Noncommunicable Diseases. The Human Mind. Seeing in the Dark. Man with no pulse: How turbines can replace a heart. Sandrine Ceurstemont, New Scientist TV You no longer need a heartbeat to be alive.
In a groundbreaking surgery last year, doctors William Cohn and Bud Frazier from the Texas Heart Institute in Houston replaced a dying man's heart with twin turbines, resulting in a living person without a pulse. In this short film called Heart Stop Beating, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, you can follow the revolutionary procedure. Compared to artificial hearts that mimic real ones, the device is thought to be much more durable, since it has no flexible membranes or complex twisting mechanisms.
Will we ever restore sight to the blind? Here’s the third piece from my new BBC column A 46 year-old man called Miikka spotted a simple spelling mistake.
Sound rather than sight can activate 'seeing' for the blind, say researchers. Aging: To Treat, or Not to Treat? The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy David Gems The 20th century brought both profound suffering and profound relief to people around the world.
On the one hand, it produced political lunacy, war and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. But there were also extraordinary gains—not least in public health, medicine and food production. In the developed world, we no longer live in constant fear of infectious disease. Yet, as too often happens, the solution of one problem spawns others. Socioeconomic Factors Trump Race and Geography for Odds of Living to Old Age. Image courtesy of iStockphoto/digitalskillet Whether or not you will live past 70 depends on a seemingly infinite number of small variables: genes, lifestyle, whether or not you are hit by a bus, etcetera.
Tied into that prediction have long been race and location. Black males in southern cities, for example, typically have a shorter life expectancy than white males in northern rural areas. From salami to soda pop: what does “toxic” really mean? It's Time to End the War on Salt. For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt.
In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure.
We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt. The nocebo effect: Wellcome Trust science writing prize essay. Can just telling a man he has cancer kill him?
In 1992 the Southern Medical Journal reported the case of a man who in 1973 had been diagnosed with cancer and given just months to live. How Doctors Can Ethically Harness the Placebo Effect. Howard Brody, MD, PhD, is the John P.
McGovern Centennial Chair in Family Medicine and Director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. For years, doctors thought that placebos like sugar pills were totally inert, just something to be given out to mollify a demanding patient without any expected health benefits. Gradually, both physicians and medical researchers came to realize that such treatments can sometimes cause substantial improvement of symptoms, even when there’s no chemical or other biomedical explanation for what occurs—a phenomenon called the placebo effect. The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills - Alexis Madrigal - Life. While people of all cultures experience sleep paralysis in similar ways, the specific form and intensity it takes varies from one group to the next They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home.
Their median age was 33. All but one -- 116 of the 117 -- were healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five natural causes of death for other American men in their age group. The Trillions of Microbes That Call Us Home—and Help Keep Us Healthy. “The classical view of infectious disease is that a single organism invades and produces an infection,” Seed says.
Old Methods for New Drugs - David C. Swinney. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space. Why Does Grapefruit Mess With Your Medicine? Rural Life May Boost Allergy Resistance. A miracle molecule hiding in milk. 06.06.12 - A Lausanne-based research team has identified a molecule naturally present in milk and other foods, nicotinamide riboside, that has extraordinary health benefits. Their findings indicate it could play an important role in preventing weight gain and diabetes and improving muscular performance.
Many natural foods, including milk and perhaps even beer, contain a molecule whose effects on metabolism are nothing short of astonishing. In an article making the cover story of today's Cell Metabolism journal, Johan Auwerx, head of EPFL’s Laboratory of Integrative Systems Physiology (LISP) and holder of EPFL’s Nestlé Chair in Energy Metabolism, describes a series of experiments done using nicotinamide riboside (NR), a molecule that, although known to indirectly influence the activity of mitochondria, the “powerhouses” of the cell, has been little studied up to this point. Preventing obesity. Increasing muscular performance. Improving energy expenditure. Pollution, Poverty and People of Color: Children at Risk. Special Report: Pollution, Poverty, People of Color Communities across the US face environmental injustices Read Part 1 and Part 2 of the Special Report WORCESTER, Mass. – When doctors told Wanda Ford her 2-year-old son had lead poisoning, she never suspected that the backyard in her low-income neighborhood was the likely culprit.
Ford knew that exposure to the heavy metal could be dangerous. How Bacteria in Our Bodies Protect Our Health. Explore the Human Microbiome [Interactive] Gut bugs confined to quarters by special immune cells - health - 17 June 2012. Species-Specific Microbes May Be Key to a Healthy Immune System. Genes May Influence Body's Bacteria. Our Microbiomes, Ourselves. Genetic logic circuit makes cells self-destruct if they look cancerous. Did Alternative Medicine Extend or Abbreviate Steve Jobs's Life? Exact details of the alternative natural and traditional therapies tried by Steve Jobs before he underwent surgery in 2004 and eventually died of pancreatic cancer earlier this month have not been disclosed.
Guerilla enlightenment: Defending science online - opinion - 01 May 2012. Pro-reason bloggers are doing a better job than scientists at challenging alternative medicine. The Evolved Self-management System. How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. Nicotine Replacement Doesn’t Help Smokers Quit, Study Finds. Can Too Much Information Harm Patients? [Excerpt] Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (Basic Books, 2012), by Eric Topol, a professor of innovative medicine and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. Nearly 7 Billion people on the planet. Tissue-bank shortage: Brain child. Why the Myth of the Meth-Damaged Brain May Hinder Recovery. Methamphetamine is widely believed to cause brain damage and cognitive impairment in users.
The Medication Generation: Teenagers and Antidepressants. A Drug That Wakes the Near Dead. The Fallacy of the 'Hijacked Brain' Casual Marijuana Smoking Not Harmful to Lungs. 8 Drug Combinations That Can Really Mess You Up. Children’s A.D.D. Drugs Don’t Work Long-Term. Head Agony. Shot May Top Acupuncture For Pain Relief. Hurt Blocker. New Target Discovered for Pain Relief. Cool Aid: Drug That Lets Body Temperature Drop Could Save Stroke Victims. Genes Are No Crystal Ball For Disease Risk. Biobank promises to pinpoint the cause of disease - health - 30 March 2012.
How Useful Is Whole Genome Sequencing to Predict Disease? Do We Need Doctors Or Algorithms? The Patient of the Future. Synthetic Heredity Molecules Emulate DNA. Tomorrow's Medicine. Another Side To Statins. The Stats on Statins: Should Healthy Adults Over 50 Take Them? Statins Are Linked With Fatigue. “The Errors of Their Ways” by Rachel Giese. Two Hundred Years of Surgery. Old, Irradiated Tissues Are Rescued to Answer Nagging Questions about Nuclear and Medical Risk.
Scientists transform scar tissue into beating heart muscle. The future of medicine: Squeezing out the doctor. Empowering the Body to Fix Its Parts. Transplantable Blood Vessels Woven from Lab-Grown Human Tissue. Dallas Wiens, Face Transplant Recipient. Retinal Implants Could Restore Partial Vision. Patient S3: The Woman Who Controlled a Robotic Arm With Her Brain - Jessica Benko - Health.
Burn Victim Sam Brown Treated With Virtual-Reality Video Game SnowWorld: Newsmakers. LSD Helps to Treat Alcoholism. Stem Cell Treatment Spurs Cartilage Growth. Why We Shouldn’t Prescribe Hormonal Contraception to 12 Year Olds. Feel The Burn. What Doctors Don't Understand about Anesthesia.