Assessment of the Effect of Raga Therapy & Nisha Amalaki Churna on Prehypertension - A clinical study

Background: Prehypertension is classified as elevated blood pressure above normal by American medical classification. JNC 7 suggested systolic between 120 to 139 mmHg or diastolic 80 to 89 mmHg should be consider as Pre-hypertension. Oxidative stress develops due to stress and anxiety is recognized as main risk factor for initiation of hypertension. The Nada Yoga (sound based yoga) practices has been reported to decreases stress and anxiety. Nisha Amalaki Churna the combination of Amalaki (Indian gooseberry) and Haridra (turmeric) powder also reported to effectively reduces oxidative stress. Aim - To assess the combined effect of Indian Classical Raga Ahirbhairav and Hindol along with Nisha Amalaki Churna on Prehypertension. Material and method- It was clinical study. Total 48 patients selected by purposive sample technique and then divided into 2 groups (n = 24 each) randomly. Assessment was done by criteria of pre hypertension given by JNC 7. Result - In present study group A (Raga Ahirbhairav, Raga Hindol and Nisha Amalki Churna) patients the mean score of Systolic B.P. had decreased from 135.50 to 120.76 (Mean difference 14.74) with extremely significance (p <0.0001) compare to group B (only Nisha Amalki Churna orally) and mean score of Diastolic B.P. had decreased from 88.61 to 79.706 (Mean difference 8.904) with extremely significant (p <0.0001) compare to group B. Relief in mild headache 31.94% (p<0.01), relief in Anxiety 52.67% (p<0.0001) and relief on stress was reported 34.56% (p<0.0001) in Group A were reported, compare to Group B. Conclusion- result of study indicating that Raga therapy with Nisha Amalaki Churna had potential in the management of pre hypertension.

Predicting ICD-9 Codes Using Self-Report of Patients

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is a globally recognized medical classification system that aids in the identification of diseases and the regulation of health trends. The ICD framework makes it easy to keep track of records and evaluate medical data for evidence-based decision-making. Several methods have predicted ICD-9 codes based on the discharge summary, clinical notes, and nursing notes. In our study, our approach only utilizes the subjective component to predict ICD-9 codes. Data cleaning and segmentation, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are applied on the subjective component during the pre-processing. Our study builds the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to develop a model for predicting ICD-9 codes. The ICD-9 codes contain different ICD levels such as chapter, block, three-digit code, and full code. The GRU model scores the highest recall of 57.91% in the chapter level and the top-10 experiment has a recall of 67.37%. Based on the subjective component, the model can help patients in the form of a remote assistance tool.

For the Insane in the Insane World

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all now living in a world of mass panic, confusion, and isolation that inflicts experiences of mental illness on those not typically considered mentally ill. When, where, and how does identifying “mental illness” come to trap certain people under the stigmatizing identity, while others are able to avoid the problematic medical classification but not the lived experience? As a writer mitigating a long-term struggle between my lived experiences with depression and anxiety, and the outside categorization and medical classification of these “mental illnesses”, I realize the current public sentiment has never been more welcoming of my personal musings on these tensions. I have centered an autoethnographic approach that reflects on mental health experiences and critiques of biomedical ontologies through a reading of My Brilliant Friend (and the associated quadrilogy). By attending to socially relevant story arcs involving mental health, I use the symbol of book character Lila’s “blurred boundaries” to both identify and rethink mental health categorizations and lived experiences that previously differentiated subsets of people prior to COVID-19. My reflection ultimately seeks to address the ways that these once dissimilar groups have converged psychologically through disruptions of time during the current health pandemic.

The Effect of Hyper-Parameters on the Performance of Third Order Neural Network Algorithms on Medical Classification Data

The artificial neural network (ANN) particularly back propagation (BP) algorithm has recently been applied in many areas. It is known that BP is an excellent classifier for nonlinear input and output numerical data. However, the popularity of BP comes with some drawbacks such as slow in learning and easily getting stuck in local minima. Improving training efficiency of BP algorithm is an active area of research and numerous papers have been reviewed in the literature. Furthermore, the performance of BP algorithm also highly influenced by the size of the datasets and the data preprocessing techniques that been chosen. This paper presents an improvement of BP by adjusting the two term parameters on the performance of third order neural network methods. This work also demonstrates the advantages of using preprocessing dataset in order to improve the BP convergence. The efficiency of the proposed method is verified by means of simulation on medical classification problems. The results show that the proposed implementation significantly improves the learning speed of the general back-propagation algorithm.

Cultivated co-production: Sexual health, human rights, and the revision of the ICD

STS scholars frequently have shown how science and sociopolitical arrangements are ‘co-produced’, typically tracing how scientific actors themselves keep ‘science’ and ‘politics’ far apart. Revealing co-production is therefore deemed the work of the STS analyst, who unearths linkages that the actors might be unaware of, or might ignore or deny. By contrast, the creation of a new chapter on ‘sexual health’ in the recent revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) offers a case of what might be termed ‘cultivated co-production’. Neither oblivious to the linkages between science and politics nor invested in obscuring them, the designers of the sexual health chapter sought support for their work by demonstrating, transparently, how science, ethics, and human rights might properly be aligned. The intentional and visible character of co-production in this case indicates awareness of the need to manage the contested nature of gender and sexuality at a transnational level. It also reflects two changes in the organization of medical politics and medical classification: a widespread recognition of the necessity of reaching out to lay stakeholders and advocates, and the rise of an emphasis on ‘conventions’ as the backbone of transnational biomedical consensus processes.

Disability as a ‘New’ Global Social Theme: The Role of International Organizations in an Expanding Global Policy Field

Disability as a global social policy issue has gained increasing importance during recent decades, partly due to a shift in conceptualization from a medical to a social perspective on disability. This new relevance has led to the emergence of a global organizational field around the topic, with a high involvement of International Organizations (IOs). In order to investigate the population of IOs in the field, this chapter identifies influential actors, relates them to the main discourses, and maps their relations. It can be seen that agencies of the United Nations have become the key actors in promoting the rights-based social perspective and the monitoring of the implementation of disability rights. In contrast, the World Health Organization is still the leading organization in the provision of medical classification systems. Overall, it can be noted that the organizational field leaves space for IOs to influence the direction of global and national disability policy.