doctors

While mastectomies save many women from breast cancer, they often leave the subject feeling depressed, unattractive and ashamed. Some women opt for breast implants in an attempt to regain their lost positive body image, but an Australian doctor has now developed a device that allows women to regrow their lost breast using their own tissue.

Until the naked mole rats yield their secrets, humanity will still have to worry about treating and controlling cancer. And to that end, one company may have figured out a novel way to prevent the spread of a highly dangerous form of brain cancer, through the use of pulsing electric fields.

While some companies hope an iTunes-like approach to distributing scientific papers on the cheap will get journal articles into the hands of people who need them, a new study shows that many medical students are already taking the Napster approach. A new paper studying the downloading habits of medical students found 125,000 users of peer-to-peer filesharing services who obtained some 5,000 scientific papers for free, circumventing the usual $30 fee.

In a few years, doctors won’t need to fill the bodies of gastrointestinal-cancer patients with chemotherapy drugs that also kill off normal tissue. Instead, patients will swallow an electronic pill that finds its way to a tumor, dispenses drugs onto it—and only it—and then passes harmlessly from the body. That’s the promise of the iPill, an ingestible capsule being developed by the electronics giant Philips.

At 3 p.m. last June 22, Pam Barco’s heart stopped. The 46-year-old ER clerk at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was near the end of her shift when she felt dizzy, put her head down on her desk, and suddenly stopped breathing. A nearby co-worker saw Barco slump over and shouted, “Staff emergency!” Minutes later, a dozen doctors and nurses surrounded Barco’s body. They shocked her with a defibrillator. No response. They shocked her twice more. Nothing. Then: Beep. Beep. Beep.

Road signs have been a blessing to many drivers, acting as a quick guide away from danger or to the nearest gas stations. Now researchers in France have come up with an iconic language of their own to help lead doctors to the right drug prescription. Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his colleagues at the University of Paris hope the VCM (Visulaisation des Connaissances Médicales) icon system will help lessen prescribing errors. Something often traced to restraints on physicians' time and resources that prevent them from easily looking up or remembering drug properties. With VCM, doctors can see the risks associated with any given drug at a glance.