‘An Ohio chiropractor who claimed to treat patients using time travel has surrendered his license to practice.
State regulators had been investigating Dr. James Burda of Athens, who said he could take care of anyone, anywhere by reaching back in time to when the injury occurred.
Burda said he discovered the skill six years ago when he hurt his own foot while driving. He said he gave the pain a command to stop and it went away.
He said he doesn’t use force to realign bones, but he uses his mind to manipulate the body. But if that doesn’t work, he said he travels back in time to fix the problem. He calls the practice Bala-Keem. State medical officials call it malpractice.’
`Yes, that’s a pistol completely stuffed into the vaginal vault. All of a sudden her agitation and thrashing about seemed a lot more important than it had a few minutes before. How the hell were we to get the gun out without the damn thing discharging?
In the end, there was no real option. She was sedated and taken to the OR for an exam under anesthesia. They put a bulletproof vest over the patient’s body to protect the anesthesiologist in the event the gun went off, and had general surgery standing by. [..]’
`In all this time however, every attempt at biological warfare has been essentially offensive. The idea has always been to incapacitate or kill the enemy. Except once, in Poland, during World War II, where a pair of quick-thinking doctors used a little-known organism to keep the Nazis at bay.
The microorganism is Proteus OX19. In most ways it’s an entirely ordinary little bacterium. Its one remarkable feature is that human antibodies for Proteus OX19 cross-react with the antibodies for Ricksettia – the bacterium responsible for the deadly disease typhus. Blood from a patient infected with Proteus Ox19 will give a false-positive in the most common typhus screening method, the Weil-Felix test.
Enter the Nazis into Poland. [..]’
`[..] In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq’s Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.
As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.’
`[..] Computational modeling of the THC-AChE interaction revealed that THC binds in the peripheral anionic site of AChE, the critical region involved in amyloidgenesis. Compared to currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, THC is a considerably superior inhibitor of A aggregation, and this study provides a previously unrecognized molecular mechanism through which cannabinoid molecules may directly impact the progression of this debilitating disease.
[..] Therefore, AChE inhibitors such as THC and its analogues may provide an improved therapeutic for Alzheimer’s disease, augmenting acetylcholine levels by preventing neurotransmitter degradation and reducing A aggregation, thereby simultaneously treating both the symptoms and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.’
`Camille has beauty and brains.
She’s a former model and a Phi Beta Kappa with a master’s in education. There’s a part of her, though, that’s not so perfect.
She smells like spoiled fish.
Camille says when she taught, students wouldn’t come near her.
“They would say things like, ‘Ew, this classroom stinks like dead fish.’ They would call me ‘Miss Fishy.'”‘
`Serb Ratko Dankovic, 23, had been drinking Rakia with mates while watching a magician perform a sword swallowing trick on the television.
They then started arguing over how the trick was done, and when Dankovic told mates that sword swallowing was easy and anyone could do it – they challenged him to prove it.
But he had to be rushed to the local hospital after swallowing a knife with an eight inch blade, eight nails, two spoons and a couple of clothes pegs to win the ten pound bet.’
`According to the Health Department, lab tests have confirmed both viral and bacterial infections in about a dozen camp-goers, including nine cases of norovirus, six cases of Campylobacter jejuni, a bacterial infection; three people were found to have both.
That may be just the tip of the iceberg. More than 100 people have reported some sort of gastrointestinal illness related to the camp, including 88 people who attended the camp, and another 20 who had a family member at the camp.
`Victims of the disastrous “Elephant Man” drugs trial have been told they face contracting cancer and other fatal diseases as a result of being poisoned in the bungled tests.
One of the six victims was told last week he is already showing “definite early signs” of lymphatic cancer.
He and three others have also been warned that they are “highly likely” to develop incurable auto-immune diseases.’
followup to Two drug trial men critically ill.
`A man was arrested on charges of practicing medicine without a license after a woman died during a liposuction procedure performed in the basement of a home, authorities said Monday.
Luis Carlos Rebeiro, a native of Brazil, was to be arraigned in district court on Monday following the death of a 23-year-old woman Sunday. [..]
Police also charged Rebeiro with drug possession. A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said she did not know what type of drugs.’
`The U.S. military has begun developing an ultrasonic tourniquet in an effort to stop life-threatening bleeding during combat.
