From integrative concepts, to inclusive BMI policy, to the potential benefits of vaginal discharge — here are some of the best health stories from Yahoo News partners this week.
Some doctors are using AI chatbots to help deliver bad news to patients, the report says.
According to the New York TimesSome doctors are using AI chatbots like ChatGPT to communicate with patients — even helping doctors deliver bad medical news in a more empathetic way or writing scripts to help patients speak more empathetically.
An expert at Stanford Health Care told the New York Times about chatbots: “I know doctors are using it. “I’ve heard residents use it to guide clinical decisions. I don’t think it’s appropriate.”
Microsoft corporate vice president Peter Lee said many doctors are using the new technology to perform some of the mundane tasks that can consume physicians’ time, such as writing appeals to insurance companies or summarizing patient visits. But Futurism, which reported on the New York Times story, said he was skeptical that Chatgpiti was being used to deliver bad news.
“As a patient, I personally feel a little weird about it,” he told The New York Times.
Still, other experts say that ChatGPT can really benefit their interactions with patients by simplifying medical jargon and breaking down more complex concepts when talking to patients.
Doctors’ organization issues new policy on BMI, ‘excludes racism’ and acknowledges ‘historical harm’.
The American Medical Association (AMA) has approved a new policy recommending that doctors focus on body mass index (BMI) — the commonly used weight-to-height ratio — to determine whether a patient is at a healthy weight, acknowledging a “problematic history with BMI” and It does not include differences between race and ethnicity, gender and age groups, Reuters reported.
“With the newly adopted policy, the AMA addresses the problems of using BMI as a measure because of its historical disadvantages, its use for racial discrimination, and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from pre-Hispanic white populations.” AMA said in a statement. on Wednesday.
Instead of making diagnoses and recommendations based solely on BMI, the AMA recommends doctors consider other risk parameters, such as “visceral fat, body adiposity index, body composition, relative fat mass, waist circumference and genetic/metabolic factors.” “
Researchers say applying vaginal fluid to C-section babies can help restore healthy bacteria
Research It was published on Thursday, June 15 in the journal Cell Host and Microbe Exposing C-section babies to their mother’s vaginal fluid shortly after delivery has been shown to restore some of the good bacteria that C-section babies have acquired, with gut health and neurodevelopmental benefits, AFP reported.
In a small study of 68 infants, researchers at China’s Guangzhou South Medical University used a technique called “vaginal seeding” — washing each baby’s mouth and body with a cloth soaked in the baby’s mother’s vaginal fluid or a control substance. After studying the babies’ stool microbes after six weeks, researchers found that babies who were exposed to their mothers’ vaginal fluids had more “mature” gut bacteria than babies who were born vaginally. Based on questions about developmental milestones, parents of babies exposed to vaginal fluid reported that their babies had slightly better communication and motor skills than the control group at 3 months and 6 months of age.
however, Experts are concerned that The sample size is too small to draw any firm conclusions about the benefits of vaginal seed, and parents should avoid trying vaginal seed outside of a clinical setting because it could potentially transmit infection to the baby.
Scientists say they have created the world’s first artificial embryos
Researchers in the United States and the United Kingdom announced Wednesday that they have created the first human embryo-like structures from stem cells without using human eggs or sperm. CNN reported.
The research has not yet been published, but was presented at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston by Magdalena Zernica-Goetz, a professor of biology and biological engineering at Caltech and Cambridge University. Zernicka-Goetz emphasizes that the embryo-like structures her team created “are not human embryos.” But models that mimic some of the characteristics of the natural human fetus in the early stages of development, before a heartbeat appears, could be very useful for understanding genetic disorders or causes of miscarriage in early pregnancy.
Zernicka-Goetz told CNN that the goal of her research is to prevent the loss of human life, not to create it. But it still raises legal and ethical questions for countries, including the US, that “do not have laws governing the creation or treatment of artificial embryos,” according to CNN.