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Life-end Clinic will send teams to the homes of patients' whose doctors refuse to carry out the procedure A mobile euthanasia clinic will begin operating in the Netherlands on Thursday, to assist patients' whose own doctor refuse to carry out the procedure. According to the AFP news agency, the the Levenseindekliniek (Life-end clinic) has prepared several teams made up of a specially-trained doctor and nurse to attend to patients in their homes. "People who think they comply with the criteria for euthanasia can register," the Right To Die Netherlands (NVVE) spokeswoman Walburg de Jong is quoted as saying. "If they...

Federal health officials on Tuesday added new safety alerts to the prescribing information for statins, the cholesterol-reducing medications that are among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, citing rare risks of memory loss, diabetes and muscle pain. It is the first time that the Food and Drug Administration has officially linked statin use with cognitive problems like forgetfulness and confusion, although some patients have reported such problems for years. Among the drugs affected are huge sellers like Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor and Vytorin. But federal officials and some medical experts said the new alerts should not scare people away...

The common practice of inserting a stent to repair a narrowed artery has no benefit over standard medical care in treating stable coronary artery disease, according to a new review of randomized controlled trials published on Monday. Stable coronary artery disease is the type of heart ailment that causes angina, or chest pain, after physical exercise or emotional stress but generally not at other times. The review did not include studies of the emergency use of stents for heart attacks. Stent implantation involves a procedure called percutaneous coronary intervention, or P.C.I., in which a surgeon inserts a mesh tube made...

Researchers from the University of East Anglia found that flavonoid-rich foods, like oranges and grapefruit, can help protect against strokes in women. This study was published in the journal, Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association. In this study, the researchers followed 69,622 women for 14 years. The researchers monitored the protective nature of flavonoids, an antioxidant found in fruits, vegetables, dark chocolate and red wine. During the study, every four years, the women reported their fruit and vegetable intake. As a result, the researchers were able to look for relationships between flavonoid intake and the risk of ischemic, hemorrhagic...

Innovative technology getting serious consideration from nation’s military The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command is giving serious consideration to bioelectric bandages to provide pain relief, kill dangerous bacteria, and heal wounds more quickly out on the battlefield.Procellera bandage by Vomaris. The bandage, dubbed “Procellera,” purportedly creates a healing bioelectrical pathway over the wound surface to enhance the body’s natural healing process. It has already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and is now being used to treat difficult-to-heal wounds. Background on the bandage Procellera is the world’s first self-contained, conformable, cut-to-fit, electrically active bandage. It...

(CBS News) Do antidepressants work? Since the introduction of Prozac in the 1980s, prescriptions for antidepressants have soared 400 percent, with 17 million Americans currently taking some form of the drug. But how much good is the medication itself doing? "The difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people," says Harvard scientist Irving Kirsch. Will Kirsch's research, and the work of others, change the $11.3 billion antidepressant industry? Lesley Stahl investigates.

excerpt- For several years, scientists have tried and failed to determine the cause of the illness, which locals say has killed hundreds of youngsters. What they do know is that the disease affects only children and gradually devastates its victims through debilitating seizures, stunted growth, wasted limbs, mental disabilities and sometimes starvation.

Aliskiren has been sold under the brand name Rasilez in Europe and Tekturna in the U.S. since 2007. EMA said it has ruled that aliskiren be "contraindicated," or not prescribed, to diabetic patients or to people with kidney problems who are also taking older hypertension drugs known as ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers. Data suggest a risk of adverse outcomes in such patients, including hypotension, stroke and changes in renal function, including acute renal failure, the EMA said. Novartis wrote to physicians world-wide then recommending that patients with Type 2 diabetes shouldn't be treated with aliskiren, or combination products...

A leading group of U.S. doctors is trying to tackle the costly problem of excessive medical testing, hoping to avoid more government intervention in how they practice. The American College of Physicians (ACP), the largest U.S. medical specialty group, is rolling out guidelines to help doctors better identify when patients should screen for specific diseases and when they can be spared the cost, and potentially invasive procedures that follow. Many individual U.S. medical centers have launched their own efforts to build a protocol of patient care in fields such as diabetes or obstetrics, but the ACP effort has the potential...

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? No one would accuse Jaroslav Flegr of being a conformist. A self-described “sloppy dresser,” the 63-year-old Czech scientist has the contemplative air of someone habitually lost in thought, and his still-youthful, square-jawed face is framed by frizzy red hair...

