Welcome to @YouShieldapp blog!

We beleive that

• early health threat detection and proper patient education can save lives and improve healthcare outcomes.
• raising awareness can be more successful than promoting treatment. 

YouShieldapp blog covers
- early disease detection and prevention
- questions and issues of patient engagement in healthcare
- patient history importance and influence on diagnostics
- mHealth mobile technologies

Care about yourself, engage with your health, take right steps in the right time.  

Yours,
YouShieldapp team

Is your government rich enough to skip on diabetes prevention programs?

The one medical disorder that has increased significantly over the past three decades is type 2 diabetes. In 2014, diabetes statistics reveal that there were close to 422 million people living on this planet with the disorder. These numbers are gross underestimates because there are millions more with prediabetes and others who have no access to healthcare that have never been accounted for.

Evolution and Diet: We now eat more; but less variety

In 2016, nearly 30-50 percent of the world is obese and the numbers are rising fast. In fact, nearly 20% of children in the USA are overweight and many even have type 2 diabetes. In Africa, a continent that has always faced famine and hunger, many countries are now fighting escalating rates of obesity. Obesity has taken over smoking as public enemy number one. Overall, the majority of humans are now overweight and the chief reason is because of our diet. We no longer know

Vitamin D Deficiency - Causes and Symptoms

Over the past few decades, deficiency of vitamin D has become well recognized all over the globe. Data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that at least 50% of the general population has varying degrees of vitamin D deficiency. In addition, the deficiency is more prevalent in seniors and people of color. 

Worldwide, the number of people with vitamin D deficiency are said to be very high because of

Early Disease Detection Key to Good Health

The most important aspect of protecting and preserving our good health is by early detection of disease. Discovering a disease in its early stages greatly increases the opportunity to reverse, stop or treat the damage and regain our health.  Rapid advances in the field of medicine have significantly improved our ability to maintain good health and enjoy longer lives.     

The following are three important and sequential steps leading to the early detection of disease.    

Screening Tests - why are they important?

What is a screening test?

Screening tests are commonly used in medical practice to help identify those at an increased risk of having a particular disease. While it is widely thought that a screening test is diagnostic, it is given to healthy people without symptoms to detect who are likely to have or develop the disease.

Depression or possible thyroid disorders?

What is the thyroid gland?

The endocrine system is responsible all hormone production, and therefore all of functions that hormones regulate in the body. The endocrine system includes the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, pineal gland, adrenal gland, pancreas, ovaries/testes, parathyroid gland and thyroid gland. The thyroid gland is at the base of the neck and is split into two lobes, one located on either side of the windpipe. It is responsible for producing three hormones that are important for regulating many metabolic processes in the body.

The main hormones produced by the thyroid gland are calcitonin, T3 (tri-iodothyrionine) and T4 (thyroxine). Calcitonin is involved in controlling the tightly regulated calcium levels in the blood.

Early Signs of Diabetes

What is diabetes?

Diabetes is a complex metabolic condition that causes people to have high blood sugar, also called high blood glucose and hyperglycemia. This happens because the body’s way of converting glucose into energy is not functioning properly.

Glucose comes from both digested carbohydrates and stored sites in the body, primarily your liver. With the help of insulin, cells throughout the body are able to absorb this glucose to use as energy to fuel the body and brain.

When blood sugar is high (post-meal) insulin is released to signal cells to absorb sugar, reducing the concentration in the blood.

Anemia - can it be prevented?

What is anemia?

Over 1.6 billion people worldwide are anemic. Anemia is a condition by which red blood cells do not carry and deliver enough oxygen to the rest of the body. This is either because there are not enough red blood cells or because the red blood cells available do not function properly. The four major types of anemias include iron-deficiency anemia, megaoloblastic anemia, pernicious anemia and sickle cell anemia. Of these, the most common is iron-deficiency anemia.

Iron-deficiency anemia is a condition that occurs when there is a lack of iron in the body. Iron is essential to make hemoglobin, an iron-rich protein, which binds to oxygen to carry and deliver it throughout the body.

Top reasons for emergency visits - can early detection help to lower the numbers?

Top reasons for emergency visits & hospitalization

In the United States, the Emergency Department (ED) sees around 136.6 million patients per year. Just over 50% of that number falls between the ages of 25-64, and within this age group, 40-55% of patients enter the ED with high blood pressure (>140/90). This high percentage is instrumental to the fact that so many of the conditions seen upon admittance to the ED are chronic diseases, as high blood pressure is a factor for many including heart disease, respiratory disease and diabetes.

The top five reasons for admission to the Emergency Department differs between age groups:

Importance of Patient History for Diagnosis

Why does patient history matter?

Using patient history is critical for an efficient and accurate diagnosis. The diagnostic process often involves taking medical history, performing a physical examination, prescribing diagnostic tests and interpreting the collective results. If a piece of patient history is missing, it may misguide the entire diagnostic pathway. Therefore, the information elucidated while taking patient history will ultimately enable the clinician to select the timeliest approach.

Obtaining a thorough patient history is also the first step to assure that the process is cost-effective. By being specific and selective, the amount of unnecessary tests can be significantly reduced. This can protect patients from extensive additional testing that may eventually provide a diagnosis, but at a greater cost to the patient.

HIPPA and Medical Apps - What is the Status?

The world of medicine is changing fast. Textbooks are no longer in vogue for medical information. Today, one can find almost  any type of medical information on the web.

Hospitals and healthcare providers have now gone one step further to compete for patients. Many of them now have apps available on mobile devices like androids and iPhones. There are medical apps which provide consumers with the latest developments in medicine, when the ER is not busy, what services are provided by a healthcare facility and so on.

How Health Risks Assessment Can Be Fast With Your Smart Phone

There was a time when one always had to see a doctor to get a diagnosis and treatment. However, in just the past five years, healthcare delivery has changed. With the availability of digital devices like tablets and smartphones, medicine has gone hi-tech. Today, many hospitals have apps that provide direct information to the patient. The smartphones are now being loaded with ample medical information that is readily available with a click of a button. The days of physically going to a doctor for every complaint are over.

With the revolution in smartphone technology, there are tools that can track heart rate and rhythm, monitor symptoms of a mental health disorder and even tell you if the blood sugar levels are low or high. Smartphones have many benefits for the population – they can

- cut costs of a doctor's visit,

- speed up pace of care

- provide more autonomy and power to the patient.

Treating diabetes early can result in a cure

Treating diabetes early can result in a cure

One of the fastest growing medical disorders globally today is type 2 diabetes. In almost every country on the planet, the rates of type 2 diabetes have been increasing rapidly over the past 3 decades. Two of the primary reasons for the increased incidence of type 2 diabetes include our lifestyle- which has become sedentary and eating too much processed foods.  Once diabetes has been diagnosed and allowed to progress, it is associated with devastating complications. Researchers have developed many new drugs in the past two decades but these drugs are costly and also have adverse effects. It is estimated that in the next few decades nearly 33%-50% of people globally will have diabetes.

There is a growing belief in the medical community that type 2 diabetes can be cured if it is diagnosed and treated aggressively early in the disease.

Do modern physicians need an app that can spot a disease?

Are phones now ‘pocket doctors’?

The use of mobile phones and innovative apps is emerging in the management of many health conditions. Apps are widely accepted and rapidly advancing for preventing, monitoring and diagnosing disease. Currently apps are used in the management of cancer, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, eye disease, skin cancer and Parkinson’s disease, to name a few.

If apps are now capable of this individualized technology, and there is such wide-scale usage, are smart phones now a pocket replacement for doctors? There has been much debate around this in the medical arena.