Staying alive

December 1, 2010 - 8:41 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, health, Israeliness, Life, News 

Reminiscent of the joke Woody Allen recounted in Annie Hall about two people complaining about the food in a restaurant with one going, “This food is terrible” and the other responding, “yes, and the portions are so small,” the portions in Israel are apparently getting bigger.

New statistics released by the Health Ministry this week showed that Israelis are living longer than they were 10 years ago. The report – comparing Israel’s health system results with those of the OECD, which Israel recently joined, and those collected in other countries by the World Health Organization – shows that in 2009, local women lived an average of 83.5 years, and men lived 79.7.

According to The Jerusalem Post’s medical correspondent Judy Siegel, this marks an increase of 2.6 years and 3 years, respectively, since 2000, and is better than the OECD figures for men – though it is similar to those for women.

I didn’t use the Woody analogy to suggest that life in Israel is terrible, but with all the problems that elderly people face regarding health and economic hardships, it’s certainly a mixed blessing that we’re sticking around longer.

And how are we dying? Not from terror attacks, as much of the world has been led to believe, but from the ‘normal’ causes.
Cancer became the leading cause of death in 2007 and remains so, with heart disease in second place. Deaths from infectious diseases are more common here than in other OECD countries, while suicide, road accidents, stroke and digestive system diseases are less common.

The report also dealt with the opposite end of the life cycle spectrum – birth. The average Israeli woman is waiting longer to procreate – giving birth to her first baby at 26.5, compared to 25.3 a decade ago.

Infant mortality rates are similar to those in the other OECD countries and declining, the report shows, with 3.8 per 1,000 live births – 2.7 for Jews and 7.6 for Muslims. In 2000, the infant mortality rate among Arabs was four times the current rate.

So, we’re doing a lot to insure that our citizens – whether babies or septuagenarians – are being kept alive. Now we just have to do a better job at making sure those lives are better.

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Israel going to pot

March 22, 2009 - 10:08 AM by · 5 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Medical Breakthroughs, Technology 

pot1Forget California – did you know that Israel has one of the most progressive medical marijuana programs around?

Run out of an office in the Tel Aviv suburb of Bat Yam, the Health Ministry’s program provides legally grown pot to hundreds of Israelis with medical conditions that have been proven to be helped by the active ingredient in cannabis – THC.

The categories include patients with malignant tumors who are in one of two stages – either during chemo to ease nausea and promote appetite, or those with a final stage tumor, terminal patients who have a prognosis for living for another six months; HIV patients, who attend one of the country’s eight HIV centers in the country; chronic pain patients who are being treated at pain clinics or by a known pain physician; patients with Crohn’s Disease or ulcerative colitis, who are being treated by gastroenterologists; and MS patients specifically for the spasticity symptoms upon recommendation from an MS center or a neurological specialist.

In addition patients with post stress trauma disorder are being tested with the drug on an experimental basis – these include many former IDF soldiers experiencing PSTD following their participation in battle.

Dr. Yehuda Baruch is the guy who makes the decisions which patients are accepted to the program, which receives over 60 applicants each month. The licenses need to be renewed at various intervals ranging from monthly to annually depending on the condition. According to Baruch, once a patient receives approval, he’s given the option to either grow the plants himself or be supplied free of charge by one of the minstry’s five authorized pot growers.

In addition to the medical marijuana program, Israel can boast one of the world’s superstars in cannabis research – 78-year-old Professor Raphael Mechoulam. In 1964, Mechoulam was the first researcher in world to isolate THC, and in 1993, he headed an Israeli-Scottish team that succeeded in identifying, isolating and synthesizing a previously unknown substance in the brain that functions much as THC itself. The researchers named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit word ananda, meaning inner joy.

Today, in his lab at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Mechoulam and his team synthesize the THC from a steady supply of cannabis supplied by the Israel Police, and create a liquid form that’s given to cancer patients undergoing painful marrow transplants.

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