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Today, October 5th, three Americans were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine. This continues the strong showing of US medical research, with US researchers counting for eighteen of the last thirty winners. US institutions where the research was conducted accounted for 19 of the 30 last prizes. If this was a sporting contest, commentators would be talking about an "American legacy of dominance" in the field. Instead of talking about the tremendous success the US has had, all we hear from our politicians and left wing talking heads is how the medical system is broken. The media talks about the...

Storming the Beaches of Norman Norman, Oklahoma, that is. Okay, so there aren’t any real beaches in Norman, Oklahoma. But when Steve Meyer and I went there recently, the Darwinists who have installed themselves as absolute dictators at the University of Oklahoma (OU) made our arrival feel like D-Day. On September 28, Steve gave a talk on his best-selling book Signature in the Cell at the Oklahoma Memorial Union on the OU campus. The following evening, September 29, Steve and I answered questions after a showing of the new film Darwin’s Dilemma at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History,...

Vienna (dpa) -- A substance contained in sperm fluid prolongs life and might be used in fighting Alzheimer disease, Austria's Graz University announced Monday. Researchers Tobias Eisenberg and Frank Madeo have found that the substance spermidine extends the lifespan of human immune cells, as well as of mice, flies, worms and yeast fungus. "We might have found the holy grail of age research," said Eisenberg, whose study involved 29 colleagues in six countries and was published in the British journal Nature Cell Biology on Sunday. In tests with mice treated with spermidine, cell damage linked to aging was reduced, and...

boom in affordable housing in the 1950s was helped by the invention of a distinctive multifunctional piece of equipment: the backhoe. Its strong yet relatively slender articulated arm allowed precise yet rapid placement for digging or lifting. The manipulative device is trim and fast, since hoses transfer power to it from a powerful hydraulic pump within the main chassis. The "arm" of the backhoe makes many people think the equipment design is similar to a human arm, but what makes it so versatile is that it is actually more like a giant human finger. If a valuable piece of equipment...

The devastation of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic is well known, but a new article suggests a surprising factor in the high death toll: the misuse of aspirin. Appearing in the November 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases and available online now, the article sounds a cautionary note as present day concerns about the novel H1N1 virus run high. High aspirin dosing levels used to treat patients during the 1918-1919 pandemic are now known to cause, in some cases, toxicity and a dangerous build up of fluid in the lungs, which may have contributed to the incidence and severity of symptoms,...

Sgt. John Young, an Aurora, Colo., native and a medic with Border Transition Team Tribal, hands out candy to Iraqi children, Sept. 6, in Maysan province. Photo by J.P. Lawrence, Multi-National Division - South. COB ADDER — Kids love anything free. So when Border Training Team Tribal delivered children's medicine and candy to the people of Maysan province, Sept. 6, kids were elated – at least for the candy. BTT Tribal's mission was to distribute children's medicine to the Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 41st Iraqi Army Brigade."What we're trying to do is build relationships with the village," said Sgt....

snip... A Genuine Solution The solution to America’s health care problems is not more government intervention. Government violations of individual rights through government interference in the marketplace are the source of the problems. Government meddling in health insurance has all but eliminated choice, competition, and innovation, and has driven up the cost of health insurance. Government interference in medicine has caused incalculable harm to both patients and doctors, and driven up the cost of health care. Government controls have bred more controls, as politicians and bureaucrats have tried to “solve” the problems created by one set of regulations by imposing...

An Open Letter to Karl Giberson --snip-- Unfortunately the claim that evolution is a fact, as much as is gravity or heliocentrism, has always been motivated by metaphysical assumptions. These assumptions trace back to the Enlightenment, and Darwin and Wallace built upon them. The conclusion ever since was that evolution had to be true, not because of the empirical science but because of the metaphysical mandate...

After World War II, the U.S. government invested an enormous amount of money in medicine; medical research, medical procedures and medical technologies. This investment made contemporary scientific medicine into American medicine, characterized by a continuing flow of new treatment possibilities. These advances raised all kinds of ethical questions. Some were personal and individual, others were social and political. Both type questions are addressed by a new academic discipline called bioethics. The first attempt to develop a scientific medicine took place in Greece in the 5th century B.C. It was called Hippocratic medicine. Closely linked with this first scientific medicine was...

