With more than 5,000 music therapists in the U.S. today, music therapy is a practice that is growing in demand, popularity and relevance in today’s health care.

Today’s music therapists work in a variety of health care facilities including psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitative facilities, medical hospitals, outpatient clinics, day care treatment centers, agencies serving persons with developmental disabilities, community mental health centers, drug and alcohol programs, senior centers, nursing homes, hospice programs, correctional facilities, halfway houses, schools, and private practice.

A new case study appearing in General Dentistry, the journal of the Academy of General Dentistry, has made national headlines after drawing parallels between the oral hygiene issues seen in methamphetamine and cocaine users and a patient who consumed an excessive amount of diet soda for years.

Of the patients in question – a 29-year-old crystal methamphetamine user, a 51-year-old crack cocaine user for 18 years and a patient who admitted to consuming two liters of diet soda a day for three to five years – none had visited the dentist in years and all had extremely poor dental hygiene, resulting in what the authors described as erosion, cavities and discoloration.

But University of Minnesota School of Dentistry experts warn that extrapolating the true clinical impact of any single patient case is challenging. In addition, without context around the level of soda intake in question, alarming news headlines like those seen this week may be giving consumers the wrong message.

For some couples, arriving at the miracle of birth is more complex than sperm + egg = embryo = pregnant. The human body is incredibly complex, and few processes are as complicated as human reproduction.

For example, consider the first five days in the reproduction process:

Day 0 – Egg meets sperm in the fallopian tube. Sperm penetrates egg.
Day 1 – Fertilization occurs and a zygote forms, which includes DNA from both the male and female.
Day 2 – The zygote has evolved into an embryo. Cell count is now four.
Days 3 to 5 – Even more growing as the cells split. There are now eight cells. The embryo leaves the fallopian tube and enters the uterus.
Day 5– Embryo hatches, blastocyst embryo erupts and implants into the uterine wall, and a woman is deemed pregnant.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have completed testing on a Type 1 diabetes treatment involving transplanting “islet cells”, or insulin producing cells known to reverse and even diminish the disease.

So far, 48 people have undergone the groundbreaking experimental treatment which seeks to eliminate one of America’s most serious health problems…

A cord blood transplant is prepared for delivery to the patient at the University of Minnesota.

Cord blood transplants can do amazing things for people with very difficult diseases. But it’s important to remember that cord blood transplantation is a potentially life-saving but highly risky procedure, and is only used to treat the sickest patients, including one recently here at the University of Minnesota diagnosed with both HIV and leukemia.

A cord blood transplant does complex work inside the body, and preparation and recovery is hard work for both the patient and the doctor.

So it might be surprising to know that despite such a transplant being one of modern medicine’s most amazing treatments, the procedure itself is quite simple when compared to major surgery like a joint replacement or solid organ transplant.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), despite the best efforts of hospitals and health care workers, 1 in 20 hospitalized patients will contract a health care acquired infection. The infections can cost the United States health care system billions of dollars each year and worse, can result in thousands of deaths.

But it turns out, new technology may help hospitals and health care organizations in the fight against antibiotic resistant superbugs like Clostridium difficile or Staphylococcus aureus. Today, USA Today profiles new robots that use ultraviolet (UV) radiation in pulse form to disinfect hospital rooms or other health care environments. Other machines on the market use hydrogen peroxide vapor to accomplish the same thing.

The report notes that health care workers and the CDC can’t yet say definitively what percentage of bacteria the machines eliminate, but that when used in tandem with effective cleaning and sterilization measures they may be able to better protect both patients and health care workers.

Check out USAToday.com for more.