Free Republic

Every person, regardless of race, creed, or country, is born into the world with certain natural rights, including the right to live, the Second Continental Congress declared 240 years go this July 4. From the right to life, surely one can infer a right to try to extend oneÂ’s own life and improve its quality. For this reason, all 13 states that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776, and simultaneously declared unalienable each personÂ’s rights to life and liberty, either have passed or are considering passing legislation expanding the freedom of terminally ill patients to try to survive. Five...

After dozens of tests and scans, you’re sitting across from your doctor, and he sighs. Brain cancer, he tells you, and your heart drops. Depending on the type of tumor, your chances of survival could be quite reasonable or nearly hopeless. But the percentage he gives you — even if it’s as depressing as 20, 15, or 10 percent — represents a fighting chance. There are surgeries to remove tumors, and if yours is inoperable, there’s still chemotherapy. You could take corticosteroids. Unless a cancer is in its final stages, doctors have multiple strategies they may employ, and that means...

Venezuela is running out of just about everything. Food, medicine, electricity, toilet paper, condoms -- you name it. ( Full title ). And over the weekend at least two large international airlines -- Lufthansa and LATAM -- said they will suspend service to Venezuela in the coming months due to the economic crisis. The widespread scarcities and fleeing businesses reflect a country in crisis. "There's a shortage of everything at some level," says Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Venezuela's Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent. Venezuela's economy is spiraling into...

It’d be easy to miss the unobtrusive brown door to Joon Yun’s second floor office, tucked away next to a dry cleaners and a hair salon in downtown Palo Alto, California. But the address itself speaks loud enough. Four-hundred-seventy University Avenue is located in the heart of a neighborhood that holds a special place in the lore of Silicon Valley start-up culture. A few minutes’ walk away are the early homes of PayPal, Facebook, and Google. Yet the early ambitions of these famous companies are modest when compared to the ideas I’ve come to discuss with Yun. I’ve been led...

"Which leads to a simple question: But for the Games, would anyone recommend sending an extra half a million visitors into Brazil right now? Of course not: mass migration into the heart of an outbreak is a public health no-brainer. And given the choice between accelerating a dangerous new disease or not—for it is impossible that Games will slow Zika down—the answer should be a no-brainer for the Olympic organizers too. Putting sentimentality aside, clearly the Rio 2016 Games must not proceed."

Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the U.S. Their figure, published May 3 in The BMJ, surpasses the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) third leading cause of death -- respiratory disease, which kills close to 150,000 people per year. The Johns Hopkins team says the CDC's way of collecting national health statistics fails to classify medical errors separately on the death certificate. The researchers are advocating for updated criteria for classifying deaths on death...

Oh yes it is. "My parents were just vacationing in Europe (they go often so they're aware of how stuff works). My mom is diabetic and had a shortage of insulin while in France, they went to the drugstore and she showed the bottle of Humalog which is what she uses in the United States and the price in the United States is around $240 a bottle which is charged to her Medicare and insurance and can only be prescribed by her doctor." "The pharmacist recognized the bottle and without having to go to a doctor sold her a bottle...

A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs. A biotech company in the US has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life. Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out...

Nora Hall with the family's pet dogs.A family’s loyal basset hounds have refused to leave the side of a dying baby girl who suffered a major stroke. Nora Hall’s mother Mary Hall wrote on Facebook: “My daughter had a stroke on April 6. We have been at Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis since then. She is not going to survive. “They allowed us to have our bassets here in the last couple of days because they are so attached to her.” “Our hearts are so completely broken. We have been praying so hard for a miracle. We tried so very...

Total US spending on prescription drugs in 2015, at the manufacturers’ level and as measured by “invoice pricing,” jumped by 12.2% to $424.8 billion, after having already soared 14.2% in 2014! A two-year increase of 28%! So you’d think we’d get some results for all this moolah. But no. This $424.8 billion in prescription drug spending at “invoice pricing” isn’t based on what Americans or their health insurers pay. According to IMS Health, which released the report, it reflects invoice pricing by drug companies to distributors. It includes neither price concessions by drug companies nor the “mark-ups and additional costs”...