Called the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation (DBAC) program, it aims to create a cuff-like device that wraps around a wounded limb. Rather than applying pressure to the wound to stem the flow of blood, the device would use focused beams of ultrasound (sound waves above the audible frequencies) to non-invasively clot vessels no matter how deep they are.’
`When most parents have a baby, they spend months dreaming about what their bundle of joy will look like. Will she look like mom? Will he have dad’s eyes? But for one Navy family, the birth of their daughter didn’t give them the answers to those questions. Their daughter was born without a face.’
`Pigeons falling from the sky prompted a hospital in Schenectady, N.Y., to close its emergency room and call in a hazardous materials team.
The birds had been poisoned by an exterminator.
Fire and police personnel noticed the dead and dying birds on the ground when they arrived at Ellis Hospital’s emergency room on an unrelated matter.
They closed off the ER for several hours out of fear that one of the falling birds would hit someone. A hazmat official said, “Birds were coming down like divebombers.”‘
`Increasing numbers of Americans are becoming too fat to fit into X-ray machines, US researchers report.
The nation’s rising obesity problems mean many citizens are not only too large for scanners but they have too much fat for the rays to penetrate.
Over the past 15 years, the number of failed scans linked to patient obesity has doubled, Radiology journal reports.’
`A doctor and two nurses who worked through the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina were arrested overnight Monday on suspicion of murder, accused of giving four patients stranded at their flooded hospital lethal doses of morphine and a sedative.
“This is not euthanasia. This is homicide,” Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti said. [..]
The arrest warrants said Pou and the two nurses intentionally killed four patients “by administering or causing to be administered lethal doses of morphine sulphate (morphine) and midazolam (Versed).”‘
`A doctor allegedly told a patient she is so fat she might only be attractive to black men.
He also allegedly advised another to shoot herself to end her suffering after brain surgery.
Rude and offensive? Yes, said a New Hampshire judge. But worthy of discipline from the New Hampshire Board of Medicine? No, the judge ruled in ordering the board to stop disciplinary proceedings against Dr. Terry Bennett.
The judge made clear that while he doesn’t condone the remarks, Bennett has the right to speak bluntly to patients.’
Without any drugs and with the witch doctor stopping occasionally to drink some beer, what better way to pass time in the jungle than have you brain operated on?
`Hundreds of people have flocked to a hospital in the Indian city of Calcutta to see a man holding a sizeable chunk of his head in his hands.
Doctors say a section of electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull fell off on Sunday, months after he suffered severe burns.
He has now become the centre of public attention as the man who literally “holds his head in his hands”.’
`Doctors have their first proof that a man who was barely conscious for nearly 20 years regained speech and movement because his brain spontaneously rewired itself by growing tiny new nerve connections to replace the ones sheared apart in a car crash.
Terry Wallis, 42, is thought to be the only person in the United States to recover so dramatically so long after a severe brain injury. He still needs help eating and cannot walk, but his speech continues to improve and he can count to 25 without interruption.’
`Genetically modified tomatoes containing edible vaccine are to be used to challenge two of the world’s most lethal viruses.
The aim is to create affordable vaccines for HIV and the hepatitis B virus (HBV) that could be easily grown and processed in the countries where they are most needed. So far, none of the 90 or so potential vaccines against HIV have proved successful and, though a vaccine already exists for HBV, it is too expensive to be used by poorer countries.’
`People with long-term, low-level exposure to pesticides have a 70 percent higher incidence of Parkinson’s disease than people who have not been exposed much to bug sprays, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
Such workers include mostly farmers, ranchers and fishermen, the researchers report in the July issue of Annals of Neurology.
Their study supports previous research that suggests pesticides can be linked with Parkinson’s, which is caused by the destruction of key brain cells, the team at the Harvard School of Public Health said.
“The findings support the hypothesis that exposure to pesticides is a risk factor for Parkinson’s disease,” they wrote.’
`The ultimate death toll among humans from mad-cow disease could be massively under-estimated, according to an innovative study conducted among a cannibal tribe in Papua New Guinea. [..]
British doctors have hit on the idea of seeing whether people there fell sick long after the practice died out, the aim being to determine how long it takes for this BSE-like disease to incubate.
