How An Early Orthodontist Visit
Can Head Off A Child’s Jaw Problems
While it may seem premature to take a 7-year-old child to the orthodontist, such an early visit can save thousands of dollars in future dental issues.
“Jaw issues especially are much more easily fixed when children are young,” says Dr. Stuart Frost, an orthodontist and author of The Artist Orthodontist: Creating An Artistic Smile is More Than Just Straightening Teeth (www.drstuartfrost.com). “This includes imbalances of the muscles of the face along with tongue and tooth-positioning problems.”
It is easier to correct skeletal jaw problems at an early age while guiding the teeth into the mouth correctly. Doing so maximizes the ability to create or maintain space in the child’s jaws to allow teeth to grow in, and minimizes the opportunity for the teeth coming in wrong, says Dr. Frost.
Dr. Frost says that after about age 9, the window closes on fixing most of the problems easily. At that age, he says, the seam in the roof of the mouth fuses into solid bone and once it does, widening the upper palate from side-to-side is nearly impossible. If the problem is addressed before that happens, the upper jaw can be more easily expanded to create the space needed for all the teeth to come in, he says.
If a child snores, has sleep issues, bedwetting or is grinding their teeth they should have an airway evaluation done by an orthodontist as soon as possible, says Dr. Frost.
“Waiting even a few years can have a lifetime impact,” Dr. Frost says. “By the time the child hits 11 or 12 years old and the adult teeth are coming in, the problems multiply. If we can fix the issues while the child’s bones are still developing, it will be easier and a lot cheaper to accomplish instead of after all the damage has been done.”
Many of the issues can be remedied by the orthodontist applying braces and an expander appliance to coax the structures into balance.
Not tackling these issues early can cause issues such as a flaring of teeth, underbites and adult teeth erupting sideways through the gums.
Dr. Frost says other issues that could get complicated if they are not treated early include:
Breathing problems. These breathing issues lead children to thrust their tongues and heads forward when asleep, causing further misalignment of the jaw and interrupted sleep. Adults with sleep apnea are fatigued and unrefreshed, causing their bodies to break down as the cells become slowly malnourished.
Immune system Issues. Immune system issues unknown to humans in past generations are common today. The immune system can be impacted by dental problems at an early age.
Increased allergy problems. Allergies can play a crucial role in childhood development of the face, jaw, and teeth. They can be an early warning sign that your child’s teeth aren’t growing properly.
Jaw alignment problems. -Misaligned jaws lead to chronic head, neck and shoulder pain.
“The bottom line is that an early investment in your child’s health will almost certainly pay off in time and money,” Dr. Frost says, “as well as enhance their future health.”
About Dr. Stuart Frost
Dr. Stuart Frost, author of The Artist Orthodontist: Creating An Artistic Smile is More Than Just Straightening Teeth (www.drstuartfrost.com), is an orthodontist and sought-after speaker who has given seminars, lectures, and speeches throughout the world to dentists and the general public on groundbreaking dentistry. He graduated from the University of the Pacific School of Dentistry and has continued his education at the University of Rochester, where he accomplished a one-year fellowship in Temporomandibular Joint Disorder and a two-year certificate in orthodontics.
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Health Catalyst Secures up to $100 Million with Financing Led By OrbiMed
Financing round which includes new and existing investors follows record growth in 2018
Silicon Slopes, Utah, February 7, 2019 – Health Catalyst®, Inc., a leader in next-generation data, analytics and improvement, announced the closing of a Series F equity and debt funding round led by OrbiMed, a leading healthcare public and private market investment firm. This equity and debt funding will provide Health Catalyst with access to up to $100 million in capital. Several existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Sands Capital Ventures, UPMC Enterprises and Kaiser Permanente Ventures also contributed to the financing, which lifts Health Catalyst’s value above $1 billion.
Proceeds from the financing will support continued expansion of Health Catalyst’s technology and services offerings for healthcare transformation. The company is on a mission to unleash data as a catalyst for massive, sustained clinical, financial and operational improvements in the performance of healthcare organizations. In support of that mission, the Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™) is the foundation upon which the company has built an expanding library of analytics applications, supported by world-class services.
“As more healthcare organizations are coming to understand, the future of healthcare will rely on the broad and more effective use of their vast stores of data,” said Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton. “This additional capital will enable us to continue developing the technology and expertise necessary to offer health systems a path to systematically use data to analyze their performance, and then work to make measurable improvement in clinical, financial and operational areas. It will also help to support our expansion, already underway, into the life sciences and international markets.”
