Today, I am pleased to share with you my new book — a Boles Book for Becoming Job Ready — and I wrote the book to help young people learn how to wend their way into a new job marketplace, an area that is getting tougher, and more crowded, to survive in, and conquer, every day.
I woke to the sad news this morning that Mindy McCready — mother of two young children, country music singer, and star of Dr. Drew Pinsky’s “Celebrity Rehab” — was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Those of us who watched Celebrity Rehab could see this end bearing down on Mindy from afar, and the question was always not if she’d be run over by life, but when. As of yesterday, we have our answer, and now the mourning for her children must begin.
Continue reading → Mindy Got a Gun: Celebrity Death Trap or Rehab?
With the tremendous amount of unemployment in the United States, there is one section of employers that, far from suffering, have been rather lacking in qualified hirees and that is in the area of therapists for autistic children.
I’m old enough and just craggy enough to remember the pure disdain medical doctors had for the internets in the early 1990’s when the web was growing by bounds and grabbing the brains of any and every eager mind. The reason doctors hated the internet was because open access to information diluted their expertise by egalitarian dissemination of research and the democratic propagation of information; and they resented it when patients knew more about a drug or a condition than they did. Eager patients are hungry for information and becoming the master of a single pill or a defined diagnosis is much easier than having to worry about every single chemical condition and biological solution studied at medical school. Patients are the masters of their ailments; doctors are the jack of all ills.
Continue reading → The Jack of All Ills: How the Internet Democratized Medicine
A good friend of mine, who happens to be in his late 80’s — or his “Pre-Nineties” as he sometimes fondly proclaims — has been a lifelong educator. He is responsible for helping form many genius minds. As he eases into the final stage of his life, he has had to have some physical therapy to help him walk again. After his most recent round of therapy, his physical therapist told him to tell his doctors that he’s “has better balance now, has more strength now and can walk better now than ever before!” That was joyous news to my friend, but the biggest compliment was yet to come when his therapist added, “You’re teachable! You’re almost 90 years old and you’re still teachable!”
What a moment that was for my friend. After a 60-year teaching career, the teacher was still “teachable” and in the afterglow of having that terrific story shared with me, my mind turned to Steve Jobs who had just died. Was Steve Jobs teachable? Or did he think he knew more than his doctors?
“DRACO” is destined to be the next “Big Thing” in medicine. Here’s the technical explanation of the cure and, after the jump, I’ll give you the more ordinary angle on the human power of DRACO in our lives:
Currently there are relatively few antiviral therapeutics, and most which do exist are highly pathogen-specific or have other disadvantages. We have developed a new broad-spectrum antiviral approach, dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO) that selectively induces apoptosis in cells containing viral dsRNA, rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells. We have created DRACOs and shown that they are nontoxic in 11 mammalian cell types and effective against 15 different viruses, including dengue flavivirus, Amapari and Tacaribe arenaviruses, Guama bunyavirus, and H1N1 influenza. We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza. DRACOs have the potential to be effective therapeutics or prophylactics for numerous clinical and priority viruses, due to the broad-spectrum sensitivity of the dsRNA detection domain, the potent activity of the apoptosis induction domain, and the novel direct linkage between the two which viruses have never encountered.
Here’s an explanation of what you’re seeing in the image below:
The microscope images show that DRACO successfully treats viral infections. In the left set of four photos, rhinovirus (the common cold virus) kills untreated human cells (lower left), whereas DRACO has no toxicity in uninfected cells (upper right) and cures an infected cell population (lower right). Similarly, in the right set of four photos, dengue hemorrhagic fever virus kills untreated monkey cells (lower left), whereas DRACO has no toxicity in uninfected cells (upper right) and cures an infected cell population (lower right).
On my daily walk along the streets of Jersey City, I see happiness, I hear laughter — and sometimes — I am a witness to death. This week, the weather here has been exceptionally punishingly hot, and when I stepped out into 99 degrees of a steaming, urban, core, I wanted to get my walk over quickly and efficiently.
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