June 11, 2012
It sounds like a silver lining. Even if the Supreme Court overturns President Barack Obama’s health care law, employers can keep offering popular coverage for the young adult children of their workers. (Washington Post)
June 11, 2012
Is your doctor a technophobe? Increasingly, the answer may be no. There’s a stereotype that says doctors shun technology that might threaten patients’ privacy and their own pocketbooks. But a new breed of physicians is texting health messages to patients, … Read More
June 11, 2012
Anyone who’s had a hospital stay knows the beeping monitors, the pagers and phones, the hallway chatter, the roommate, even the squeaky laundry carts all make for a not-so-restful place to heal. (Washington Post)
June 8, 2012
Premila Vaghela, a poor 30-year-old surrogate mother, died last month, while reportedly waiting for a routine examination at a hospital in Ahmedabad. The news was barely covered by the media – after all, she had completed the task she had … Read More
June 8, 2012
The federal government has launched an initiative to reduce the use of antipsychotic medications in nursing home patients, many of whom are elderly or have dementia and can’t always communicate their needs to physicians and other caregivers. (American Medical News)
June 8, 2012
Two million of the world’s poorest children could be saved by introducing routine vaccination programmes against diarrhoea and pneumonia, says Unicef. (BBC News)
June 8, 2012
Alex Archer was 20 weeks pregnant when a routine ultrasound turned her life upside-down, literally. (ABC News)
June 8, 2012
Beth Sercus, a 53-year-old accounting consultant from Wharton, N.J., remembers the day her 3-year-old Brian was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system. (ABC News)
June 7, 2012
British physicians say some patients with osteonecrosis who need hip replacements could be treated with stem cells from their own bone marrow. (UPI)
June 7, 2012
As in vitro fertilization has become an increasingly common fact of life for those seeking to start a family, so have twins, triplets – or more, thanks to the transplantation of multiple embryos. The CDC reports that the twin birth … Read More
June 7, 2012
A global vaccine action plan, developed to help save millions of lives over the next decade, was adopted last month (26 May) by 194 countries at the World Health Assembly (the decision-making body of the WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. (SciDev)
June 7, 2012
A team of scientists has discovered what could be a novel source for researching and potentially treating Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions involving the destruction of brain cells. (ABC News)
June 6, 2012
Young adults with health insurance coverage are more likely to have regular medical visits and are less likely to go without care, delay care or end up in the emergency department, according to survey results released by the Centers for … Read More
June 6, 2012
There is a higher risk of complications and multiple births in pregnancies that result from IVF techniques, say experts. (BBC News)
June 6, 2012
Labels inside every box of morning-after pills, drugs widely used to prevent pregnancy after sex, say they may work by blocking fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Respected medical authorities, including the National Institutes of Health and the … Read More
June 6, 2012
The severe shortage of viable organs for transplantation in the U.S. has led a transplant surgeon to propose harvesting kidneys from people who are not dead yet. (ABC News)
June 6, 2012
A new noninvasive  procedure may one day allow women  to test their unborn babies for more than 3,500 genetic disorders. It could perhaps replace amniocentesis in which a probe is inserted through a woman’s abdomen,  extracting a small amount of amniotic fluid to … Read More
June 5, 2012
The controversial techniques would allow women with serious inheritable diseases to avoid passing them on to her children. (Telegraph)
June 5, 2012
Doctors are ignoring ‘do not resuscitate’ orders and attempting to revive hospital patients suffering a cardiac arrest. (Daily Mail)
June 5, 2012
Life came careeening to a halt for Doug Cook when his journalist wife Radene severely damaged her spine in a Los Angeles plane crash in 2000. (ABC News)
June 5, 2012
SMART pumps deliver drugs perfectly dosed for individual patients. Easy-to-use defibrillators can bring heart-attack victims back from the brink of death. Pacemakers and artificial hearts keep people alive by ensuring that blood is pumped smoothly around their bodies. Medical devices … Read More
June 4, 2012
Harvard biologists have brought new meaning to the term “fine print” by devising microscopic tiles made of DNA that self-assemble into letters, Chinese characters, emoticons and other shapes. (LA Times)
June 4, 2012
As the email whizzes off into the ether, dread strikes. It’s gone to the wrong person. Normally, the worst that can happen is a little embarrassment. (BBC News)
June 4, 2012
Fighting stage-four ovarian cancer, Carol Delzatto has more doctor appointments than she cares to count. But this day, she is beaming as Dr. Pamela Sutton comes into sight, greeting her patient and calling her beautiful. Delzatto looks forward to her … Read More
June 4, 2012
The National Spelling Bee of 2023 started out like any other, but controversy enveloped the contest when Suzy Hamilton, an 8-year-old from Tulsa, emerged as the new champion. Contestants had been getting younger for years; that was nothing new. (Wall … Read More
