“Bodies Revealed exhibit plays into growing health care, medical research sector in Grand Rapids - MLive.com” plus 1 more

Bodies Revealed exhibit plays into growing health care, medical research sector in Grand Rapids - MLive.com

Posted: 02 Dec 2010 08:43 AM PST

Published: Thursday, December 02, 2010, 11:45 AM

As a permanent exhibit depicts the history of the Furniture City, the newest feature just down the corridor offers a vivid display that ties to a future that Grand Rapids has begun to create in another industry: Human health.

By bringing "Bodies Revealed" to town, the Grand Rapids Public Museum seeks to not just play into the new economy but perhaps even motivate people to become part of the burgeoning health care, medical research and biotechnology sector in West Michigan.

Given all that's occurring in Grand Rapids in building the life sciences sector, Bodies Revealed — displaying 12 full human bodies and 200 partial bodies and organs — was a must for the museum to host, Director of Education, Interpretation and Research Chris Carron said.

"We're moving toward this industry," Carron said as he strolled through the Bodies Revealed exhibit, housed on the museum's third floor through May 1.

"We need to be able to help our public be more aware of what that means and inspire the next generation of workers," he said. "This is how our economy is changing and we want to help facilitate that.

"It's a new industry, and it's an industry that the community has wrapped itself around full force."

Visiting an exhibit that's tied and appeals to the region's life sciences industry is similar, for example, to touring a furniture factory 50 years ago, Carron said.

He cites past stories about how the museum has heard from people who years ago visited the Robert B. Chaffee Planetarium when they were young and were inspired to pursue careers in science, aerospace or space exploration.

"It will be interesting in 20 years if people come in and say, 'I knew then I wanted to find a cure for cancer' or 'I wanted to be a surgeon' ... 'I can recall when that exhibit was at the museum. That was when I wanted to....'" Carron said.

Life sciences has become a growing economic force in Kent County in the last decade, driven by a massive buildup in clinical and research facilities and the roughly $1 billion invested on the Michigan Street hill in downtown, a corridor known as the Medical Mile.

Health care providers alone in Kent County directly employed nearly 42,000 people as of 2008, according to a biannual economic impact analysis conducted by the Michigan Health & Hospital Association. Including indirect employment, care providers support more than 69,000 jobs in Kent County that paid annual wages and salaries of $3.23 billion.

The Public Museum is complementing Bodies Revealed with an ancillary exhibit on the history of health care products and medical devices made in West Michigan, as well as with a health care lecture series that begins Jan. 18 with Asghar Khaghani, Spectrum Health's new heart transplant surgeon.

Physicians and health care providers and educators have been strong supporters of Bodies Revealed, Carron said. Physicians in various medical disciplines, plus more than 50 medical residents from Michigan State University's College of Human Medicine, are serving as volunteer docents to answer question from people during the exhibit.

Bodies Revealed "gives participants an opportunity to see the beauty of the human body literally beneath the skin. The dissections are so careful and so detailed that they will add to the understanding of how the body works for those of us in the health professions and those who are not," said Peter Coggan, president and CEO of Grand Rapids Medical Education Partners that's coordinating medical residents for the exhibit.

"It can truly be a life-changing experience that may open the door to a career decision for a high school student, contribute to the understanding of a sports team coach about player injuries, explain some of the aches and pains to which we are all heirs, and leave us marveling about how it all works," Coggan said.

The response from medical residents who have volunteered for the exhibit "has been outstanding," he said. "If you attend and talk to them, you will experience some of their enthusiasm for the study of the workings of the human body and how that knowledge contributes to their practice of medicine."

A number of care providers and organizations also have provided financial support for the exhibit.

Connecting with the local health care community is natural wherever Bodes Revealed travels, said Roy Glover, chief medical officer for the exhibit.

"When we come to town, we want to be a player in the health care business. We want to be a player in what's going on," said Glover, a Calvin College graduate and a professor emeritus of anatomy and cell biology at the University of Michigan.

Bodies Revealed, he said, is much about generating awareness about the complexity of the human body and how its systems work.

"A lot of our exhibit is about taking better care of your body. A lot of problems are preventable," Glover said.

One stark example of that comes via a healthy human lung that's displayed next to a damaged lung of a person who smoked.

"Everything you experience here is looking at yourself," Glover said. "There probably isn't a more precious possession that you own or that you are in charge of than your own body."