2018: A Breakthrough Year
The market’s rising valuation of Health Catalyst as a leader in data, analytics and improvement was secured through the company’s strong performance in 2018. During the year, Health Catalyst experienced over 65% growth in its annual recurring revenue, over 50% growth in revenues, and over 80% growth in its gross profits. The company also added sixteen new health system customers in 2018, more than in any previous year in the company’s 10-year history. Health Catalyst also added over 200 team members in 2018, to end the year with nearly 750 team members throughout the US. Also during the year, Health Catalyst’s customers realized over 250 documented clinical, financial and operational improvements, by far the most of any year in the company’s history.
The company’s strong business performance in 2018 was mirrored by the high ratings it received from industry analysts, whose findings were based on surveys of Health Catalyst customers. Industry bellwether KLAS Research awarded Health Catalyst its “Best in KLAS” ranking for Business Intelligence, marking the second year in a row that Health Catalyst has been recognized by KLAS as the top-performing solution in the category for its ability to help turn raw data into clear insights that drive improved clinical, financial and operational performance. KLAS also named Health Catalyst to its exclusive “A-List” of Healthcare IT companies that combine high customer satisfaction with high rates of customer retention, in its April 2018 report, Decision Insights 2018: National Trends & Best Practices. And in December, KLAS ranked Health Catalyst second overall in its report on population health management vendors, Population Health Management 2018, Part 1.
On the product development front, Health Catalyst released several new applications in 2018 including Touchstone™, a breakthrough analytics application featuring next-generation benchmarking and prioritization capabilities powered by Artificial Intelligence to supercharge healthcare improvement initiatives; and the Patient Safety Monitor™ Suite: Surveillance Module, the industry’s first comprehensive patient safety application to use predictive and text analytics combined with concurrent clinician review of data to monitor, detect, predict and prevent threats to patient safety before harm can occur.
The year also saw Health Catalyst add significant new capabilities, talent and customers with its acquisition of Medicity, one of the nation’s largest population health management companies with solutions for health information exchange (HIE), business intelligence, and provider and patient engagement. Medicity added to the Health Catalyst customer base more than 50 clients, including state and regional HIEs, large employers, health plans, health systems and providers in physician groups and extended care facilities. The combination is empowering connected communities with the insights required to improve healthcare outcomes, control costs, and advance population health management.
Long recognized as a “best place to work” by top healthcare and technology publications, Health Catalyst continued to add to its world-class leadership team in 2018 with several significant new hires. These included William Caldwell, M.D., former Senior Vice President of Clinical Integration at Novant Health; Jason Jones, formerly a senior analytics leader at Kaiser Permanente; Cathy R. Menkiena, former Senior Director of EHR Solutions at Encore Health Resources, an emids company; Ryan Smith, former Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Banner Health; Elia Stupka, formerly a bioinformatics leader at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Director of Computational Biology and Genomics at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma; and Steven Vance, former regional Chief Financial Officer and Compliance Officer at Intermountain Healthcare.
Also joining Health Catalyst in 2018, as strategic advisors, were healthcare luminaries Brent James, M.D., a global leader in bringing quality improvement science and methods to clinical care and the first Chief Quality Officer of Intermountain Healthcare; Eric Topol, M.D., Executive Vice President and Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute, and the Founder and Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute; and Timothy Zoph, the former Senior Vice President of Administration and CIO at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. Dr. James is also an investor in this latest round of financing.
About OrbiMed
OrbiMed is a leading investment firm dedicated exclusively to the healthcare sector, with approximately $13 billion in assets under management. OrbiMed invests across the spectrum of healthcare companies worldwide, from venture capital start-ups to large multinational companies. OrbiMed manages a series of private equity funds, public equity funds, royalty and credit funds and other investment vehicles.
