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Health Care Myth Busters: Is There a High Degree of Scientific Certainty in Modern Medicine? |  |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 25th, 2011 .
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Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book Demand Better! Revive Our Broken Health Care System (Second River Healthcare Press, March 2011) by Sanjaya Kumar, chief medical officer at Quantros, and David B. Nash, dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University. In the following chapter they explore the striking dearth of data and persistent uncertainty that clinicians often face when having to make decisions. [More]
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Is the "war on cancer" winnable? 40 years after the unofficial declaration, the disease is spreading throughout the globe | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 24th, 2011 .
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Pervasive, elusive and tough, cancer has proved to be a formidable foe against generations of bright and well-funded researchers. [More]
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Dressing the meat of tomorrow | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 23rd, 2011 .
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If you take a small sample of animal tissue and encourage it to grow in vitro , separate from the original animal's body, it is possible to create an edible piece of meat. Culturing living tissue is a routine lab procedure and an important part of medical and biological research, but using the tools and techniques of tissue engineering as the basis for industrialised food production is an idea that some people may find unpalatable.
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Reflections from Science | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 22nd, 2011 .
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Science, it is sometimes claimed, is neutral: it is up to society to decide how to employ research findings. Yet society often struggles with its end of the deal. That is because science can also hold up a mirror to the results of our culture’s choices--and we may not like what we see.
Consider antibiotics. Since their discovery decades ago, these “wonder drugs” have been used far more widely than for the treatment of sick patients. Tourists take them when they go on vacation to prevent traveler’s diarrhea. We give them to livestock, helping to keep our meats cheap.
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The Smallest Mind | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 17th, 2011 .
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Researchers have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind is smaller than a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms--making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs--by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms are swimming freely in a petri dish. The technology may help neuroscientists for the first time gain a complete understanding of the workings of an animal’s nervous system.
The worm in question, Caenorhabditis elegans , is one of the most extensively studied organisms in biology: investigators have completely mapped and classified its cells, including its 302 neurons and the 5,000 or so connections among them. But science still does not know exactly “how neurons work together in a network,” says Andrew Leifer, a graduate student in biophysics at Harvard. For example, how does the worm coordinate its 100 or so muscles to relax and contract in a wave pattern as it swims?
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Rare African kittens bred from frozen embryos and sperm | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 16th, 2011 .
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One of the risks in writing about endangered species is concentrating too much on the cute ones. But I couldn't skip covering the African black-footed cat ( Felis nigripes ) and the scientific breakthrough that could give this rare species an extra chance at survival.
The African black-footed cat is one of the world's smallest and rarest cat species, not to mention one of the least studied. Full-grown cats, native to southern Africa, weigh just 1.3 to 1.9 kilograms and have a body length of about 36 to 63 centimeters, not including the tail. The species, listed as vulnerable to extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List of Threatened Species, has a shrinking population--fewer than 10,000 individuals--and has only been studied once in the wild.
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Rare African kittens bred from frozen eggs and sperm | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 16th, 2011 .
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| No Comments |
One of the risks in writing about endangered species is concentrating too much on the cute ones. But I couldn't skip covering the African black-footed cat ( Felis nigripes ) and the scientific breakthrough that could give this rare species an extra chance at survival.
The African black-footed cat is one of the world's smallest and rarest cat species, not to mention one of the least studied. Full-grown cats, native to southern Africa, weigh just 1.3 to 1.9 kilograms and have a body length of about 36 to 63 centimeters, not including the tail. The species, listed as vulnerable to extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Red List of Threatened Species, has a shrinking population--fewer than 10,000 individuals--and has only been studied once in the wild.
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How Radiation Threatens Health | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 15th, 2011 .
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The developing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the wake of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami has raised concerns over the health effects of radiation exposure: What is a "dangerous" level of radiation? How does radiation damage health? What are the consequences of acute and long-term low-dose radiation? [More]
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Does Potassium Iodide Protect People from Radiation Leaks? | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 15th, 2011 .
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A full meltdown has been avoided so far at Japan's 40-year-old Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Neverless, as far away as Tokyo, 240 kilometers to the south, the city government says small amounts of the radioactive iodine and cesium have been detected in the air . Higher levels of radioactive materials have been monitored closer to the plant, prompting the government to order the evacuation of residents within a 20-kilometer radius. [More]
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Uninformed Consent: Tech Solutions for Faulty Permissions in Health Care | |
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Posted by Mary Canady March 15th, 2011 .
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Much of what happens to you in the hospital in the name of diagnosing and healing is invasive. Depending on what ails you, a doctor may need to ream out an artery to get more blood to your heart, or flood your body with a poison to kill cancerous cells, or saw through the bones of your leg to replace a crumbling hip or a worn-out knee. If a stranger came at you with a scalpel or syringe in a back alley, you would consider it assault and battery. But in a hospital most of us willingly schedule an appointment and pay big money to be precision-poked and carved because we trust our doctor’s skill and knowledge and assume the alternatives--illness, incapacity or early death--are surely worse.
But how many patients truly understand the alternatives or the risks and benefits of the test or treatment they are undergoing? One of the guiding principles of modern health care is that, except in an emergency, doctors must get the patient’s permission before the start of any invasive medical procedure. That “informed consent” is supposed to be based on an earlier conversation during which physicians make sure patients understand what the procedure will and will not do, along with its benefits and risks relative to other options.
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