heart, Stroke, and Emergency Medicine Web sites selected from  www.dmoz.org    added 2/14/01

A few Health Information Web Sites  added 2/09/01
IntelliHealth Heart    Stroke from Harvard Medical School
Mayo Heart    Mayo Stroke
Emergency Medicine for Doctors

WristCare monitoring system from Finland.   
Wrist unit radios to base station 20- 30 meters away, which places a telephone call in 30 minutes. 
This response time is too slow for sudden cardiac arrests. added 2/01/01

LifeShirt-like device (patented 5,694,939) by NASA  
Autogenic-Feedback System-2   just records - no real-time alarms  added 2/01/01