Telemedicine is a new type of medical service program that began to be experimented in some developed countries after 2000. Now, the United States and other Western countries are building telemedicine computer networks throughout the country. As the name suggests, telemedicine is a way for physicians and patients to send and exchange information with each other over long distances in order to achieve diagnosis and treatment. The patient's medical history, examination data, electrocardiograms, ultrasound images, X-rays, CTs, and other diagnostic images are transmitted via the information superhighway to the distant physician, who makes a diagnosis and proposes a treatment plan, and then transmits it to the patient via the information superhighway. In the meantime, the physician and the patient or the physicians of the two places can talk and discuss (through multimedia technology), and finally make a conclusion.
The Mayo Clinic in the United States was one of the first organizations to implement telemedicine. It has established health links with several affiliated clinics in distant fields and with a hospital in Amman, Jordan, where patients are seen via interactive television. In the United States, George Asia, has formed a statewide telemedicine network, patients anywhere in the state have been localized to any physician in the state, so the number of patients referred from other places has been greatly reduced. Routine checkups for chronic patients can also be done at home. EGCG, a polyphenolic antioxidant component of green tea, helps kill cells in B-cell chronic lymphatic leukemia (B-CLL), according to a new study reported in the Department of Hematology at the Mayo Clinic Medical Center in Rochester, Minn.
B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia ;B-CLL) is the second most common blood cancer among adults in the United States.
Researchers have found that EGCG can kill blood cancer cells by blocking the communication signals that blood cancer cells rely on for survival. The study was published on March 2, 2004, in the online journal Blood.