Free Republic

Pharmacies in Greece were on strike earlier this week in protest at the government not paying them for medicines that should be free to customers. Many pharmacies now have huge debts to pharmaceutical companies for drugs they have handed out free of charge. Sky News spoke to one pharmacist who has not been paid by the state for over a year. Evaggelina Rousi, who runs a chemist in Athens, said: "The government owes us 30,000 euros but we have not been paid by them for a year and a half. Many people who rely on regular medication are at risk....

By the time Dr. Spencer Misner had carved away the dead and diseased flesh from Bobby Rice’s right foot last year, little remained other than bones and tendons. “I couldn’t believe it. It didn’t look real. It looked like something out of a movie,” recalled Rice, a Whitfield County resident. Today, the ankle has almost completely healed. It looks like Rice had simply scraped it. And Rice’s foot has largely healed, too. Misner credits cutting-edge stem cell treatments for saving Rice’s foot and leg.

He is only a freshman at North County High School in Anne Arundel County. However, 15-year-old Jack Andraka is being recognized for developing what may become an effective way to detect pancreatic cancer.

Drinking a daily cup of coffee -- or even several cups -- isn't likely to harm your health, and it may even lower your risk of dying from chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests. NIH followed 400,000 men and women for 13 years, during which 13% died. In the study, both regular and decaf were associated with a lower risk of dying Overall, coffee drinkers were less likely than their peers to die during the study, and the more coffee they drank, the lower their mortality risk...

here are essentially two ways to heal a wound: 1) Primary intent: bringing the wound edges together via bandage, suture, or glue. 2) Secondary intent: allowing the wound to heal “as is” when primary intent is not indicated (such as a very contaminated, dirty wound with multiple deep entry points). It’s important to close a wound by primary intent for several reasons: 1) Hemostasis (stopping bleeding): because if you lacerated a vessel with your injury, you will need to ligate it somehow. Granted, if you lacerate a major artery, you will just need to apply pressure because ligating it may...

A blogger in North Carolina has been threatened with jail time for “practicing nutrition without a license” by writing about his experiences with diabetes and telling readers what types of food he was eating. It was in January when the North Carolina Board of Dietetics and Nutrition told blogger Steve Cooksey, who writes at diabetes-warrior.net, that it was investigating him for providing nutrition care services without a license. Cooksey was accused of violating Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes, which makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without state permission – a license. According...

...boy recovers completely Although a team of four physicians insisted that his son was “brain-dead” following the wreck, Thorpe’s father enlisted the help of a general practitioner and a neurologist, who demonstrated that his son still had brain wave activity. The doctors agreed to bring him out of the coma, and five weeks later Thorpe left the hospital, having almost completely recovered.

Rabbits with brain injuries hop again after treatment with dendrimers. By tacking drugs onto molecules targeting rogue brain cells, researchers have alleviated symptoms in newborn rabbits that are similar to those of cerebral palsy in children. Cerebral palsy refers to a group of incurable disorders characterized by impairments in movement, posture and sensory abilities. In general, medicines tend to act broadly rather than influence certain sets of cells in the brain. “You don’t expect large molecules to enter the brain, and if they do, you don’t expect them to target specific cells, and immediately act therapeutically — but all of...

WASHINGTON — For a man who has long battled advanced heart disease, Dick Cheney has had a remarkable streak of being in the right place at the right time. Now 71, the former vice president has survived five heart attacks, the first of them at the age of 37. Even before he received a heart transplant a month ago today, Mr. Cheney had benefited from just about every procedure, technology and class of drug available to people with his condition — atherosclerosis, in which fatty deposits block blood flow in the arteries. Indeed, Mr. Cheney’s medical history could almost be...

“FDA is relying on 20th century regulatory science to evaluate 21st century medical products,” declared Food and Drug Administration Commissioner (FDA) Margaret Hamburg back in October 2010. One result: As biotech and medical discoveries accelerate, the number of new drugs approved by the agency remains basically flat. A 2010 study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by researchers from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas found that the time from drug discovery to marketing increased from eight years in 1960 to 12 to 15 years in 2010. Five years of this increase results from new regulations boosting the...

