The Bottom Buddy is a device which helps the morbidly obese wipe after using the bathroom. I’ll hold my tongue a bit except to say that it probably says something about the state of and concern for public health in this country. *Sigh*
From Sky News
Dr. Jerome Goopman, author of How Doctors Think, has an upcoming webinar on the subject next month. The web broadcast is intended for medical students, residents and academic faculty at various medical schools across the country.
A week ago hackers attacked an Epilepsy Foundation online forum and directed visitors computers to seizure inducing patterns of flashing lights.
Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.
The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security.
RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.
Fultz says she “locked up.”
“I don’t fall over and convulse, but it hurts,” says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d’Alene, Ohio. “I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak.”
After about 10 seconds, Fultz’s 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.
This is, based on the actual physical nature of the attack, one of the worst hacks ever if the report is accurate. A terrible tale and these guys should go to jail under some kind’ve assault statute if there’s any justice and serve non-consecutive time for illegally accessing the forum as well.
The first full face transplant recipient has come froward a year after surgery.
“People in the street look at me very differently. They no longer stop and stare or shout cruel words.
“Instead I am accepted. I even dream of myself in my new face and now I would love to find a wife, settle down and have children.”
Multiple media websites are reporting this as Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (using either that name or the eponym Von Recklinghausen’s disease). While von Recklinghausen has some other disorders named after him and some MSM confusion might be expected, it appears from multiple news sources that this patient had NF1. A prominent feature of neurofibromatosis is multiple cutaneous tumors, but to get this big, start this early (at age 6), and to be “cured” by this face transplant seems unusual from my understanding.
Whatever the cause of the disfiguration, this is a remarkable result for the first patient to get his entire face replaced by a cadaveric donor.
Trepanations (putting a hole in someone’s skull) are the world’s oldest known surgeries, which is pretty fascinating when you think about it. There are skulls thousands of years old which actually show signs of healing after such operations, implying the patients survived the surgery.
Well, we can add to the evidence of ancient neurosurgery. They’ve uncovered a young ancient Greek woman who appears to have had her head popped open after suffering some head trauma.
Site excavator Ioannis Graikos said the woman’s skeleton was found during a rescue dig last year in Veria, a town 46 miles west of Thessaloniki. “We interpret the find as a case of complicated surgery, which only a trained and specialized doctor could have attempted,” Graikos said.
A bone expert who studied the find said the skeleton belonged to a woman of up to 25 years old who had suffered a severe blow to the crown of her head, Graikos said. The operation was apparently an attempt to save her life.
He said the clearly defined shape of the hole left in the woman’s skull was a sign of relatively sophisticated surgery.
Google Health is coming to compete with Microsoft. They’re running trials out of the Cleveland Clinic.
Large EMRs providing information anywhere and allowing patients more control over their medical records are obviously necessary and inevitable. And I’d probably trust Google with my personal health information.
Some of the first screenshots are here.
Credit to The Haversian Canal for apparently helping to lead the NEJM website into making this new Image Challenge a reality.
I’m a big fan of these self quiz resources on the web whether they be derm atlases or radiology cases. Good to find a new one with some breadth and some actual physical exam findings.
Kevin Everett is up and walking, with some credit being given to induced hypothermia therapy for his spinal injury.
[H]e gets up. He rises from his chair and walks easily to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and takes out a drink. Then he walks back. Simple as that. And yet not simple at all. “I’m making strides every day,” he says. “Way back when I was first in the hospital the doctors were saying I might not ever walk again, and they didn’t know the outcome for me moving my limbs anymore. So how much do I believe about all this? The sky is the limit. I’m going to take this as far as I can.”
Hypothermia for closed head and spinal injuries isn’t exactly new, but it isn’t a standard of care either.
In November 2006, [Dr.] Cappuccino had attended a seminar of the Cervical Spine Research Society and sat in on a talk by Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. Dietrich devoted the last 10 minutes of his presentation to the potential benefits of induced hypothermia for neuroprotection — the rapid cooling of the body to reduce metabolic demand and to prevent further damage from swelling and other inflammatory mechanisms. It is a controversial treatment that has not been established as a standard of care in spinal cord injuries and is the subject of considerable debate in the field. Partly motivated by that talk, Cappuccino had instructed the EMTs at Bills games to stock their ambulance with three bags of saline solution in a cooler.