Govt closes down city North Korean clinics Apr 17, 2016 Dr. Hamis Kigwangalla, the deputy minister of Health, Social Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, announced during an impromptu visit to the clinics on Friday, one located at Mahiwa Street and the Oriental Traditional Medicine at Magomeni Mikumi both operated by Maibong Company, a North Korean firm.The deputy minister said the two clinics were operating without legal documents including lacking a business license. While being interrogated by the minister, a healer at the clinic whose name could not easily be availed told the minister that their business is jointly operated with...

It might be time to rethink fertility treatment. Here’s the scoop: scientists at Northwestern University 3D printed a functional ovary out of Jello-like material and living cells. When implanted into mice that had their ovaries removed, the moms regained their monthly cycle and gave birth to healthy pups. The scientists presented their results last week at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Boston. Although the study was done in mice, “we developed this implant with downstream human applications in mind,” says lead author Dr. Monica Laronda in a press release. If successful in humans, the prosthetic would be able to...

I confidently predict that people will still be having sex in 20 to 40 years’ time, but they will be using sex to conceive their babies much less often. Two biomedical advances are going to change how humans reproduce: whole genome sequencing and stem cell technology.

New Jersey hospital emergency room becomes first in U.S. to end use of opioid painkillers PATERSON, N.J. -- St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center announced it has become the first hospital in the country to implement a program that will manage patients' pain in the emergency room without the use of opioid painkillers. Painkillers most frequently used in the emergency room in the past were oxycodone, vicodin and percocet, according to Dr. Mark Rosenberg, the Emergency Department chair. “Our job here together is to look at the whole equation and understand how we can stop people from going from a prescription,...

In a new clinical trial to observe a new method of injecting islet cells into a patient with Type 1 diabetes, doctors from the University of Miami’s Diabetes Research Institute have confirmed that their first trial patient no longer needs insulin therapy. Wendy Peacock, their first patient, has been giving herself insulin injections and following a strict daily schedule to take care of her diabetes since she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 17. Now 43, Peacock has undergone the surgery in this new trial and no longer needs injections because her body is producing insulin naturally. Since the...

Thousands of tigers are dying in wretched conditions on farms masquerading as wildlife parks to feed a booming multi-million dollar business in China for wine made with their bones, a MailOnline investigation reveals. Newly-wealthy Chinese customers who cling to the traditional belief that tiger bone wine makes you stronger and peps up your sex life are paying up to £400 a bottle and driving a phenomenal growth in tiger farming.

If this human breakthrough had occurred with embryonic stem cells, the front page stories would have screamed around the world. But it was adult stem cells and so the reporting was muted. You see, the media still–after all these years–tend to judge the newsworthiness of a story based on whether a breakthrough is embryonic. The story is sensational, nonetheless. Adult stem cells have cured blindness and may provide a splendid treatment for cataracts. From the Telegraph story: Cataracts can be cured by using a patient’s own stem cells to regrow a ‘living lens’ in their eye, restoring sight in just...

More than 1,500 Syrian physicians are working in Germany. Could this be the death knell for Syria’s medical system?Abu Mohammed, a bespectacled doctor, sits at a desk in a nondescript, rectangular room littered with hand-scribbled notes on sheets of lined paper. The 30-year-old is clad in a button-down shirt, jeans, and sneakers. A white coat is nowhere to be seen. Across from him is an ailing patient. The doctor begins his evaluation with the basics: How is the patient feeling, and can he describe his pain? “I have fever and a headache,” complains the young man. “For how long have...

Two Canadian anti-vaxx parents have been accused of letting their 19-month-old son die of meningitis, a treatable disease for which they refused medical care and antibiotics. Instead, they tried and failed to heal their son with home remedies in March 2012. David and Collet Stephan tried to cure a disease that infects the fluid around the spinal cord and brain with such treatments as olive leaf extract, whey protein, water with maple syrup, and juice with frozen berries. After young Ezekiel continued to suffer for two weeks, the Stephans changed treatments to apple cider vinegar, horseradish root, hot peppers, onion,...

A scientist whose major breakthroughs have emerged from studying the brains of Irish families says we are only five to 10 years away from a cure for Alzheimer's disease. In a recent interview with the Irish Times, Professor Tim Lynch, currently with the Dublin Neurological Institute at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, recounted the discovery he made while working in New York almost 20 years ago, which changed the course of his research. In 1994, Lynch was part of a team studying frontotemporal dementia in an Irish American family at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York. The team discovered that...