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US Health Care Reform: As Seen From the Trenches: Part 3 of a 6-Part Series - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 01 Dec 2010 10:46 AM PST

The obesity epidemic is putting ever-increasing strain on the U.S. health care system. The United States leads the world in obesity, thus qualifying our population as the world's unhealthiest. Obesity rates are about 30 percent of the population (defined as a body mass index of over 30- (weight in kg)/(height in meters squared)). Rising obesity, which is responsible for pervasive disease processes manifest in all areas of medicine, increases health care cost exponentially.

Every pound an individual gains in fat causes their cells to respond less and less effectively to insulin, putting pancreatic beta cells into overdrive for insulin production. Beta cells eventually become nonviable due to excess strain from chronic insulin resistance, leading to type two, "adult diabetes." This pathology is also beginning to affect the growing number of obese adolescents in the United States.

Diabetes leads to cardiovascular disease on the macro and microvascular level. Macrovascular diseases include heart attacks, cerebrovascular accidents (embolic/ischemic strokes), end stage kidney disease (with renal artery disease), and blindness (through retinal artery disease). Microvascular diseases include neuropathy, (with loss of distal sensation initially -- fingers and toes -- predisposing to infections due to poor blood supply, leading to amputations starting in the toes and working up the feet and legs to viable tissue), as well as further insult to kidney and retinal disease.

Aside from diabetes, obesity is associated with hypertension, arthritis (from the stress created on joints through carrying around an unnatural amount of human weight), asthma/pulmonary conditions (secondary to the muscles of respiration being unable to fully expand the chest underneath an overbearing load -- the so called Pickwickian syndrome from Charles Dickens, "The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club"), and obstructive sleep apnea (resulting from too much soft tissue laxity in the upper airway during sleep, creating momentary asphyxiation until arousal occurs), which itself causes a constant fatigued feeling, non-productivity during the workday, pulmonary hypertension leading to right sided heart failure, and fatal car crashes from chronic exhaustion. The morbidity and mortality linked with obesity is extensive. The cost of managing patients with obesity-related disease is colossal.

Calculations of obesity's economic impact, through tabulating aggregate direct health care costs and lost human productivity, demonstrate dollar ranges in the 100's of billions. These calculations are daunting and complex, given the wide-ranging impact of obesity. One gains an appreciation of the magnitude of obesity's cost, and the challenge in accurately portraying it, through considering medication costs for diabetes and its numerous associated pathologies (hypercholesterolemia, hypertension, retinal disease, etc.), dialysis costs for chronic renal failure, inpatient medical and outpatient rehabilitation costs for stroke patients, and the opportunity costs of losing great numbers of viable, working-aged individuals to disease processes, accounted across all areas of the health care system.

The Italian Renaissance notions of beauty revolved around voluptuous, thickened flesh, which symbolized wealth during the early 1500's, a historical era where diseases of starvation and malnutrition plagued society's poorest populations. Ironically, we are now in a historic era where our indigent populations are affected by diseases of excess (obesity), which is coupled with the modern post World War II idea of the social welfare state taking responsibility for its citizens from "cradle to grave." Progress and modernity have created food surpluses so abundant that all levels of society have access to plentiful nutrition. Population studies and empirical measures have delineated that poorer segments of the U.S. population are disproportionately affected by obesity. Various social and economic reasons may account for this fact, such as a lack of understanding and education about nutritional value or unavailable balanced and healthy food supplies. This population in particular faces tough challenges in dealing with obesity and its costs. Since the poorest populations are dependent on the social welfare institutions of Medicare and Medicaid, a disproportionately obese, underprivileged population places excessive pressure on the U.S. health care system and Federal Government.

Preventive care is the essential, cost-effective fix for the obesity epidemic. While awareness of the obesity epidemic in the United States seems to be present from health care workers to politicians, the results of a thinner society are lagging. Discipline and personal accountability are paramount in combating obesity. Eating less and exercising more are complex individual decisions that can be aided with strong societal/cultural pledges to healthier living. Educational programs, community events, and social institutions will be integral components in creating the collective willpower and changes necessary to beat obesity. As it stands, there are no signs of the trend toward an ever-obese society reversing.

Debilitating strain on the system is easy to contemplate when the voluminous health problems resulting from obesity are extrapolated across an increasingly obese society. Sustaining such a system implicates drawing more money from an ever-shrinking tax base (with unemployment hovering at nearly 10 percent in the United States and nearly 50 percent of the population currently not paying federal taxes) in order to support social welfare institutions. The ramifications for health care costs are in my opinion deleterious and the sustainability of such a system is impossible.

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Health and Beauty

Thursday, December 2, 2010