Yaws, a disease that penicillin nearly eradicated 40 years ago, has been re-emerging in rural tropical Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands — but a new study has shown that a modern drug is as effective against the disease as penicillin was. Yaws is a close relative of syphilis — both are caused by a spirochete bacterium, though syphilis is usually transmitted by sex and starts as a genital sore, while yaws is passed by skin contact with its usually painless skin sores. They resemble raspberries, and one name for the disease is “framboise,” French for raspberry. It is...

A skin cancer drug has reversed Alzheimer's in mice - raising hope that it could be similarly successful against the incurable disease in humans. Now families of Alzheimer's sufferers are now bombarding physicians with requests for the drug, called bexarotene and marketed as Targretin. In research published in the journal Science, mice were engineered to exhibit Alzheimer's symptoms - such as forgetfulness and rapid cell death. After they took the drug, they became instantly smarter, performing better Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio added that plaque in the mice brains that was causing Alzheimer's had started to...

NEW YORK – A six-year-old Bronx boy died after his father gave him methadone, believing the liquid was cough medicine. The boy's mother, 36-year-old Raquel DeLeon, hid her methadone inside a DayQuil bottle in their apartment on East 147th Street in the south Bronx. On Saturday, when Carlos Rios Jr. fell ill, his father gave him a teaspoon of the liquid, believing it was cough medicine, police said. Soon after taking the dose, the boy complained of dizziness. His father told him to lie down, but grew concerned after his son became unresponsive. The father immediately called 911 and medics...

FDA Drug Safety Communication: Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea can be associated with stomach acid drugs known as proton pump inhibitors (PPIs)  Safety AnnouncementAdditional Information for Patients and ConsumersAdditional Information for Healthcare ProfessionalsData Summary (Tables) Safety Announcement [02-08-2012] The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is informing the public that the use of stomach acid drugs known as proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) may be associated with an increased risk of Clostridium difficile–associated diarrhea (CDAD). A diagnosis of CDAD should be considered for patients taking PPIs who develop diarrhea that does not improve. .benefit { font-size: medium; font-weight: bold; color: #f9e4bb; }Patients should immediately...

Nancy Brinker, the founder of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has admitted in her first public comments since the organization reversed its contentious decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood, that she “mishandled” the recent controversy and “made some mistakes.” In a note sent Wednesday night to Sally Quinn of The Washington Post in response to an open letter from Quinn, Brinker wrote, “Sally, you know that we would never, ever, leave women unserved, especially the low-income, uninsured and underinsured women who are relying on us more than ever in an uncertain economy.”

Alzheimer’s disease seems to spread like an infection from brain cell to brain cell, two new studies in mice have found. But instead of viruses or bacteria, what is being spread is a distorted protein known as tau. The surprising finding answers a longstanding question and has immediate implications for developing treatments, researchers said. And they suspect that other degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s may spread in a similar way. Alzheimer’s researchers have long known that dying, tau-filled cells first emerge in a small area of the brain where memories are made and stored. The disease then slowly moves outward...

Strain of MRSA from the U.S. causes large boils and is resistant to several front-line antibiotics Survives on surfaces so can be picked up on public transport A flesh-eating form of pneumonia that is easily passed between healthy people on public transport is spreading across the UK, experts have warned.

One of the most common questions that I am asked from prospective survival medics is “What antibiotics should I stockpile and how do I use them?” There isn’t a 60 second answer to this. Actually, there isn’t a 60 MINUTE answer to this, but anyone that is interested in preserving the health of their loved ones in a collapse will have to learn what antibiotics will work in a particular situation. It’s important to start off by saying that you will not want to indiscriminately use antibiotics for every minor ailment that comes along. In a collapse, the medic is...

Pay Attention to Your Ticker Heart attacks don't always strike out of the blue -- there are many symptoms we can watch for in the days and weeks leading up to an attack. But the symptoms may not be the ones we expect. And they can be different in men and women, and different still in older adults. Last year, for example, a landmark study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Institute found that 95 percent of women who'd had heart attacks reported experiencing symptoms in the weeks and months before...

A suburban Chicago man accidentally shot a 3.25in (8.25cm) nail into his skull but is recovering after doctors successfully removed it from the centre of his brain. Dante Autullo, 34, was in his workshop when a nail gun recoiled near his head. But he had no idea the nail had entered his brain until the next day, when he began feeling nauseous.