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Afghanistan has some of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world, and a high concentration of donkeys. Enter the maternity saddle -- a new invention that promises to carry women in labor across Afghanistan's difficult terrain so they can get the medical care they need. The British charity HealthProm and designer Peter Muckle developed the inflatable donkey saddle to ease the burden on women about to give birth in remote areas of Afghanistan. The lack of suitable transport in mountainous areas leads many pregnant women to opt against heading to health centers in favor of giving birth...

Merck & Co (MRK.N), taking a cue from other drugmakers that have slashed research spending to bolster earnings, on Tuesday said it plans to cut annual operating costs by $2.5 billion by the end of 2015 and eliminate 8,500 jobs. By slimming down, Merck aims to narrow its focus to products with the best chance of winning regulatory approval and achieving substantial sales, while jettisoning research products with less likelihood of success. The planned job cuts, representing more than 10 percent of the company's global workforce of 81,000 employees, would be in addition to previously announced cuts of 7,500 positions.

Perhaps the coming onslaught of Obamacare won’t matter that much. After all, in whatever form it finally emerges, it will still be the biggest federal program of all time, and will likely be the straw that breaks Uncle Sam’s piggy bank. (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?) What is more tragic than the destruction of a public sector, that quite frankly has been going downhill since the Civil War, is the ruination of medicine...

A Chinese man whose nose was severely disfigured following a car accident will soon get a replacement—in the form of a nose that has been growing on his forehead. A video from Chinese television station CCTV shows doctors checking the nose’s progress on the forehead of a 22-year-old man named Xiaolian at a hospital in Fuzhou located in the Fujian province, Reuters reports. The man reportedly only got basic medical care after he was involved in a car accident last year. He developed an infection that corroded the cartilage in his nose, which made reconstruction surgery impossible. That’s when they...

The Year of the Snake has proved unlucky for one woman in northern China who received hospital treatment after opening a bottle of wine containing a snake that suddenly jumped out and bit her hand. The surprise attack occurred after the woman surnamed Liu from Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang Province decided to add more alcohol to the bottle when the snake, which she had bought live in June and since kept pickled in spirits, pulled a Jesus and sprung to life, dbw.cn reported on September 3. Liu received treatment at a local hospital for inflammation, explaining she drank snake wine regularly to...

A drug that was used to treat a skin disorder has shown signs of being able to treat aspects of type 1 diabetes. A small trial on US patients suggests that alefacept helps the body produce its own insulin, which is key for people with type 1 diabetes.

The high cost of medical care in the US plus the rationing of medical care in other nations has spurred the growth of medical tourism. As I mentioned in a previous post, outstanding doctors, nurses, and hospital facilities can be found in countries such as Costa Rica, Thailand, India, the Philippines, etc. offering care at costs significantly lower than in the US and without the rationing and waiting times of other countries. One problem with traveling from the US to another nation for medical care is the cost and inconvenience of travel. Additionally, each nation will have its own tort...

Aetna, one of the nation's largest health insurers, has pulled out of its sixth Obamacare insurance exchange. The company announced this week that it will not join the state-based exchange in New Jersey, as it reviews its participation in the Affordable Care Act. It will continue to serve employers and offer plans to individuals outside of the exchange in the Garden State, where it has 1.1 million customers...

Death Panels by a thousand cuts. No one could have seen this coming, no one. From the L.A. Times, that hotbed of right-wing scare-tactics, Insurers limiting doctors, hospitals in health insurance market: The doctor can’t see you now. Consumers may hear that a lot more often after getting health insurance under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. To hold down premiums, major insurers in California have sharply limited the number of doctors and hospitals available to patients in the state’s new health insurance market opening Oct. 1. New data reveal the extent of those cuts in California, a crucial test bed...

The doctor can't see you now. Consumers may hear that a lot more often after getting health insurance under President Obama's Affordable Care Act. To hold down premiums, major insurers in California have sharply limited the number of doctors and hospitals available to patients in the state's new health insurance market opening Oct. 1. New data reveal the extent of those cuts in California, a crucial test bed for the federal healthcare law. These diminished medical networks are fueling growing concerns that many patients will still struggle to get care despite the nation's biggest healthcare expansion in half a century.

