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*
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.
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.
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.”
I want to love stents. But how can you as the evidence mounts?
As The Health Care Blog predicted (here’s the pre-study release New York Times story), stents appear to be overused. Researchers presenting findings from the COURAGE study at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology found that,
patients who received stents to prop open coronary blood vessels in addition to being treated with statins and other heart drugs during a five-year clinical trial had better blood flow to their heart than those treated only with drugs. But they did not live longer or have fewer heart attacks.
That finding confirmed the results of smaller trials. In this study, however, researchers also found that the one previously unquestioned advantage of stenting — better relief from the chest pain, shortness of breath and other symptoms from arteries that are clogged — disappeared over time even though the implants were highly successful at improving blood flow.
I’m not sure how seriously to take this. I don’t think the investigation of radiofrequency energy is totally novel. But this is just a kind’ve weird story.
Inside his Sanibel Island garage, [John] Kanzius invented a machine he believes sits on the brink of a major medical breakthrough.
“It’s a kick-ass cancer cell generator,” Kanzius said.
Kanzius said his machine basically makes cells act like antennae to pick up a signal and self-destruct.
Unlike current cancer treatment, Kanzius’ machine does not use radiation. Unlike today’s radio-frequency treatments, it’s noninvasive.
Now, some of the nation’s most prominent doctors and scientists are using Kanzius’ machines in their research. In January, researchers said they performed a breakthrough at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“The complete killing of pancreatic cells in laboratory conditions is encouraging,” Dr. Steve Curley said.
Curley is currently testing whether cancerous tumors can be wiped out in animals.
“We’ve got a lot more work to do, but this is very interesting preliminary work,” Curley told WPBF.
Here’s an article on Kanzius’ efforts from 2005. Google searches (here and here) turn up little but the same.
Here’s Dr. Curley’s profile on M.D. Anderson’s website. Here’s Dr. Curley’s research interests with some selected publications.
There’s no doubt the article is dancing around an active area of research (see here and here), I guess the real question is what John Kanzius’ machine has contributed to it.
I’m sure there’s work like this going on a few places. This specific incredibly cool video comes from the University of Pittsburgh Motor Lab. You can watch more footage here.
An overly broad category. That being said, here’s something to add to more of the hype and hope.
Ellis-Behnke covers the wound with a clear liquid, and the bleeding stops almost at once. Untreated, the wound would have proved fatal, but the rat lived on.
The liquid Ellis-Behnke used is a novel material made of nanoscale protein fragments, or peptides. Its ability to stop bleeding almost instantly could be invaluable in surgery, at accident sites, or on the battlefield.