About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst is a next-generation data, analytics, and decision-support company, committed to being a catalyst for massive, sustained improvements in healthcare outcomes. We are the leaders in a new era of advanced predictive analytics for population health and value-based care with a suite of machine learning-driven solutions, decades of outcomes improvement expertise, and an unparalleled ability to unleash and integrate data from across the healthcare ecosystem. Our Health Catalyst Data Operating System (DOS™)—a next-generation data warehouse and application development platform powered by data from more than 100 million patients, and encompassing over 1 trillion facts—helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Our technology and professional services can help you keep patients engaged and healthy in their homes, communities, and workplaces, and we can help you optimize care delivery to those patients when it becomes necessary. We are grateful to be recognized by Fortune, Gallup, Glassdoor, Modern Healthcare and a host of others as a Best Place to Work in technology and healthcare. Visit www.healthcatalyst.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
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JIM CROW JUMPS INTO THE GAME
By Robert C. Koehler
937 words
History in blackface slaps the present moment awake.
What? The governor put that picture on his yearbook page? In 1984? The wave of outrage, the demand for his resignation — from Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s own party, the Democrats — can’t be dismissed with a shrug and an apology. His career may be over, thanks not simply to an act of youthful stupidity but to the context that made it possible: good old American racism.
The controversial picture shows two guys standing next to each other, holding cans of (most likely) beer. One is dressed up in a Klan hat and robe; the other is smeared in blackface. For reasons that now seem incomprehensible, it was posted on Northam’s own page in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook. He has publicly denied that he himself is in the picture, but . . . too bad. That’s not enough to make the scandal disappear. The picture’s impact is visceral.
Should Northam resign because of it? This is a question that instantly pulls me in two directions: yes and no. For now I’ll let it hover as “maybe” and move on to the real story here, which isn’t the governor’s youthful indiscretion or personal morality, but America’s dark, still-buried history: not simply of racism and violence, but the of the apple-pie normalcy of it.
Suddenly it is the normalcy of it that is being clawed into accountability and purged. Consider how much things have changed. Remember Robert Byrd? He was the longest-serving senator in U.S. history and a liberal Democrat. He was also a member, in his younger days, of the Ku Klux Klan — an officer, for God’s sake. He was a Kleagle and an Exalted Cyclops.
Remember Hugo Black? He was also a liberal Dem, serving for 10 years in the Senate and 34 years on the U.S. Supreme Court. He also joined the Klan in his younger days and never exactly apologized for doing so. “I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes,” he once said, by way of explanation.
All that was back in the days before racism had come undone as a core feature, if not a basic requirement, of being white in America. The fact that this has changed is worth acknowledging. Most Democrats, including most of the declared 2020 presidential candidates, have called on Northam to resign. I’m sure this is as much pragmatic awareness as moral outrage. The Dem base has no tolerance left for idiots in blackface, much less for pseudo-Klansmen. Unavoidably, a line of connection runs straight from the yearbook photo to the worst of American history: lynching, slavery, genocide.
The history of blackface makes this clear. A singing-and-dancing white man with his face blackened by burnt cork was at the center of what was once the country’s most popular form of entertainment: the minstrel show. It’s where Jim Crow began:
Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.
“Jim Crow grew to be minstrelsy’s most famous character,” Blair L. M. Kelley wrote at TheGrio. “. . .The gag in Jim Crow performances was that Crow would show up and disturb white passengers in otherwise peaceful first class rail cars, hotels, restaurants, and steamships. Jim Crow performances served as an object lesson about the dangers of free black people, so much so that the segregated spaces first created in Northern states in the 1850s were popularly called Jim Crow cars. Jim Crow became synonymous with white desires to keep black people out of white, middle-class spaces.”
The history of blackface entertainment grows ever more chilling, populated with such characters as Jim Crow and Zip Coon and Mammy the faithful slave, with her illiterate, disposable pickaninny children.
“Minstrelsy,” Kelley wrote, “desensitized Americans to horrors of chattel slavery. These performances were object lessons about the harmlessness of Southern slavery. By encouraging audiences to laugh, they showed bondage as an appropriate answer for the lazy, ignorant slave. Why worry about the abolition of slavery when black life looked so fun, silly, and carefree? Even the violence of enslavement just became part of the joke.”
What begins to emerge with increasing clarity is how little this country has atoned for its past. No, a shrug and an apology aren’t quite enough.
Suddenly the governor of Virginia is assigned the role of scapegoat. This also concerns me. His resignation may have pragmatic necessity, but the blame for the horrors summoned by his yearbook photo require a collective acceptance of responsibility.
As Rhae Lynn Barnes wrote recently in the Washington Post: “In Jim Crow’s century-long reign, a strange, visible and highly pervasive world of blackface minstrel shows took hold in nearly every city and town in the United States. Amateur blackface minstrel shows and parades were so central to civic and campus life in 20th-century America that it’s hard to find a university yearbook without a blackface image or a town that didn’t hold such a parade.
