Daily News Channel
•SERGEANT JOEY BOZIK What’s Fair Got to Do with It? Weeks after an anititank mine ripped his body apart, Sergeant Joey Bozik, 26, emerged from a coma to find himself surrounded by relatives and friends at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
As the case of the so-called Octomom continues to spur outrage and debate over the use of in vitro fertilization in the U.S., new research suggests that the most effective and inexpensive IVF method may also be the least likely to result in dangerous multiple births.
The doctors who agreed to an experimental treatment for a severely disabled girl thought there were clear medical benefits to keeping her small. Autopsy the doctors’ argument, and you find that they concluded they could remove Ashley’s uterus and breast buds because she’d be better off without them; they could keep her short because, since she’ll never have a job or a romance, she’d not suffer the social consequences of smallness
In Stockholm last week a committee of Swedish doctors was deciding whether to give the 1937 Nobel Prize for Medicine to: 1> Biochemist Ibert Szent-Gyrgyi of the Hungarian University of Szeged who discovered that a certain acid in the adrenal glands of healthy men and animals had the same beneficial effect as Vitamin C contained in oranges and lemons; 2> Biochemist Walter Norman Haworth of Birmingham University, who analyzed the chemical structures of Vitamin C and the ascorbic acid which Professor Szent-Gyrgyi isolated; or 3> Biochemist Paul Karrer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, who made Vitamin C artificially. While the world of scholars waited, the Nobel Prize committee took a quick last look at the accomplishments of Albert Szent-Gyrgyi.
Like a dried-apple doll’s, Carmela’s 99-year-old wrinkled smile was sweet but a little spooky.
In 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist at London’s Royal Free Hospital, published a study in the prestigious medical journal Lancet that linked the triple Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine with autism and bowel disorders in children. The study — and Wakefield’s subsequent public statements that parents should refuse the vaccines — sparked a public health panic that led vaccination rates in Britain to plunge.
After more than five months of going it alone, Iran’s opposition Green Movement is reaching out to the United States for help.
The uproar in the medical community was immediate. In a reversal of standard practice that bewildered physicians and patients around the nation, an independent government panel this week abandoned its long-standing recommendation that healthy women over age 40 get a breast-cancer screen once every year or two years.
Few medical conditions rival autism as a magnet for controversy. Practically everything about the disorder — its cause, its treatment, the way it is diagnosed, how it is studied — is subject to bitter dispute, sometimes to the point of death threats.
Some dude outside my supermarket just asked me to sign a petition to legalize marijuana. Apparently he was so high that he forgot he’s in California, where pot is already more legal than budget-balancing.