Their suspicions were confirmed, for they identified 11 people who were diagnosed with kuru between July 1996 to June 2004. [..]
As vCJD only surfaced as a disease little more than a decade ago, this relatively tiny toll has eased initial worries that tens of thousands of people could die, given that millions of people ate BSE-infected beef.’
`An Indonesian who died after catching the A(H5N1) bird flu virus from his 10-year-old son represents the first confirmed case of human-to-human transmission of the disease, a World Health Organization investigation of an unusual family cluster has concluded, the agency said Friday.
The W.H.O. investigators also discovered that the virus had mutated slightly when the son had the disease, although not in any way that would allow the virus to pass more readily among people.’
`Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix.
The “click” of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.
“While you’re trying to understand a difficult theorem, it’s not fun,” said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
“But once you get it, you just feel fabulous.”‘
`A former handyman has won more than $400,000 in a lawsuit over a penile implant that gave him a 10-year erection.
Charles “Chick” Lennon, 68, received the steel and plastic implant in 1996, about two years before Viagra went on the market. The Dura-II is designed to allow impotent men to position the penis upward for sex, then lower it.
But Lennon could not position his penis downward. He said he could no longer hug people, ride a bike, swim or wear bathing trunks because of the pain and embarrassment. He has become a recluse and is uncomfortable being around his grandchildren, his lawyer said.’
`The neurological basis for poor witness statements and hallucinations has been found by scientists at UCL (University College London). In over a fifth of cases, people wrongly remembered whether they actually witnessed an event or just imagined it, according to a paper published in NeuroImage this week.
Dr Jon Simons and Dr Paul Burgess led the study at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr Burgess said: “In our tests volunteers either thought they had imagined words which they had actually been shown or said they had seen words which in fact they had just imagined – in over 20 per cent of cases. That is quite a lot of mistakes to be making, and shows how fallible our memory is – or perhaps, how slim our grip on reality is! [..]”‘
`What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?
Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.
Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.’
`Since 9/11, 283 World Trade Center rescue and recovery workers have been diagnosed with cancer, and 33 of them have died of cancer, says a lawyer for the ailing responders. [..]
Doctors say the cancers can strike three to five years after exposure to toxins such as benzene, a cancer-causing chemical that permeated the WTC site from burning jet fuel.
“One in 150,000 white males under 40 would normally get the type of acute white blood-cell cancer that strikes a healthy detective,” said Worby, whose first client was NYPD narcotics cop John Walcott, now 41. Walcott spent months at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills landfill. The father of three is fighting leukemia.
“We have nearly 35 of these cancers in the family of 50,000 Ground Zero workers. The odds of that occurring are one in hundreds of millions,” Worby said.’
`On April 16, the New York Times ran a full-page ad from contact lens producer Bausch and Lomb, announcing the recall of its “ReNu with MoistureLoc” rewetting solution, and warning the 30 million American wearers of soft contact lenses about Fusarium keratitis. This infection, first detected in Asia, has rapidly spread across the United States. It is caused by a mold-like fungus that can penetrate the cornea of soft contact lens wearers, causing redness and pain that can lead to blindness—requiring a corneal replacement.
That same week, the House of Representatives passed a provision to a bill requiring that the very same fungus be sprayed in “a major drug-producing country,” such as Colombia. The bill’s sponsor was Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and its most vocal supporter was his colleague Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who has been promoting the fungus for almost a decade as key to winning the drug war.’
`Hollywood party girl Paris Hilton was happy to play charity queen while the cameras were rolling.
But two years after a well-publicised visit to Gold Coast charity Paradise Kids, the millionaire heiress has broken a promise she made to help seriously ill children.
Hilton pledged to organise a star-studded benefit concert in Los Angeles to raise much-needed funds for the charity. [..]
“I’ll get a few friends together. I know the Backstreet Boys will help out for sure and I talked to Blu Cantrell last night,” Hilton claimed at the time. Missy Elliott was another big-name act mentioned.
“I definitely want to do this,” Hilton told gathered media. “My grandmother died of cancer and I almost lost my cousin to leukemia. It’s just something very important to me. [..]
To date, no benefit concert has taken place and efforts by Paradise Kids to contact Hilton have been unsuccessful.’
