Free Republic

The horrific treatment of Dr. Paul Church has become a nightmare – affecting him, of course, but ultimately all of us as well. Because he told the medical truth and refused to bow to political correctness on this critical public health issue, he has now been banned from four prominent Boston area hospitals and a urology clinic. This is the frightening state of today’s medical profession. Dr. Church is a urologist who was on the staff of several major Boston area hospitals and clinics for nearly 30 years. He was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. He has done...

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State's College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient's own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells. Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. "By using our novel nanochip technology, injured or compromised organs can be replaced. We have shown that skin is a fertile land where we can grow the elements...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The betting was that law-and-order Attorney General Jeff Sessions would come out against the legalized marijuana industry with guns blazing. But the task force Sessions assembled to find the best legal strategy is giving him no ammunition, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, a group of prosecutors and federal law enforcement officials, has come up with no new policy recommendations to advance the attorney general’s aggressively anti-marijuana views. The group’s report largely reiterates the current Justice Department policy on marijuana.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Jesus Aponte pushes a door open to reveal hundreds of aromatic, spiky green plants, a crop that Puerto Rico hopes will help it ease a grinding economic crisis by generating millions in revenue and tens of thousands of jobs. Aponte, a 29-year-old biologist and chemical engineer, had been thinking of joining the wave of young Puerto Rican professionals heading to the U.S. to seek work — an exodus that has aggravated the U.S. territory’s woes. But then he saw the saw the island’s medical marijuana industry start to expand, and found one of the...

New finding by UCLA expert is sure to stoke the debate over how to decide if someone’s really “dead” or notThree years after being declared brain dead following an ill-fated throat surgery at Children’s Hospital in Oakland and subsequently kept on life support, Jahi McMath continues to occupy a central role in the legal and philosophical debate over when a family should remove a loved one from life support. In the latest twist to the drama, a well-known neurologist has reviewed videos of McMath and says they prove she’s still alive after all, even if her brain is not functioning...

Two-year-old Eden Carlson lost a significant amount of brain tissue after spending 15 minutes underwater. Director of Hyperbaric Medicine, Dr. Paul Harch, says she made remarkable improvements after being treated with oxygen for 45 minutes twice a day. Weeks later, Eden’s parents brought her to New Orleans, and Harch put her in a hyperbaric chamber. “I dosed it at the same level of oxygen but now with pressure, and she made another very noticeable improvement with just the first hyperbaric treatment and from there just accelerated,” Harch said. In February of 2016, Eden escaped the baby gate in her home...

The box of prescription drugs had been forgotten in a back closet of a retail pharmacy for so long that some of the pills predated the 1969 moon landing. Most were 30 to 40 years past their expiration dates — possibly toxic, probably worthless. But to Lee Cantrell, who helps run the California Poison Control System, the cache was an opportunity to answer an enduring question about the actual shelf life of drugs: Could these drugs from the bell-bottom era still be potent? Cantrell called Roy Gerona, a University of California, San Francisco, researcher who specializes in analyzing chemicals. Gerona...

So Charlie Gard’s fate now comes down to this: whether an American doctor can persuade a British judge that little Charlie’s life is worth living. The child cannot see, cannot hear, and suffers from a genetic disorder for which there is no cure—yet he has exposed the great fault line between the post-Christian West and its past. For most of history, men and women have regarded suffering as part of life. But as medicine tames once-deadly afflictions and the idea of some larger meaning to the cosmos wanes, suffering comes to appear less a part of the natural order than...

A comparison of health systems in 11 wealthy nations has found the US falling short by multiple measures, while the UK’s National Health Service leads in several categories. “We measured performance quality across five domains, and the USA fell short in all five,” says Eric Schneider of the Commonwealth Fund think tank in Washington DC. The domains were ease of access to healthcare, how equal access is to people of different incomes, administrative efficiency, how well the care process works for people who use it, and how good the health outcomes are. The analysis included data from sources including the...

Lingering uncertainty about the fate of the Affordable Care Act has spurred the California legislature to consider adoption of a statewide single-payer health care system. Sometimes described as Medicare for all, single-payer is a system in which a public agency handles health care financing while the delivery of care remains largely in private hands.