We have grown increasingly sceptical about vaccination in recent decades, says Mark Honigsbaum. Politicians have long known that a life lost today is far more emotive than a life saved in some hard-to-glimpse future – hence the problems with justifying the war in Afghanistan. But health professionals have been rather slower to learn the same lesson. That is why, for every parent reconsidering the offer of the cervical cancer vaccine for their daughter this morning, following the unexpected death of Natalie Morton, a 14-year-old from Coventry, there will be a GP or school nurse urging young women to have the...

Study: Women With Diabetes May Be 26% More Likely Than Other Women to Develop Atrial Fibrillation Reviewed By Laura J. Martin, MDWomen with diabetes may be 26% more likely than other women to develop a heart rhythm problem called atrial fibrillation.Researchers report that news in the October edition of Diabetes Care.Data came from more than 34,000 adults who got their health care through Kaiser Permanente Northwest. The group included 17,000 diabetes patients.When the study started, atrial fibrillation was more common in diabetes patients than in people without diabetes, affecting 3.6% of the diabetes patients, compared to 2.5% of those without...

In a Commentary essay, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld provide an analysis of biological thought that differs profoundly from that presented by those celebrating the Bicentenary of Darwin's birth and, incidentally, the recently published AP Biology Standards. "This is the story of how biology of the 20th century neglected and otherwise mishandled the study of what is arguably the most important problem in all of science: the nature of the evolutionary process. This problem [ . . ] became the private domain of a quasi-scientific movement, who secreted it away in a morass of petty scholasticism, effectively disguising the fact...

In an article reviewed by F1000 Medicine Faculty Members Robert Ruff, Brian Olshansky and Luis Ruilope, the blood-thinner dabigatran is shown to protect against stroke, blood clotting and major bleeding as effectively as warfarin, but with fewer side effects. The original paper, Dabigatran versus warfarin in patients with atrial fibrillation, by Neal Devaraj and Stuart Connolly et al. in the New England Journal of Medicine, says warfarin (also commonly used in rat poison) has several drawbacks. Finding the correct dosage requires careful and laborious monitoring, and the risk of major bleeding has led to it being under-used. With fewer side-effects...

Knockout strategies have demonstrated that the function of many genes cannot be studied by disrupting them in model organisms because the inactivation of these genes does not lead to a phenotypic effect. For living systems, this peculiar phenomenon of genetic redundancy seems to be the rule rather than the exception. Genetic redundancy is now defined as the situation in which the disruption of a gene is selectively neutral. Biology shows us that 1) two or more genes in an organism can often substitute for each other, 2) some genes are just there in a silent state. Inactivation of such redundant...

Computers are becoming faster and more powerful all the time and those improvements have been mainly due to better hardware. Future improvements, however, may well rely increasingly on better architecture and software. One reason why this seems likely is that the human brain, with its very different architecture, dramatically out performs computers in performing various tasks (such as perceiving an object in a complex visual scene). If computers are to match the brain's performance, they likely will need to exploit features of the brain's design. In some regards the brain's hardware is far beyond that of a computer. Its "wires,"...

Blindness first began creeping up on Barbara Campbell when she was a teenager, and by her late 30s, her eye disease had stolen what was left of her sight. Reliant on a talking computer for reading and a cane for navigating New York City, where she lives and works, Ms. Campbell, now 56, would have been thrilled to see something. Anything. Now, as part of a striking experiment, she can. So far, she can detect burners on her stove when making a grilled cheese, her mirror frame, and whether her computer monitor is on. She is beginning an intensive three-year...

Toronto researchers have developed a portable device they say will accurately diagnose prostate cancer in 30 minutes. The microchip technology, created by a pair of University of Toronto scientists, will be able to determine the severity of the tumours through a simple urine sample and produce quick diagnosis with no need for painful biopsies.

Hey, physicians-in-training: Blabbing about patient care on Facebook and Twitter are Doctor No-Nos. A new survey of medical-school deans reveals that med students' unprofessional conduct on social networking sites and blogs is common, according to Time magazine. Many of the future doctors use YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook to discuss sexual misconduct, post discriminatory statements and talk about patient cases, according to the survey, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It's ongoing even though the students understand patient-confidentiality laws and have been instructed in the ethical standards of their chosen profession, according to the article...

This article talks about intelligence. There are a great number of smart people in the world, and in general the intelligence quotient (IQ) of someone may determine how well he or she may perform in certain situations. In general, there is almost certainly a correlation between a high IQ score and being more intelligent according to IncreaseBrainPower.com. However, if you have even average intelligence, you can find examples of cultural biases on many IQ tests. Furthermore, there are specific test-taking skills that have been proven to raise scores on many tests, including IQ tests. This last point makes perfect sense,...

