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New drugs would only be licensed for the NHS if they help those judged to be a benefit to wider society under proposals from the health watchdog. Pharmaceutical firms on Thursday night warned that the move could lead to new medicines being denied to the elderly. A senior professor also said that the plans could threaten the well-being of older people and were “deeply suspect”, while charities questioned the ethics of the policy.

Did the recent recession make people feel physically ill? A study of Google queries suggests it did. Researchers counted queries for health terms — abdominal pain, headaches, shoulder pain, migraine and hundreds of others. Then they tracked how the numbers of searches for those terms changed during the recession — December 2008 through December 2011 — from levels before the recession began. The study was published in the February issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Imagine a world where a handheld gadget scans your body and diagnoses illnesses in seconds - reducing hospital visits and potentially saving your life. It may sound like the work of science fiction but engineers in California have taken their lead from the Star Trek franchise and developed a real-life version of the show’s medical tricorder. The Scanadu Scout can read a person’s temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and more, simply being held against their forehead. It was developed by Scanadu’s CEO Walter De Brouwer, 56, at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California. A prototype of the Scout was...

(Reuters) - The U.S. beef industry's dependence on the muscle-building drug Zilmax began unraveling here, on a sweltering summer day, in the dusty cattle pens outside a Tyson Foods Inc slaughterhouse in southeastern Washington state. As cattle trailers that had traveled up to four hours in 95-degree heat began to unload, 15 heifers and steers hobbled down the ramps on August 5, barely able to walk. The reason: The animals had lost their hooves, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture documents reviewed by Reuters. The documents show the 15 animals were destroyed. The next day, the hottest day of the...

Over the last 12 months some 3,000 Cubans, mostly doctors, have arrived in the United States after deserting one of the Venezuelan government´s social programs they staff. This accounts for a 60% increase as compared with 2012. In 2012 there were about 5,000 refugee Cuban doctors and nurses in the United States coming from all over the world. Through December 1, 2013 this figure had surged to 8,000, 98% of them came from Venezuela. These are estimates by Dr. Julio Cesar Alfonso, head of the South Florida group Solidarity Without Borders Inc. (SWB), which helps Cuban medical professionals who try

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Since Healthcare.gov’s staggering debut in October, Obamacare has faced a level of attack not seen since its controversial debate and passage on Capitol Hill in 2010 -- and this is only the enrollment phase. What lies ahead in 2014 when the actual delivery of health care begins remains to be seen, but for many observers the odds are it won’t be pretty, or what people expect. “There are going to be a lot of after effects that I don’t think are appreciated,” says Doug Cote, US chief market strategist at ING Investment Management in the attached video. “I think...

Hi all, Last night I spent 8 hours in the ER and am still in pain. I'm also mad about the whole thing. Obviously, though, I'm healthy enough to type on my iPad! Any insight is appreciated. For the last 3 weeks or so I have had a dull pain right below the bottom of my ribcage on the left side. At times it would become sharp, like a stabbing pain and I would not be be able to take a deep breath during that time. I would cringe in pain during these times. After a while it would go...

SURGEONS may soon be able to "draw" new bone, skin and muscle on to patients after scientists created a pen-like device that can apply human cells directly to car-crash victims and others with serious injuries. Australian scientists have made a "BioPen", which allows doctors to apply stem cells and growth factors on to damaged and diseased bones. The machine works in a similar way to a 3D printer, building up the materials required to heal a bone. Experts have said it could improve bone reconstruction surgery. The device was created at the University of Wollongong and St Vincent's Hospital in...

Approximately 18 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant. But that may change someday sooner than you think -- thanks to 3D printing. Advances in the 3D printing of human tissue have moved fast enough that San Diego-based bio-printing company Organovo now expects to unveil the world's first printed organ -- a human liver -- next year. Like other forms of 3D printing, bio-printing lays down layer after layer of material -- in this case, live cells -- to form a solid physical entity -- in this case, human tissue. The major stumbling block in creating tissue continues...