“. . . Northam’s blackface yearbook spread is a small shard of an expansive and ever-present national story, one that shows how racism defined what it means to be a patriotic, successful and civically oriented white man in modern America.”
The undoing of American racism has been a long, fierce, painful process, and we’re hardly beyond it. From our prison complex to police shootings to voter purges aimed at people of color to Muslim bans, border cages and the brutal thuggery of ICE, racism still rules. Standing in moral judgment of the past won’t, in and of itself, heal the harm we’re inflicting on the future.
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Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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THE BRAVE
Announce Second
Full-Length Album Aura
Due Out April 5th via UNFD
Pre-Order Aura at https://unfd.lnk.to/Aura
Watch the Music Video for New Single "Technicolor" HERE
February 7, 2019 - Brisbane, QLD, Australia - The Brave, one of the most exciting young bands coming out of the Australia heavy music scene, have announced their second album, Aura, will be released April 5 via UNFD. It is an expansive album that deals with some weighty questions, and that sense of searching for something bigger is rendered in The Brave's uniquely punchy-yet-cinematic style.
The band dropped their epic new single 'Technicolor" along with the aesthetically pleasing music video for the track earlier today. This is the second single from Aura, following up previously released single "Ethereal", which was named Best Heavy Song at last year's Queensland Music Awards. The anthemic track leads the charge of the Aura era and establishes them as inventive, emotive and dynamic keepers of the flame, taking the energy and chaos of a youthful mistake and recasts it as something quite different. Frontman Nathan Toussaint shared that the track reflects back on "That feeling of everything around you not being what it seems and wanting to get back to normality." Fans can check out the music video for "Technicolor" here.
Aura is a bold snapshot of a band seeking to use the simple power of music to move people. Threaded throughout are themes of change, love and loss, and taken as a whole body of work it's sure to further establish The Brave as one of the most forward-thinking and exciting bands in heavy music in 2019. Aura is available for pre-order today at https://unfd.lnk.to/Aura.
Aura Track Listing
1. Through The Dark
2. Technicolor
3. Out Of Reach
4. Ethereal
5. Lost To The Night
6. Burn
7. Above The Clouds
8. Aura
9. Desolation
10. Dragged Down
11. Goodbye
Formed in Brisbane in 2013, The Brave quickly started turning heads with 2014 EP 'Endless', which captured their particular brand of lightning in a bottle with the critically acclaimed breakout debut album 'Epoch' in 2016, which won plaudits worldwide from the likes of BBC Radio 1, Kerrang, Triple J and more. 'Aura' takes that groundwork and builds on it in striking fashion.
The Brave is Nathan Toussaint (Vocals), Kurt Thomson (Guitar), Daniel Neucom (Bass), Denham Lee (Guitar) and Brent Thomson (Drums).
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For More Information:
http://www.unfdcentral.com/music/the-brave/
Follow The Brave
https://www.facebook.com/thebraveofficial/
https://twitter.com/thebravebris
https://www.instagram.com/thebraveofficial/
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ASSE Student Exchange Programs is now looking for American families to host high school students from Asia. These personable and academically select exchange students speak English, are bright, curious, and eager to learn about this country through living as part of a family for an academic year and attending high school. Your support of these students reinforces the United States’ commitment to education and opportunity throughout the world.
ASSE is currently seeking host families for these well-qualified, bright, motivated and well-screened students coming from Japan, China, Thailand, Taiwan, Mongolia, and South Korea. By living with local host families and attending local high schools, the students acquire an understanding of American values and build on leadership skills.
The exchange students arrive from their home country shortly before school begins and return at the end of the school year. Each ASSE student is fully insured, brings his or her own personal spending money and expects to bear his or her share of household responsibilities, as well as being included in normal family activities and lifestyles. At the same time the student will be teaching their newly adopted host family about their own culture and language.
If you are interested in opening your home and sharing your family life with a young person from abroad, please contact us today for more information, call (800) 733-2773, go online at www.ASSEhosts.com or email asseusawest@asse.com
Founded by the Swedish National Department of Education, ASSE International (formerly American Scandinavian Student Exchange) is a non-profit, tax-exempt, public benefit organization. ASSE is officially designated as an exchange visitor program by the United States Department of State and cooperates with the Canadian Provincial Ministries of Education.
