International Museum of Surgical Science
A trip through the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago will make you glad you live in the modern world instead of the “good old days”! Wired has a gallery of exhibit photos ranging from a skull that belonged to a trepanation patient to early x-ray machines. Pictured is a vest used in 1899 to correct scoliosis. If this were posted as a “What Is It?” I would guess it to be an instrument of torture. Link -via Digg
(image credit: Jim Merithew/Wired.com)
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10 Drug Breakthroughs that Changed the Medical World
WebMD recently consulted with experts to determine the most important drugs from throughout history. They were looking for drugs that changed the medical landscape by either treating a large number of people with a range of problems or by showing that it is possible to treat a disease.
You might be able to guess that penicillin or the smallpox vaccine are included in the list, but others such as aspirin might surprise you. The link below includes a graphic that shows the drugs that made the list and provide information on the hottest selling drugs today and the likely hot one of tomorrow. The original WebMD story discusses the rationale behind choosing each drug.
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Placebos Are Becoming More Effective
The percentage of new pharmaceutical products that fail their effectiveness trials is growing. The culprit is the placebo effect, which appears to be stronger than in years past. If a drug cannot provide relief significantly better than a sugar pill, it won’t go on the market.
The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.
It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.
Wired takes a look at how the placebo effect works, and the various reasons newer drugs don’t compete as well with the mind’s ability to affect our bodies. Link -via Boing Boing
Previously at Neatorama: Prozac: No Better Than Placebo?
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The Everlasting Pill
Wouldn’t it nice if one dose of medicine could be used over and over? The was the premise behind the everlasting cathartic pill. It was made of metal, and leeched out antimony as it passed through the digestive system, aiding in the elimination of parasites. It was billed as a cathartic, or laxative as we would say today. And the pill could be recycled! According to a 1907 pharmaceutical guide:
The bullet was passed out, recovered from the feces and used over and over again. This, as Dr. J. A. Paris says, was economy in right earnest, for a single pill would serve a whole family during their lives and might be transmitted as an heirloom to posterity.
Some heirloom! Link
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Longer Eyelashes, Just A Drug Away
The FDA has just approved a drug that will help lengthen your eyelashes. Hopefully they won’t get quite as long as the ones in this photo, but who knows the long term effects of eyelash medication overdoses?
The drug, Allergan, contains an active ingredient that was originally created to treat glaucoma, but found to have this pleasant side effect. The drug should be available in May and will cost $120 per each month’s supply. It will take about two to four months for the effect to start to show.
Link Photo By Asobitsuchiya [Flickr]
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A Vaccine for the Ebola Virus?
Scientists may finally be on the cusp of finding a vaccine for the Ebola virus. According to an article in EurekAlert:
Because Ebola virus is so dangerous, producing and testing a vaccine is extremely challenging for the scientists. One significant factor slowing down progress has been that there are only a very limited number of high containment facilities with staff capable and authorised to conduct the research.
“Ebola virus is a Biosafety Level 4 threat, along with many other haemorrhagic fever viruses”, says Dr Sanchez. “As well as the difficulty in getting the right staff and facilities, vaccines for viruses like Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have been difficult to produce because simple ‘killed’ viruses that just trigger an antibody response from the blood are not effective. For these viruses we need to get a cell-mediated response, which involves our bodies producing killer T-cells before immunity is strong enough to prevent or clear an infection.”
The researchers have now used several different recombinant DNA techniques, which have allowed them to trigger a cell-mediated response and produce a vaccine that is effective in non-human primates. One of the candidate vaccines is about to be tested on people for the first time, after entering Phase 1 clinical trials in autumn 2006.
I’m old enough to still remember the early 90s, when movies like Outbreak and books like The Hot Zone had a firm grip on the popular imagination. There was a mystique about these deadly diseases that people just found utterly compelling. I can’t really speculate why, except to say that that maybe it’s the same reason people find serial killers compelling too: We long to know why/how they do what they do. But, like serial killers, we’ll probably never understand any of them completely. We just need to be able to stop them.
Here’s wishing Dr. Sanchez good luck at the CDC today, where he’ll be presenting Ebola vaccine developments!
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Amputees 'regain sense of touch'
Scientists have managed to restore a sense of touch to two patients with prosthetic arms, in what is seen as a step towards creating sensitive limbs.
When heat or pressure was applied to the chest, the patients said they felt as if their hand was being touched. Dr Todd Kuiken, who led the research, said it could pave the way to providing amputees with the ability to feel what he touches with a prosthetic hand as if it were his own hand. Via: BBC News
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