Sometimes, surprise findings can be life-saving, for example in the case of an athlete whose brain is scanned after a concussion, and radiologists spot a tumor, Hauser said. Other times, nothing can be done. That same brain scan might show early signs of an incurable condition, Hauser said, and "this young person now needs to live with the knowledge that she may someday develop this neurologic disease." Follow-up testing may do harm. Doctors, researchers and direct-to-consumer companies alike should inform potential patients about the possibility of incidental findings before they undergo a medical test. They should clearly explain what will...

After a man lost his right hand in a work place accident in November, doctors in Changsha, Hunan province successfully reattached the limb by grafting it to his ankle for a month. The man, Xiao Wei, said that at the time of the accident he "was just shocked and frozen to the spot, until colleagues unplugged the machine and retrieved my hand and took me to the hospital. I am still young, and I couldn't imagine life without a right hand." Doctors, opted to graft the hand to Wei's ankle to prevent it from dying while they worked on his...

Once-privileged New Yorkers who supported Obamacare are discovering that Obamacare means they’ll be losing some of their privileges: "Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s health care plan…They are part of an unusual, informal health insurance system that has developed in New York, in which independent practitioners were able to get lower insurance rates through group plans, typically set up by their professional associations or chambers of commerce… But under the Affordable Care Act, they will be treated as individuals, responsible for their own insurance policies. For many of them, that is likely to...

At this point we have no idea how many people will become newly insured under ObamaCare. For the first year out, the number of people with insurance may actually go down! But the administration's goal is to insure an additional 30 million people and eventually a lot of those people will acquire health plans. When they do, the economic studies predict that they will try to double their use of the health care system. Adding to this increased demand will be new mandated benefits. The administration never seems to tire of reminding seniors that they are entitled to a...

U.S. geneticists say a second code hiding within DNA changes how scientists read its instructions and interpret mutations to make sense of health and disease. Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed it was used exclusively to write information about proteins, but University of Washington scientists say they've discovered genomes use the genetic code to write two separate "languages." One, long understood, describes how proteins are made, while the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden...

Just recently, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center was announced as one of an elite group of six cancer research and treatment centers throughout the world who will participate in an ongoing collaborative effort to fast-track the advancement of cancer treatment development as part of a new GlaxoSmithKline initiative. It is just one in a series of many examples of how MD Anderson is the preeminent cancer research and treatment center in the United States, if not the world. According to a new report in the Financial Times, new healthcare plans are being nudged by the statutes of...

President Obama and his allies have consistently argued that his health care law was prudent, because without it, uninsured individuals would continue to show up at hospitals and receive care without paying, thus driving up costs on everybody else. But now, the Wall Street Journal has reported, hospitals are concerned that the law could exacerbate this problem, known as uncompensated care. The reason stems from the high deductibles in health care plans offered on Obamacare's new government-run exchanges. A deductible is the amount that individuals must pay for care before the benefits of a health insurance policy kick in. As...

By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging. Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers. All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s. We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise...

Just as cars can’t go anywhere without drivers and employees can’t work without bosses, health care doesn’t happen when there are no doctors around. And when an estimated 70 percent of the doctors in the nation’s deepest-blue state are rebelling against Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act is forcing a critical decision: America will have to junk Obamacare and go back to square one on health insurance reform, or trash the last vestige of private health care in this country by forcing doctors to do the government’s bidding. The rebellion among California physicians was detailed earlier this week by Washington Examiner...

If you like your medicines, you may not be able to keep them under Obamacare. The President famously promised that you could keep your health plan and doctor. For many people, both of those pledges are turning out not to be true. And now, you might not be able to keep your drugs, either. There are two reasons why. The first issue has to do with the higher out of pocket costs patients will face. The second issue may be far more severe. Simply put, many drugs may not be covered at all, and the costs patients incur by buying...

Americans who are buying insurance plans over online exchanges, under what is known as Obamacare, will have limited access to some of the nation’s leading hospitals, including two world-renowned cancer centres. Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new healthcare exchanges in New York, Texas, and California, for example, will not offer patients’ access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centres, or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, one of the top research and teaching hospitals in the country. Experts say the...