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Another Petri Dish Study Touted By Media As Miracle Cure For Cancer

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Maitake soup Tiny Urban Kitchen.jpgEarlier this week, I saw one of the best treatments of a misinterpreted story that has me thinking about how all news outlets should report in vitro laboratory studies.

Only thing is that it didn’t come from a news outlet.

It came a brainwashing site run by those medical socialist types – I am, of course, speaking of the UK National Health Service and their excellent patient education website, NHS Choices.

You may recall reading in the popular dead-tree or online press that investigators from New York Medical College in Valhalla published in British Journal of Urology International about maitake mushroom extract killing bladder cancer cells. The most widely cited reports came from the UK Daily Mail by Tamara Cohen entitled, “Mushroom ‘shrinks cancer tumours by 75 percent,'” and “Cancer Cure: Mushrooms Can Shrink Tumors,” by Jo Willey of the UKDaily Express. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata - PostRank (PostRank: All)*

Bunny Tattoo Becomes 3D With ICD Implant

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Well, at least it’s one way to make a former tattoo three-dimensional:


Just putting the sexy back… 🙂

-Wes

Photo used with patient permission.

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Hidden Costs In The Healthcare Reform Bills: How To Fake Budget Neutrality

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President Obama said he will not sign a healthcare reform bill that was not budget neutral. You can view this statement at 3.50 minutes into this video clip.

The only way that can happen is if the healthcare expenses in both bills are hidden, unrealistic expense estimates are or expenses deflected to other areas in the budget. The Senate and House bill do both. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Sexually Transmitted Infections Still On The Rise

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The CDC announced last week that the latest statistics on Chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are still unacceptably high in the United States. The U.S. has some of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections of any developed country in the world including 1.2 cases of Chlamydia in 2008 and syphilis cases, up 18 percent, are at 13,500. Men who have sex with men accounted for 63 percent of the syphilis cases, but the rate among women also increased 36 percent between 2007 and 2008.

Almost half of the 19 million new sexually transmitted infection cases reported each year are among 15- to 24-year-olds. Clearly marking the shift away from abstinence-only policies, the CDC called for better, more honest and open, sex education including how to use a condom, limiting the number of sexual partners, and avoiding people who have had multiple sex partners. Read more »

This post, Sexually Transmitted Infections Still On The Rise, was originally published on Healthine.com by Nancy Brown, Ph.D..

Taking Joy In The Little Things

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The past few days have shown me some small pleasures of my practice.  I spent about 20 minutes sewing together the hand and forehead of a sweet elderly lady who fell down while being evacuated from a nursing home fire.  Her skin, like tissue, came together in fragile folds; my hands moved easily with the needle and thread thanks to so many years of practice, so many hundreds of feet of sutures placed.  Although I must admit that my cataract-stricken right eye left my depth perception imperfect in a way that bonded me to her.  (Sitting here, with no reading glasses, I can close my left eye and all I see is a hint of lines on the page, but no letters.)

My sweet little lady smiled at me, nervously, tentatively, but was comforted at the prospect of  going back to her bed.  Her son eased her fear with  jokes, then took her home. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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