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We have a friend, Kayse, here in Michigan who has a beautiful little 2 year old girl named Lila. Kayse sent us an update the other day (Saturday September 27th) because Lila has been sick for the last couple of weeks. Most people have read about the viruses making their way around the country and get a little nervous about their children getting one of these viruses that have put so many children in the hospital. Well, we pay close attention to these updates that we receive because Lila has Trisomy 18 (Edwards Syndrome) which is the same chromosome abnormality...

ob Schneider has learned the hard way that there's no way to inoculate yourself against an Internet backlash. State Farm Insurance has dropped an ad campaign featuring the "Deuce Bigalow" star in a reprisal of his "Richmeister" character -- a.k.a. the "making copies" guy -- from "Saturday Night Live." The decision stems not from an objection to rehashed humor from the mid-'90s, but to Schneider's outspoken stance against childhood vaccines. Along with former "View" co-host Jenny McCarthy, Schneider, who has lately been busy trying to revive his career with a spec sitcom, has been one of the most vocal celebrity...

Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Rene Garcia presented the University of Miami with a check for $1 million for HIV/AIDS research Monday morning. Scott stopped by the university’s Miller School of Medicine to highlight funding in the “It’s Your Money Tax Cut Budget” for HIV/AIDS research.

Health professionals who treat burn victims are acutely aware of the necessity to treat burn injuries, particularly severe ones, as rapidly as possible. As one journal article explains it, “In severe burn injuries where both the epidermal and dermal layers of skin are destroyed, prompt wound closure is critical for favourable [sic] patient outcomes and reduced mortality rates.” A team of biomedical and mechanical engineering graduate students at the University of Toronto have developed what may at the least be considered a preliminary–but certainly extremely technologically advanced–solution to the problem of critical, temporal health intervention for burn patients. For their...

So it begins: Panel Urges Overhauling Health Care at End of Life Taking care to make sure that Republicans are implicated, the NY Times hails death of the elderly. “The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly.” The operative word here is "costly."I have no problem with any old person expressing the wish to be left to die in peace. I have a big problem with Death Panels deciding that death is cheaper than life and making that the national...

The Italian government has plans to produce medical marijuana in a military factory in Florence, national media reported on Friday. Roberta Pinotti, defence minister, and Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin have given their backing to the plans to see the army produce drugs using cannabis, La Stampa said. If approved the medical marijuana will be cultivated at a chemical plant run by the army, originally used to produce medicines for the military. The plans could see cannabis drugs available in Italian pharmacies as early as next year, the newspaper said. But although the defence and health ministries have been drawing up...

Mark Smith was a microbiology graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when, in 2011, a family friend became infected with the notorious superbug clostridium difficile. C. diff can cause severe diarrhea, disability, and malnutrition and is responsible for roughly 14,000 deaths in the United States each year. In 2012, after taking seven rounds of the antibiotic vancomycin and failing to improve, Smith’s friend received a DIY fecal transplant from his roommate—in their apartment, using an over-the-counter enema kit. The friend recovered within days, but “the whole thing was absurd, not at all how it should be done,” Smith...

President Obama urged West Africans in areas affected by the Ebola virus not to touch the corpses of loved ones who had succumbed to the deadly disease in a public service announcement released by the State Department on Tuesday. "When burying someone who has died from this terrible disease, it's important to not directly touch their body," Obama says. "You can respect your traditions and honor your loved ones without risking the lives of the living." [Snip] "If you feel sick with a high fever, you should get help right away," Obama said.

All too often these days, I find myself fidgeting by the doorway to my exam room, trying to conclude an office visit with one of my patients. When I look at my career at midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I'd be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic. Many of my colleagues are similarly struggling with the loss of their professional ideals. It could be just a midlife crisis, but it occurs to me that my profession is in a sort of midlife crisis of its own....

Brain-wave sensing machines have been used to ‘telepathically’ control everything from real-life helicopters to characters in a computer game. Now the technology has gone a step further by allowing someone in India to send an email to his colleague in France using nothing but the power of his mind. The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) headsets to record electrical activity from neurons firing in the brain, and convert the words ‘hola’ and ‘ciao’ into binary. In EEG, electrical currents in the brain are linked with different thoughts that are then fed into a computer interface. This computer analyses the signal and...