The oral contraceptives Yaz and Yasmin are the top-selling pharmaceutical line for Bayer HealthCare, largely as a result of marketing that presents them as much more than mere pregnancy prevention. Yaz, in particular, the top-selling birth control pill in the United States, owes much of its popularity to multimillion-dollar ad campaigns that have promoted the drug as a quality-of-life treatment to combat acne and severe premenstrual depression. Yaz, a newer sister drug to Yasmin, contains less estrogen. The franchise had worldwide sales of about $1.8 billion last year, based on Bayer’s successful positioning of Yasmin and Yaz as the go-to...

A landmark book about intelligent design has hit the bookstore shelves. I’ll tell you about it. In recent years, there have been several important books about intelligent design that go to the debate about evolution and the origins of life. Bill Dembski’s The Design Inference was first. Then along came Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe, showing the irreducible complexity of the cell, which casts grave doubts on Darwinian evolution as an explanation for life and higher life forms. Now we’ve got Signature in the Cell by the Discovery Institute’s Dr. Stephen Meyer. I’m going to warn you up front:...

BANGKOK — For the first time, an experimental vaccine has prevented infection with the AIDS virus, a watershed event in the deadly epidemic and a surprising result. Recent failures led many scientists to think such a vaccine might never be possible. The vaccine cut the risk of becoming infected with HIV by more than 31 percent in the world's largest AIDS vaccine trial of more than 16,000 volunteers in Thailand, researchers announced Thursday in Bangkok. Even though the benefit is modest, "it's the first evidence that we could have a safe and effective preventive vaccine," Col. Jerome Kim said in...

On occasion I have alert bells ring--when in doubt don't, kind of bells--that I pay close attention too. The new H1N1 vaccine seems to be coming at a record pace from development to availability. I am concerned that we have moved to fast with too little testing to be administering this vaccine to a wide population. Any thought? Anyone else concerned?

Johnson & Johnson’s McNeil unit is voluntarily recalling 57 lots of infants’ and children’s liquid Tylenol products because of possible bacterial contamination. The products being recalled were made between April and June and include nearly two dozen varieties, including Children’s Tylenol Suspension 4 oz. Grape, Infants’ Tylenol Grape Suspension Drops 1/4 oz. and Children’s Tylenol Plus Cold/Allergy 4 oz. Bubble Gum.

A physician grassroots movement to re-establish honor, dignity and worth to the medical profession. That its sole mission is to protect the relationship between the doctor and the patient... The MillionMedMarch will follow in October to remind our elected officials that we intend to keep coming back to Washington and keep marching until the doctors and the patients are the focus of the healthcare reform. We will be joined by the Docs4PatientCare group as well as others that will be coming from all across the US. Please join us on October 1 in DC and don't forget to sign the...

Food poisoning is a common, usually mild, but sometimes deadly illness according to eMedicineHealth. Typical symptoms include nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramping, and diarrhea that occur suddenly (within 48 hours) after consuming a contaminated food or drink. Depending on the contaminant, fever and chills, bloody stools, dehydration, and nervous system damage may follow. These symptoms may affect one person or a group of people who ate the same thing (called an outbreak). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that in the United States, food poisoning causes about 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and up to 5,000 deaths each...

Sept 23, 2009 — Imagine never having to wash your windows again. That would be a huge boon not only for window washers on skyscrapers, but for astronauts on the space shuttle or space station. It may become a reality, thanks to the lotus plant...

Physicians Are Talking About: The Million Med March on Washington "I'm tired, mad as hell, and just not going to take it anymore," says Richard Chudacoff, MD, a gynecologist from Las Vegas. "I am going to Washington, DC. At noon, on Thursday, October 1, 2009, I will be on the Mall with a few other physicians." Dr. Chudacoff is not talking about vacation plans. Rather, he intends to unite with other physicians in what he calls the Million Med March. "We simply decided that we will not work that day and perhaps the day before and maybe even the day...

H.R. 3200 would enact a series of synergistic causal sequences. This would start with an instantaneous increase in demand as new consumers enter the system or existing consumers demand more medical goods and services. Clinics, practices, and hospitals currently rely on higher private insurance payouts to make up for the low reimbursement rates from Medicare. Under the new system, they would not receive it, either from the government plan or the private insurers. The government will not pay it. Insurance companies, required to cover pre-existing conditions, maintain coverage unconditionally, and cap premiums, will have no choice but to cut payments...

A group of anesthesiologists sing a cute parody.