Chemotherapy could allow cancer to spread, and trigger more aggressive tumours, a new study suggests. Researchers in the US studied the impact of drugs on patients with breast cancer and found medication increases the chance of cancer cells migrating to other parts of the body, where they are almost always lethal. Around 55,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Britain every year and 11,000 will die from their illness. Many are given chemotherapy before surgery, but the new research suggests that, although it shrinks tumours in the short term, it could trigger the spread of cancer cells around the...

After they suffered the loss of their 5 month old son who died one day after receiving eight vaccines, the broken hearted parents are taking up the cause of infant and childhood vaccine death and injuries to fight for America's most helpless and vulnerable victims. Unbelievably, the hospital cremated the infant and ruled Matthew's death was "UNDETERMINED." The couple's lawyer would not let the baby's mother Crystal view the autopsy report which "was one of the most difficult to look at" even though the lawyer had seen many autopsy reports. The parents had to wait well over two years to...

Ronald Reagan speaks out on Socialized Medicine, circa 1961. Audio file.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYrlDlrLDSQ&feature=youtu.be  

BOSTON -- On the day Boston Children's Hospital celebrated being named "the number one pediatric hospital in the nation" by U.S. News & World Report, I was interviewing Dana Gottesfeld in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts. Dana is the young wife of Martin "Marty G" Gottesfeld, an imprisoned technology engineer/activist who used his skills to fight against medical child abuse committed at Boston's Children's Hospital. "That is so Boston," Dana observed Tuesday in response to the new ranking -- which is already splashed in multiple gold medallions across the hospital's website. It's all about power, prestige and pull in the top echelons...

Innovations in the technology of 3D printing and scanning have been tremendous. The hype that was already being created in 3D printing is huge and the R&D is happening to fulfil the expectations in different parts of the world. Though the technology erupted in 1980’s, 3D printing for healthcare has been getting familiar in the last decade. Let us see how, across all areas, 3D printing of healthcare can have a bigger impact in coming years. Bio-printing Whenever the words “3D printing in healthcare” are uttered, most people will ask, “is it possible to 3D print an organ like heart...

One of the central campaign promises of Republicans since 2010, which has helped them sweep elections nationwide including the White House last year, has been their vow to repeal and replace Obamacare with a customer-centered, free market solution. Indeed, the promise was likely a significant reason some reluctant voters chose to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton last year. And once Trump won the White House, he continued to promise a repeal and replace of Obamacare would come in the immediate days of his presidency. However, the initial effort by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the White House...

People accuse me of imagining that everything President Trump does is brilliant (persuasion-wise) no matter what he does. But I expect the next version of the Republican healthcare bill to be a complete failure. That’s because Republicans seem deeply committed to a losing path, thanks to what might be called the Contrast Problem. Contrast is the driving principle behind all decisions. You have to know how your options differ, and by how much, or else you have no basis for a decision. President Obama solved for the contrast problem by designing Obamacare to cover more people than before. The rest...

However, he says, “what does worry me is the increase in the number of times euthanasia was performed on dementia patients, from 12 in 2009 to 141 in 2016, and on chronic psychiatric patients, from 0 to 60.” He recounts some of the horrific cases of patients of advanced dementia being euthanized without consent, such as one woman whose coffee was drugged, and who when she tried to struggle was held down by her family, and another where a husband mixed sleep medication in the porridge of his demented wife before the GP arrived with his deadly syringe. He describes...

“¡Queremos ayudarle!” I shout. I’m trying to reassure my restless patient in the medical intensive care unit that we want to help. Nurses tie his flailing arms and legs to the bed rails. He is only several hours from his last drink, meaning worse agitation is to come as his alcohol withdrawal progresses. The nurses strategize out loud, but the English that fills the room is incomprehensible to him. Within minutes, security guards arrive. The patient's eyes bulge when he sees their dark blue uniforms and the intercoms strapped to their shoulders. This, I realize, could easily seem like his...

BALTIMORE (TNS) — Hasini Jayatilaka was a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University working in a lab studying cancer cells when she noticed that when the cells become too densely packed, some would break off and start spreading. She wasn’t sure what to make of it, until she attended an academic conference and heard a speaker talking about bacterial cells behaving the same way. Yet when she went through the academic literature to see if anyone had written about similar behavior in cancer cells, she found nothing. Seven years later, the theory Jayatilaka developed early in college is now a...