Patients should not be prescribed long-acting or extended-release opioid pain relievers unless they need daily, round-the-clock care for pain that can't be managed by any other means, the Food and Drug Administration has told doctors. The new guidelines - meant to stem the country's growing epidemic of opioid abuse and addiction - will not place formal new restrictions on prescriptions by physicians, but administration officials hope to chasten physicians who prescribe the medications for anything other than ongoing, intractable pain.

Well, I sure screwed it up today… I went to sit down on a chair that wasn't there and fell, now I can't move my legs and the ER released me saying nothing is broke so there is nothing they can/will do. No brace, no chair, no crutches, nothing. The doctor didn't even touch me, tell me to wiggle toes, take my temp, listen to my heart, nothing...just a CT scan and then let me go. I couldn't even get in the car without a nurse, 2 cops and a citizen who offered to help. I don't know what to...

The living tissue inside an animal has been regressed back into an embryonic state for the first time, Spanish researchers say. They believe it could lead to new ways of repairing the body, for example after a heart attack.

Within Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution it states that “he [the president] shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” It is safe to say that before Obama, no president in our history has purposely delayed implementing a law that was supposed to be his crowning achievement. Yet, despite the original deadline of October 1, 2013, the employer mandate for health insurance has been delayed until 2015, and the individual mandate is under attack in the House, and may eventually be delayed, as well. These mandates are at the very heart of Obamacare, and are based on...

The industry of medical tourism is growing quickly all around the world in response to the ever-climbing price of US healthcare bills. Outraged patients have been warming to the idea of overseas provision of surgery and treatment over the past seven years, says the Medical Tourism Association; an operation that works towards helping Americans find suitable healthcare in other countries. Europe is emerging as a key player in the medical tourism industry based on its competitive prices and well-respected medical reputation. Prices there are kept down by strict government regulation that stipulates a national maximum on specific operational cost, full...

An enticing new study from BMC Medicine reports that people over 55 who drink a little alcohol, averaging about a glass – generally of wine – per day, are less likely to be clinically depressed than those who drink more and those who don’t drink at all. It turned out that low-to-moderate alcohol consumption was linked to reduced risk of depression: People who drank between two and seven glasses of wine per week seemed to derive the greatest benefit, having a third the risk of being depressed as people who did not drink.

The same protein tells beta cells in the pancreas to stop making insulin and then to self-destruct as diabetes worsens, according to a University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) study published online today in the journal Nature Medicine. Specifically, the research revealed that a protein called TXNIP controls the ability of beta cells to make insulin, the hormone that regulates blood-sugar levels. "We spent years confirming that TXNIP drives beta-cell death in both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes," said Anath Shalev, M.D., director of the UAB Comprehensive Diabetes Center and senior author of the paper. "We were astounded to...

Yahle, a diesel mechanic from West Carrollton, Ohio, "coded" - a term meaning emergency -- on the afternoon of Aug. 5, after arriving in the hospital that morning in cardiac arrest. A team of doctors rushed to his hospital bedside and used chest compressions, a bag connected to a breathing tube and medications to force blood and oxygen through his body. After 45 minutes, they gave up and declared him dead. "He was truly flatlined at the end of that code. He had no electrical motion, no respiration, and no heart beat, and no blood pressure," says Jayne Testa, director...

If you call the customer service line of a major business or corporation these days, there’s a good chance you’ll end up talking to someone thousands of miles away (or to a computer, if the company is really trying to cut costs). If you go shopping for new clothes, it’s likely that some of shirts and dresses you try on were made by people who are also thousands of miles away, in shops far less glamorous than the ones in which the finished products end up. Outsourcing is so commonplace in certain industries, we don’t even think twice about it...

Does the modern bureaucratization of medicine risk a return to the horrors of national socialist medicine? NOVEMBER 01, 1993 by MARC S. MICOZZI M.D. Marc S. Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D., a physician and anthropologist, directs the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., which recently brought from Berlin the exhibition, “The Value of the Human Being: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945,” curated by Christian Pross and Götz Aly. Today we are concerned about issues such as doctor-assisted suicide, abortion, the use of fetal tissue, genetic screening, birth control and sterilization, health-care rationing and the ethics of medical research on animals...