Seniors who for years have made flu shots a fall ritual are being sent to the end of the line for the swine flu vaccine. --snip--Federal guidelines call for the new H1N1 vaccine to be given first to pregnant women, those who live with or care for children 6 months or younger, health care workers, people aged 6 months through 24, and people with chronic health problems or compromised immune systems. Those groups total about 159 million people. Only after shots are offered to those groups will the vaccine be available to healthy adults 64 and younger. After that, if...

(AP) Health officials say the first doses of swine flu vaccine will be the nasal spray version. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that about 3.4 million doses of nasal spray vaccine will be available the first week of October. The government expects 195 million doses will be shipped out by the end of the year, most of them shots. The nasal spray is approved for ages 2 to 49. It's not recommended for some of the people at most risk from severe swine flu complications. That includes pregnant women, children younger than 2, and people with...

Two popular treatments lower blood sugar but may not prevent heart disease Tightly controlling blood sugar in people with diabetes doesn’t relieve inflammation that can lead to heart disease, a new study shows. A study of 500 people newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes shows that a drug called metformin and a once-daily injection of insulin are both effective in controlling blood sugar levels. But the drugs, either alone or in combination, don’t lower levels of three markers of inflammation any more than a placebo does, Aruna Pradhan, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues report...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The first roll-out of vaccines against the new swine flu virus will be 3.4 million doses of MedImmune's needle-free nose spray, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday. The CDC's Dr Jay Butler said the vaccines would be distributed the first week of October. "Initially we anticipate that 3.4 million doses of vaccine will be available," Butler told a telephone briefing. "We estimate that the amount of vaccine that will be available will increase through October." He said eventually delivery would rise to about 20 million doses a week. The United States has...

This is an article about congestive heart failure (CHF). Heart failure, also known as congestive heart failure (CHF), means your heart can't pump enough blood to meet your body's needs, according to the Mayo Clinic. Over time, conditions such as coronary artery disease or high blood pressure gradually leave your heart too weak or stiff to fill and pump efficiently. You can't reverse many conditions that lead to heart failure, but heart failure can often be treated with good results. Medications can improve the signs and symptoms of heart failure and lead to improved survival. Lifestyle changes, such as exercising,...

ST. LOUIS — A southern Illinois woman died after being severely burned in a flash fire while undergoing surgery, a rare but vexing dilemma in operating rooms. Janice McCall, 65, of Energy, Ill., died Sept. 8 at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., six days after being burned on the operating table at Heartland Regional Medical Center in Marion, Ill., her family's attorney said. Attorney Robert Howerton said he had requested medical records from the Marion hospital and that he had few details about what happened. He declined to say why McCall was having surgery. The Tennessee state medical...

The hopes of a small group of protesters from Fort Erie and Port Colborne fighting to keep their local emergency room open were dashed Wednesday when Premier Dalton McGuinty refused to consider reversing the decision. The protesters, mainly seniors and all wearing yellow t-shirts, looked on in vain from the legislature's public gallery as the New Democrats tried to get McGuinty to agree to halt the planned closing of the emergency department at Douglas Memorial Hospital in Fort Erie. "We have heard from the Local Health Integration Network and their recommendation is that they put in place a 24/7 urgent...

"They're going to put it where?"

Like virtually every issue that faces the nation, our healthcare problem is greatly exacerbated by mass immigration—both legal and illegal.  A total of 43% of non-citizens lack health insurance, compared to just 12.7% of native-born Americans.  These uninsured immigrants impose huge strains on our healthcare system that helped create the crisis we currently face. Plenty of analysts and commentators have exposed how illegal aliens will receive healthcare under Obamacare.  They point out that while the bill claims to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving benefits, the Democrats repeatedly blocked Amendments that would screen for legal status.  Steve Camorata of the non-partisan...

Manuka honey may kill bacteria by destroying key bacterial proteins. Dr Rowena Jenkins and colleagues from the University of Wales Institute - Cardiff investigated the mechanisms of manuka honey action and found that its anti-bacterial properties were not due solely to the sugars present in the honey. The work was presented this week (7-10 September), at the Society for General Microbiology's meeting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was grown in the laboratory and treated with and without manuka honey for four hours. The experiment was repeated with sugar syrup to determine if the effects seen were...

...44 percent of HIV patients being treated by the National Health Service were not residents of the United Kingdom but were from southern Africa. In essence, a huge number of AIDS patients in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Swaziland and Lesotho have decided to outsource their health care needs to British taxpayers. Similar trends will manifest themselves here in nothing flat... ...governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture -- one in which elections are always fought on the left's issues and on the left's terms and in which "conservative" parties no longer talk...