Britons are to be the first in the world to test a new vaccine against the deadly ebola virus. Altogether 60 healthy volunteers will be given the vaccine next month in a trial led by Oxford University scientists. If the vaccine performs as well in humans as in monkeys, the trial will be extended to 80 people in The Gambia and in Mali. The entire trial programme is being fast-tracked – subject to ethical approval – with the intention of using the vaccine in people at high risk in West Africa early next year. Latest figures show that more than...

Bad memories could be reversed after scientists discovered the part of the brain which links emotions to past events Bad memories of past trauma can leave people emotionally scarred for life. But now neuroscientists believe they can erase feelings of fear or anxiety attached to stressful events, in a breakthrough which could help treat depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Researchers at MIT, US, have discovered which brain circuits attach emotions to memories, and crucially, how to reverse the link. They managed to ‘switch off’ feelings of fear in mice which had been conditioned to feel anxious. It is likely the...

People who tend to blame others for their suffering and think setbacks in their lives are irreparable tend to report more pain after knee replacement surgery, according to a new study. This is not the first time feelings of personal injustice have been tied to longer recovery times and increased disability after injury, the authors write. “Pain is a complex phenomenon that is influenced by biological, social, and psychological factors,” said lead author Esther Yakobov, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at McGill University in Montreal. “Studies conducted with patients who suffer from chronic pain because of an injury demonstrated...

Work by scientists at the Universities of Manchester and Auckland suggest that both major forms of diabetes, type 1 and type 2, are the result of the same mechanism. The findings, published in the FASEB Journal, provide compelling evidence that juvenile-onset or type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes are both caused by the formation of toxic clumps of a hormone called amylin. The results, based on 20 years’ work in New Zealand, suggest that type 1 and type 2 diabetes could both be slowed down and potentially reversed by medicines that stop amylin forming these toxic clumps.

“Potentially unethical.” That’s how one expert described an Italian scientist’s plan to perform a “head transplant” by severing two heads at the same time, then cooling and flushing out the ‘recipient’ head before attaching it to its new body with polymer glue.That is “POTENTIALLY unethical?” Making one person out of two, and throwing away the unused halves, is only “potentially” unethical?Shock and awe.* * * * *Neuroscientist Sergio Canavero is undeterred by criticism, however. Canavero now reports that it’s possible to merge bone marrow, surgically cut with an ultra-sharp knife, when fusing one person’s head onto another person’s spine. The...

Dr. Leslie Lobel is an Israeli virologist conducting cutting edge research on a cure for Ebola -- a cure he believes is three to five years away. As reported in the Times of Israel: Unlike many people, Dr. Leslie Lobel has not been shocked to hear about the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the largest ever recorded since the virus’s discovery in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). A Ben-Gurion University of the Negev virologist and a leader in the search for a cure for the devastating disease, Lobel had been predicting such an outbreak. (snip)...

Screening older patients for cancer provided minimal benefit at considerable cost and increased use of invasive procedures, reported investigators in two separate studies. "It is particularly important to question screening strategies for older persons," Gross continued. "Patients with a shorter life expectancy have less time to develop clinically significant cancers after a screening test and are more likely to die from noncancer health problems after a cancer diagnosis."

Part 1: “IT’S A NIGHTMARE” After the Avandia debacle, is history about to repeat itself? Amy Lynn Evans remembers the onset of the illness that left her with seven hundred thousand dollars in medical bills. The morning began like any other. “My son was getting ready for work, and he said to me ‘Mom, you don’t look too well.’ When I went to the emergency room, they found a blood clot on my lung.

When scientists injected spores of a weakened form of the bacterium Clostridium novyi directly into the soft-tissue tumors of dogs and that of a single human subject, the results were not only abscesses, fever and pain at the site--all inflammatory responses that showed the immune system had been drawn to the area. In a matter of hours, the bacterial spores quickly found their way into these tumors' necrotic cores and began replicating madly, in several cases killing the malignant tissue. In three of 16 dogs treated with the C. novyi, tumors disappeared altogether and the animals were cured. In three...

“Diabetes is reaching epidemic proportions, not only in the U.S. but worldwide,” says Dr. Allison Goldfine, a diabetes specialist at the Joslin Diabetes Center. She is helping foreign graduate students Tobias Horstmann and Juliet Phillips with their research project. They’re trying to use bees to sniff out diabetes. In collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, they are using a device to house the bees and observe the bees’ reaction. If a patient breathes into the device and acetone is detected, the bees stick out their tongues in response.