There was contentious debate at the hospital. At least two doctors, including Gibbons, did not want to induce hypothermia, which can have dangerous side effects such as heart arrhythmia, blood clotting problems, pneumonia and organ failure. “Dr. Cappuccino was pushing the cooling, and it became a dynamic issue,” says Snyder, 35. “He had been saying all along, ‘We should do the cooling. We should do it.’ ”
Only when Everett started developing a low fever did Gibbons and others assent.
For spinal cord injury, there is some debate apparently still considerable debate on using hypothermia.
“The Miami Project made some strong statements in the aftermath of Kevin Everett’s treatment, saying that hypothermia helped get Kevin Everett up walking,” says Brian Kwon, 36, a spine specialist at Vancouver (B.C.) General Hospital, who is not convinced that hypothermia is helpful to patients with spinal cord injuries. “They have tremendous scientists in Miami who are doing fantastic, cutting-edge spinal cord injury research. But Kevin Everett is one patient, and there has never been a published study of the treatment he received.”
Cappuccino has also felt some blowback. “There are doctors out there who think I’m some kind of monster for experimenting on a human being,” he says. “There are colleagues of mine who think I’m crazy for doing what I did.”
But why-ever he’s walking, I’m just happy to see him making such remarkable progress.
A pretty amazing little “game” on ABC’s website. As Kevin, MD points out the most realistic aspect is probably the consequences when you lose.
This game is making the rounds: Via Kevin via Science Roll via A Hearty Life
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum battling it out in the forum of electronic medical records. Just what we need.
It looks like Google is going to be setting up an online medical records service to compete with Microsoft’s new HealthVault.
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Mayer outlined the ways in which the search giant plans to bring its immense data storage and organization capacities to the field of medical care and patient records. Google is already the starting point for a large majority of the health-related searches on the Web, she pointed out.
“If you look at health care, there’s already a huge user need, people are already using Google more than any other tool on the Web to find health information,” Mayer said. “And the health care industry generates a huge amount of information every year. It’s a natural core competency for us, to understand how to organize all that data.”
I’m actually all for these types of services and have only limited concerns about patient privacy. If patients fear for their privacy then they won’t use them; let the market sort it out. That being said, the Google exec could’ve been a little less blunt about the objectives…
“The goal for a lot of doctors is how many patients can they see in a day,” Mayer said. “That means their minutes per patient has got to go down, and the less time they have to spend finding and going over patient records the better. Ultimately we will design a product that’s useful for users, and also helps doctors do their job more quickly and more efficiently.”
Disappointment as Merck’s live recombinant vaccine fails in its Phase III trial,
Executives at the company, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., said 24 of 741 volunteers who got the vaccine in one segment of the experiment later became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In a comparison group of volunteers who got dummy shots, 21 of 762 participants became infected.
More on Merck’s HIV vaccine efforts here and more on HIV vaccine efforts in general at the WHO.
Even if you truly believed you were on the verge of the greatest medical breakthrough in history, wouldn’t you keep expectations somewhat reasonable until you had your definitive results?
Maybe apparently that is just my mindset though, as we’ve got a declaration of a cure for cancer…
Dr Zheng Cui, of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, has shown in laboratory experiments that immune cells from some people can be almost 50 times more effective in fighting cancer than in others.
Dr Cui, whose work is highlighted in this week’s New Scientist magazine, has previously shown cells from mice found to be immune to cancer can be used to cure ordinary mice with tumours.
The work raises the prospect of using cancer-killing immune system cells called granulocytes from donors to significantly boost a cancer patient’s ability to fight their disease, and potentially cure them.
“If this is half as effective in humans as it is in mice it could be that half of patients could be cured or at least given one to two years extra of high quality life.
“The technology needed to do this already exists, so if it works in humans we could save a lot of lives, and we could be doing so within two years.”
Dr Cui is confident patients could benefit from the technique quickly because the technology used to extract granulocytes is the same as that already used by hospitals to obtain other blood components such as plasma or platelets.