To mark the 200th anniversary year of the birth of Abraham Lincoln Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) wants to analyse the mercury-based medicine thought by some to have been responsible for the President's notorious bouts of rage in the decade before the American civil war.But the society first needs to track down some of the legendary Victorian "Blue Mass" concoction and to that end is offering a reward of £200 for information that results in some of it being pinpointed by the end of November.Blue Mass, sometimes known as "Blue Pills", was used widely, often ineffectively, for a range...

President Obama has promised to pay for health care reform mostly by ridding the system of wasteful spending. The message is that reform will be painless: We're cutting the fat, not the meat. But what if your paycheck is part of the fat? More to the point: Does cutting back on wasteful health care spending mean that doctors will make less money? Actually, let's split that question in two. The first is whether U.S. doctors are overpaid. The second is whether paying them less would save all that much. The answers, respectively: yes and no. There's no question that doctors...

On September 10, 2009, doctors, nurses and other medical professionals came to Washington, D.C. from across the country to show their opposition to Obamacare. This rally exploded the government-created myth that there is unanimity amongst health care professionals for Democrat plans to take over health care. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons came to D.C. to present a petition from doctors to lawmakers. The AAPS has been a voice for private physicians since 1943. Their motto is omnia pro aegroto, “all for the patient”. The doctors met with the representatives from their respective states and argued for a platform...

Knowing that I had spent the summer in England, a fellow law professor recently asked me whether "the Republicans" had hired me to advertise against the president's health-care plan. My response was, "No, but they could have." I would have done it for free.Watching the health-care debate from the other side of the Atlantic this summer was very interesting. First of all, British doctors do not like having their system held up as an example of what not to do. There were several panel discussions on television and the radio in which doctors defended the British medical plan; the...

Carbon nanotubes are increasingly being used in everyday products such as sporting equipment, biomedical devices and aeroplanes. But questions remain as to how safe these nanotubes really are. A main factor in nanotube toxicity are the metal contaminants that remain from manufacture, which are typically one to ten per cent by weight, say Martin Pumera and Yuji Miyahara at the National Institute for Materials Science, Ibaraki, Japan. 'Carbon nanotubes are often viewed as homogenous materials, which is of course incorrect - they often contain impurities which are not even listed by the manufacturers,'  says Pumera.  The pair have used an electrochemical...

My sister just reported back to me from the doctors' rally in DC this evening. She went with her husband and 3 teenaged daughters. Here is what she reported: It was a great, well-behaved crowd of about 1000 -- mostly doctors and some nurses. They came from across the country and all sorts of practices. She said the speakers were just folks ... that they did not appear to be professional speakers. They were just doctors, speaking from the heart. They told of personal experiences of government interference in individual care and practices and the consequences. There were a couple...

Juice extracted from North American lowbush blueberries, biotransformed with bacteria from the skin of the fruit, holds great promise as an anti-obesity and anti-diabetic agent. The study, published in the International Journal of Obesity, was conducted by researchers from the Université de Montréal, the Institut Armand-Frappier and the Université de Moncton who tested the effects of biotransformed juices compared to regular blueberry drinks on mice. "Results of this study clearly show that biotransformed blueberry juice has strong anti-obesity and anti-diabetic potential," says senior author Pierre S. Haddad, a pharmacology professor at the Université de Montréal's Faculty of Medicine. "Biotransformed blueberry...

Increasing productivity in healthcare is difficult but not impossible. Here's how. The president tells us that we should be “bending the cost curve� on healthcare, and politicans everywhere are scrambling to present their favored pork projects as plans that would do just that. Lobbyists of every stripe and color are storming legislative offices with great wads of dead presidents and the commentariat debates angels dancing upon pinheads: that is, what could be done if we had a legislative system without legislators, pork, lobbyists, or dead presidents printed on pieces of paper.What I have yet to see (and apologies to those...

How 'bored' swine flu hotline workers are wasting UK taxpayers' money on booze, games Irish Sun Friday 4th September, 2009 London, Sept 4 : Hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money has been 'squandered' - thanks to the bored workers of dried-up swine flu hotlines in the UK who spend most of their time sleeping, playing cards, boozing and smoking dope. The National Pandemic Flu Service, which started one and a half months ago, had 19 call centres under its aegis to diagnose cases and give advice on the pandemic. However with the stabilization of services and a dip...