IN 2007-8, when counterfeit versions of heparin, a blood-thinning drug, were shipped from China to the United States market, 149 people died. In the last few months, bogus versions of the cancer drug Avastin, apparently shipped from the Middle East, have surfaced in clinics in California, Illinois and Texas. Thankfully, so far as we know, they haven’t killed anyone, but more and more cases of dangerous fake drugs are being reported by the Food and Drug Administration. Numerous incidents surely go unreported, the evidence swallowed, the deaths incorrectly attributed to natural causes. Fighting the fake-drug menace is like playing whack-a-mole....

In 1861 Samuel A. Cartwright, an American physician, described a mental illness he called “drapetomania.” As Wikipedia points out, the term derived from drapetes, Greek for “runaway [slave],” and mania for madness or frenzy. Thus Cartwright defined drapetomania as “the disease causing negroes to run away [from captivity].” “[I]ts diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers,” Cartwright wrote in a much-distributed paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana. Yet this disorder was “unknown to our medical authorities.” Cartwright thought slave owners caused the illness by making “themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating...

In the past few months, fake cancer drugs have been found in clinics from California to Illinois. These fakes, which probably originated in China, were traded by numerous Middle Eastern and European traders, all of whom claimed they had no idea the products were fake. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating.But a more subtle and probably greater danger is that some drugs that make it to the U.S. legally simply do not work. All companies make mistakes and occasionally release drugs that don’t work properly. Sometimes negligence is the cause; witness the recent problems at the Puerto...

Naoki Mori, the Japanese cancer researcher who has had 30 papers retracted by scientific journals, was asked to give his side of the story. In an e-mail, he acknowledged that his colleagues “were lax in certain regards in the preparation of papers,” but he denied having committed a grave offense. The studies were retracted because they used pictures from older papers, rather than from the experiments described in the studies. “I think this reuse is not a scientific misconduct,” Dr. Mori wrote. He and his colleagues studied the response of human cells to infection by bacteria and viruses. To measure...

In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers. It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.” The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim...

A collagen-binding peptide with applications in wound healing has been developed by scientists in the US. The peptide is able to invade the strands of collagen, forming a strong and stable non-covalent bond at room temperature. Pendant drug molecules could be attached to the peptide and anchored at the wound site to aid wound healing. Representation of a collagen mimetic peptide (CMP) annealing to damaged collagen to anchor a molecule (X) in a wound bed Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and makes up three quarters of the dry weight of skin. It is formed from three...

If health care costs are ever to be brought under control, the nation’s doctors will have to play a leading role in eliminating unnecessary treatments. By some estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted this way every year. So it is highly encouraging that nine major physicians’ groups have identified 45 tests and procedures (five for each specialty) that are commonly used but have no proven benefit for many patients and sometimes cause more harm than good. Many patients will be surprised at the tests and treatments that these expert groups now question. They include, for example, annual electrocardiograms...

If every aspect of a person’s DNA is known, would it be possible to predict the diseases in that person’s future? And could that knowledge be used to forestall the otherwise inevitable? The answer, according to a new study of twins, is, for the most part, “no.” While sequencing the entire DNA of individuals is proving fantastically useful in understanding diseases and finding new treatments, it is not a method that will, for the most part, predict a person’s medical future. So, the new study concludes, it is not going to be possible to say that, for example, Type 2...

The face of medical education is changing and patients may not like it one bit. “There is a movement towards principles and concepts rather than specific courses,” Bailus Walker, Jr. of the Howard University School of Medicine said on April 4, 2012 at a conference in Crystal City, VA. “Entrance to medical schools will be based on principles and concepts rather than biochemistry knowledge.” “The old departmental barriers and walls are coming down.” Dr. Walker thinks this is a good thing. He calls it a “convergence of disciplines.” “That will lead to more STEM education,” he said, referring to training...

WASHINGTON — Old checklist for doctors: order that test, write that prescription. New checklist for doctors: first ask yourself if the patient really needs it. Nine medical societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American College of Cardiology, representing nearly 375,000 physicians are challenging the widely held perception that more health care is better, releasing lists Wednesday of tests and treatments their members should no longer automatically order. The 45 items listed include: * Don't repeat colonoscopies within 10 years of a first such test * Don't perform early imaging for most back pain * Don't do...