Okay Dr. Cui doesn’t go quite that far but I’m not sure I’d be throwing the word cure around so freely just yet. That’s a tainted word when it comes to cancer.
How close are we to being able to excise the HIV virus genome from infected people’s chromosomes? Maybe such is on the horizon (via Reddit).
Indrani and a team of scientists have developed an enzyme called Tre. Tre is a custom enzyme capable of detecting, recognising and destroying HIV, much like a pair of molecular scissors.
“In laymans terms, it’s an engineered enzyme which recognises sequences in the HIV genome that is duplicated, integrated virus and by the process of recombination, it cuts out the virus from the genome,” says she.
The biggest challenge with treating HIV today is that the virus becomes dormant and often develops resistance to HIV drugs.
The only way then to cure HIV is to get rid of the virus completely and Tre, the enzyme that Indrani constructed after a year and its 126 “cycles of mutation” totally deplete HIV in the human genome in three months in laboratory conditions.
One of her reports in Science (full publication requires subscription):
[Tre] recombinase efficiently excised integrated HIV proviral DNA from the genome of infected cells. Although a long way from use in the clinic, we speculate that this type of technology might be adapted in future antiretroviral therapies, among other possible uses.
Pretty cool.
Medical animal research plays out from both sides of the aisle. An LA pediatric ophthalmologist versus a trauma surgeon.
Dr. Rosenbaum, a highly regarded pediatric ophthalmologist who had been regularly harassed by animal-rights activists for his research work with cats and rhesus monkeys at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA, noticed a device underneath his luxury sedan. The bomb squad was dispatched to the scene and hauled away a makeshift — but deadly — explosive. A faulty fuse was the only reason it didn’t go off.
For several years now, Rosenbaum and other faculty members at UCLA Medical Center have been targeted by animal-rights activists outraged by their experiments on primates. The researchers have endured crank phone calls, menacing e-mails and intimidating threats screamed over bullhorns in the middle of the night in front of their homes.
But with the attempted bombing of Rosenbaum, and the attempted Molotov cocktail bombing last year of UCLA researcher Lynn Fairbanks in Bel-Air, activists are no longer content with talking a mean game — they now want blood.
There’s not really a word for those that would escalate the situation like this other than nutcase. Amongst them you find Dr. Jerry Vlasak.
Vlasak, a tall and lanky man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a faded goatee, settles into a booth and begins speaking excitedly, and somewhat loudly, about his obsession.
“I think the animal-rights movement has been way too slow in taking radical actions,” he says. “And they’ve been way too nice.”
Vlasak understands that his medical background gives the animal-rights movement a certain amount of cachet. Journalists come to him for quotes, and he gives them. In a 2004 interview with the London Observer, he said, “I don’t think you’d have to kill too many [researchers]. I think for five lives, 10 lives, 15 human lives, we could save a million, 2 million, 10 million nonhuman lives.”
The question is, is this the guy you want operating on your splenic laceration? A man with so little respect for human life. Better hope he doesn’t get word of a million cats drowning while in the middle of operating on you; he’d be obligated to race to their rescue and leave you cut open there I imagine.
Research at the Jules Stein Eye Institute has led to advances in gene therapies to treat inherited, blindness-causing diseases, and UCLA is credited with a breakthrough for curing visual loss in patients with the eye disease known as Stargardt’s. Rosenbaum and its other leading physicians who do key work on such diseases have plenty of supporters.
[Chancellor] Abrams recently changed UCLA policy regarding Freedom of Information Act requests. The university will no longer make public its medical research documents, according to UCLA vice chancellor for research Roberto Peccei.
Vlasak insists the experiments with rhesus monkeys and cats are unnecessary — a claim [vice chancellor Roberto Perccei] meets with open disgust. “They’re always using these things in a way to hype it up!” Peccei says. “Let them take us to court for not providing the documents.”
Via e-mail, Vlasak retorts, “They obviously feel like they have to hide not only the details of what’s going on in their research labs, but now they are going to try to hide from the public, at a public institution no less. If they were not ashamed of what they are doing, they should be willing to openly display what is going on there.”
We’re not looking at the future here, where all species will be accepted by the general public as equals. These violent animal rights activists aren’t pioneers. They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re nutcases. They’re prophets only in their own minds.
