Physicians and scientists around the world even go as far as to state that smoking leads to premature death. Don’t we all know someone who smokes constantly, even heavily, yet is still living — or has lived — to the mature age of eighty, ninety, and older? Furthermore, the MDs and PhDs state that smoking causes cancer and emphysema. If this diagnosis were definitive, wouldn’t these afflictions affect all smokers equally, rather than the small percentage that it actually does affect?
posted by Eekacat on Mar 23, 2005 - 78 comments

Conscience Clauses and Health Care --"Yes, we need to respect individual freedom of religion. But at what point does it cross the line of not providing essential medical care? At what point is it malpractice?" she asked. "If someone's beliefs interfere with practicing their profession, perhaps they should do something else." The Protection of Conscience Project feels differently: Protection of Conscience Laws are needed because powerful interests are inclined to force health care workers and others to participate, directly or indirectly, in morally controversial procedures, while NARAL says: ... Many of these clauses go far beyond respecting individuals' beliefs to the point of harming women by not providing them with full information or access to medical treatment. Medicine, not ideology, should determine medical decisions.
posted by amberglow on Sep 17, 2004 - 69 comments

Painkillers destroy hearing - Looks like America's fascination with Vicodin, Oxycotin, and other hardcore painkillers has a lasting effect other than addiction. Studies are showing that "rapid hearing loss, even deafness, in some patients who are misusing the drugs". This is serious enough for Vicodin's manufacturer to add a "warning about the potential for hearing loss to the drug's label."

Is Rush Limbaugh's sudden deafness and recent involvement in a painkiller drug investigation simply a coincidence?
posted by Argyle on Oct 3, 2003 - 38 comments

In lieu of today's posts on GM foods and meat, Trans Ova Genetics is pharming cows in hopes of creating one capable of adminstering human antibodies.
posted by hobbes on Aug 25, 2003 - 5 comments

The American Gallery of Psychiatric Art. 'Sanity For Sale: 1960-2000'. Magazine advertisements for psychiatric medications in the latter half of the twentieth century.
posted by eyebeam on Jul 23, 2003 - 15 comments

Doctors baffled as boy explains 'unique' problem. His parents didn't believe him at first, but can you blame them? This is beyond bizarre.
posted by christian on Jul 10, 2003 - 76 comments

Welcome to self-policing corporate responsibility. A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer (Expertise with responsibility) sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs - medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS - to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980s while selling a new, safer product in the West.
posted by The Jesse Helms on May 22, 2003 - 6 comments

Back pain causes brain shrinkage. I think a lot of people have back pain, then.
posted by nyxxxx on Mar 22, 2003 - 24 comments

Genomic Art. This lies somewhere on an interface between science and art that most never suspected existed. Check out the gallery.
Oh, and don't forget to visit the Randolph Y. Teasely Hospital - Dwayne Medical Center and it's current projects: male pregnancy, designer babies and Clyven, the world's first talking transgenic mouse.
posted by talos on Jan 22, 2003 - 3 comments

Tiny camera reveals the inside story for patient.
This is pretty dam clever. Girl swallows pill size camera, and doctors 40 miles away investigate her condition. Echos of Inner Space and The fantastic voyage
posted by monkeyJuice on Oct 11, 2002 - 6 comments

Paracelsus: the mercucial mage. The Fortean Times' David Hambling on one of the 16th's century's most colorful figures. A rabble-rousing non-conformist medical genuis who arguably was centuries ahead of his time, but also an egomaniac, drunk, alchemist and self-described "Prince of Philosophy and Medicine" and "Monarch of all the Arts"
posted by skallas on Aug 30, 2002 - 5 comments

We're back! [2] A new resistant strain of staph has been documented in a Michigan Man. Agricultural and medical abuse of antibiotics has quickly lead us to the point where only very expensive and rarely used antibiotics can treat some new antibiotic resistant strains of staph (and acne). On the bright side you can get your antibiotics by drinking some river water.
posted by srboisvert on Jul 21, 2002 - 11 comments

Safety of MRI scans - annoying and temporary free registration required.
If movement whilst being scanned may not be safe, then what about the heart, lungs, blood and even a foetus? You can't keep those still.
Background: Of Mice & Magnets.
posted by southisup on May 26, 2002 - 12 comments

Professor becomes world's first cyborg Surgeons have carried out a ground-breaking operation on a cybernetics professor so that his nervous system can be wired up to a computer. It is hoped that the procedure could lead to a medical breakthrough for people paralysed by spinal cord damage, like Superman actor Christopher Reeve. Prof Warwick believes it also opens up the possibility of a sci-fi world of cyborgs, where the human brain can one day be upgraded with implants for extra memory, intelligence or X-ray vision. The medical possibilities with this are amazing, so why does it make me feel so uneasy?
posted by Tarrama on Mar 22, 2002 - 24 comments

BOUTIQUE MEDICAL PRACTICES The answer to very good health care in America. If you can afford it. Otherwise....
posted by Postroad on Mar 3, 2002 - 7 comments

Utah Leads Nation in Rate of Anti-Depressant Use. It is interesting (to me) in that the people doing the study credit a "Mother of Zion" syndrome of married Mormon women putting on the happy face regardless of how happy they truly are. My state is up at the top also. Could be all the rain I guess. . .*sigh*
posted by Danf on Feb 20, 2002 - 45 comments

Convict Heart Transplant A 31 year old 2 time felon just got a heart transplant, costing tax payers close to $1 million dollars. With an annual additional cost of $15,000. Right? Wrong? I'm not so sure.
posted by SuzySmith on Jan 30, 2002 - 15 comments

michael dowling's medicine wheel (scroll down) an annual event on world aids day in boston -- md creates a labyrinthe/medicine wheel to honour the dead and help the living remember. what are your cities doing for a day without art?
posted by pxe2000 on Dec 1, 2001 - 0 comments

Medical marijuana not as effective as previously thought. Should this study affect the legalization talks?
posted by bytecode on Jul 6, 2001 - 7 comments

Someone else's Religion or your health? How the Catholic church is manipulating medical research in the United States. Stem cell research offers some exciting opportunities for medicine but the Pope doesn't think so.
posted by keithl on Jun 21, 2001 - 48 comments

This guy thinks all natural deaths are caused by vitamin or mineral deficiencies. And is a great read. Imagine Ross Perot saying this:
Well, when I practised for 12 years up in Portland, somebody'd come to me with a headache. Never had one, and I'd just walk up to them and tap them on their sinuses, and if they collapsed to their knees, they'd know they had a sinus headache. "Oh Doc, why'd you do that?" Well, that's a cheap lab test. Then if they had blood dripping out of their nose, it would take a $35 x-ray to see if they had a cancer in there. 35 bucks and a free lab test as opposed to 421 bucks.
I'm pretty sure he's a nut. But you can never tell.
posted by norm on Jan 19, 2001 - 5 comments

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,372067,00.html Thousands of South American indians were infected with measles, killing hundreds, in order to for US scientists to study the effects on primitive societies of natural selection.
posted by hobbes on Sep 22, 2000 - 5 comments

Junkies stricken with a new, mysterious ailment. All thanks to Follow Me Here for the link. This one's eerily familiar if you remember the Eighties, or just read And the Band Played On once or twice.
posted by Ezrael on Jun 11, 2000 - 13 comments

Cure for Carpal tunnel Syndrom enters clinical trial For all you folks that spend most of your lives at the keyboard salvation may be here soon.
posted by hubrix on Mar 9, 2000 - 0 comments