AllHealthcare

If you are taking care of someone at home who has H1N1 (swine) flu, it is important for you to prevent other people in the house from getting sick, according to Gary Kalkut, MD, MPH, Senior Vice-President, Chief Medical Officer of Montefiore Medical Center. Dr. Kalkut and his colleagues at Montefiore offer the following information and advice on preventing illness during ...

MELBOURNE, Australia — A team of 16 surgeons and nurses successfully concluded 25 hours of delicate surgery Tuesday to separate twin Bangladeshi girls who had been joined at their heads, sharing blood vessels and brain tissue. It is too early to know whether the two-year-old girls, Trishna and Krishna, suffered any brain damage during the marathon operation — an outcome doctors ...

People looking for natural cures will be happy to know there is one. Two words explain how it works: "I believe." It's the placebo effect - the ability of a dummy pill or a faked treatment to make people feel better, just because they expect that it will. It's the mind's ability to alter physical symptoms, such as pain, anxiety and ...

LONDON - British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart. After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark's faulty one did what many experts had thought impossible: it healed itself enough so that doctors could remove the donated heart. But ...

He lived 15 months with an incurable brain tumor, a little longer than usual for a patient in his late 70s. Perhaps equally important is that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy lived those months well - able to work almost to the end, to sail the choppy New England waters he adored, to help elect a president he supported, and even to ...

These bums are costing you a fortune. Ricky Alardo, a homeless alcoholic nicknamed Ricky Ricardo, swigs cheap vodka by day at his favorite corner in Washington Heights, then calls an ambulance to chauffeur him to the hospital for a free meal and a warm place to sleep, courtesy of taxpayers who fund his Medicaid benefits. For a chronic caller like Alardo ...

CHICAGO - A government report says the rate of dangerous staph infections has dropped dramatically in hospital intensive-care units, a rare encouraging sign about a hard-to-treat "superbug." The report involving nearly 600 hospitals is the largest to document a long-term decline in the level of IV tube-related infections of MRSA, a deadly drug-resistant staph germ. The rate of MRSA bloodstream infections ...

WASHINGTON - Patients suffering from obsessive, distressing thoughts have a new treatment option: a pacemaker-like device that relieves anxiety with electrical jolts to the brain. The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Medtronic's Reclaim Deep Brain Stimulator device as the first implant to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes uncontrollable worries, such as fear of germs or dirt. Patients suffering from ...

A federal investigation has found problems with a controversial study of an alternative medicine treatment for heart attack survivors. People in the study were not told enough about the potential dangers of the treatment, called chelation ("kee-LAY'shun"), according to a report from the U.S. Office for Human Research Protections. The report says some doctors involved in the study have been disciplined ...

Facilities for sick troops at two Army bases in the region have been declared unacceptable. Dishforth Airfield, in North Yorkshire, and Imphal Barracks, near York, have been named among the worst MoD sites after an independent review of forces' medical care. Patients' confidentiality at the two sites was compromised, with private conversations with doctors being overheard, according to the Healthcare Commission. ...

MELVILLE, N.Y. _ Long Island cancer doctors have borrowed a page from medicine's past to write a new chapter on how to address a rare malignancy by infusing heated chemotherapy directly into the abdomen using a heart-lung machine. The treatment is being tested at Stony Brook University Medical Center as a therapy for cancer of the appendix, a malignancy so rare ...

With the number of uninsured rising daily, a prominent South Miami radiologist is offering free mammogram screenings for women who have lost their jobs and health insurance. "In the spirit of Barack Obama, we need to volunteer to help our country, " said Nilza Kallos, who operates the Breast Health Center and Diagnostic Ultrasound. [widget:1048] She challenged other physicians to make ...

HARTFORD, Conn. - Aurice Barlow knows what happens when someone can't afford dental care. "I see people walking the streets with toothaches, teeth hanging out of their mouths," said the former nurse's aide. At least 30 percent of the people in this city of 124,500 are impoverished. "Nobody cares," she says. Barlow is worried she'll now become one of them. [widget:1089] ...

More people are turning to a new trend to let others know about their medical condition - tattooing. A case report presented today at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) 18th Annual Meeting & Clinical Congress shed light on this new phenomenon, while urging discussion from the medical community. The report's primary author, Saleh Aldasouqi, MD, FACE, first discovered medical ...

MINNEAPOLIS - A Minnesota judge ruled Friday that a 13-year-old cancer patient must be evaluated by a doctor to determine if the boy would benefit from restarting chemotherapy over his parents' objections. In a 58-page ruling, Brown County District Judge John Rodenberg found that Daniel Hauser has been "medically neglected" by his parents, Colleen and Anthony Hauser, and was in need ...

As a primary care doctor, I am frequently faced with decisions where the choice is not always clear. Do the latest, more expensive drugs work better than the less costly, older medications? Will ordering an MRI help me treat a patient's lower back pain? Often, the answer to these questions is, "I'm not sure." Because doctors rarely are sure which treatments ...

Despite increased emphasis on patient safety, little progress has been made in making U.S. hospitals safer, a researcher said. Dr. Peter Pronovost, a critical care specialist at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, identified physician autonomy and a lack of standardization of safety protocols as to why patient safety has not improved. "It's been almost 10 years since the Institute of ...

DALLAS _ Beverly Freeman struggled alone. A passing medical tech found her collapsed beside her bed near dawn that Tuesday and slapped a blue emergency lever near the door of Room 405. A two-tone alarm sounded on the fourth floor, and a calm voice came over the intercom at Baylor University Medical Center, saying: "Code blue, Jonsson 405; code blue, Jonsson ...

NEW YORK — One in five Medicare patients end up back in the hospital within a month of discharge, a large study found, and that practice costs billions of dollars a year. The findings suggest patients aren't told enough about how to take care of themselves and stay healthy before they go home, the researchers said. A few simple things - ...

GENEVA - Swine flu is now formally a pandemic, a declaration by U.N. health officials that will speed vaccine production and spur government spending to combat the first global flu epidemic in 41 years. Thursday's announcement by the World Health Organization doesn't mean the virus is any more lethal - only that its spread is considered unstoppable. Since it was first ...