Heart Stop Beating | Jeremiah Zagar

kidlove:

Medicine | Daughter

medicalstate:

Bringing Light created by Bert Klasey, Chris Baron & James Allen Smith for Focus Forward Films.

We often draw our inspirations from nature. It allows us to see things differently, to try new approaches, to think outside the box. In this case, researchers are looking to make brain tumours more visible for surgery through the use of fluorescence-labeled scorpion toxin. Read more here.

caitibug757:

Various illustrations by Tom Jones, founder of UIC’s Biomedical Visualization program and first president of the Association of Medical Illustrators. The department has various original illustrations by Jones, these were some of the ones that I enjoyed best.

First AMI Annual Meeting, Philadelphia 1946, Tom Jones is fourth from left in front row. 

For one of my classes, we listed to a lecture on Tom Jones and his contributions to medical illustration. He was always looking to the future, and believed in the use of various new media to help educate doctors, patients, and the public on medical matters. He helped shape modern medical illustration through his illustration along with his work with the Association of Medical Illustrators.

For more info on Tom Jones and the AMI: http://www.ami.org/about-the-ami/history-of-ami.html

We often think of illnesses being defined in a laboratory by scientists or in a clinic by doctors. But definitions of health and illness are also shaped by cultural milieus, social contexts, market forces, blind assumptions and even unconscious biases in ways that have profound implications for individuals and societies. —Jonathan Metzl (via mindovermatterzine)

skeptv:

Making Medicine from Nature

Three cutting-edge medical technologies inspired by biodiversity. This Bio Bulletin snapshot is third in a series to celebrate the 2010 International Year of Biodiversity.

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Rogue Response: Chemotherapy Undermines Itself

A new study, published in Nature Medicine, has suggested that chemotherapy used to treat metastatic cancers can cause a rogue response in healthy cells, which helps to explain why people become resistant to the treatment. Chemotherapy has been shown to lose effectiveness in a large number of patients (approximately 90%) with secondary cancers - those that started out as solid cancers in areas such as the breast, lung, and colon, and metastasised, or spread to a different area of the body. The new research shows that the cause of this resistance could be hidden in fibroblasts - wound-healing cells around tumours discovered to create a protein that may teach the cancerous cells how to evade the treatment.

Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle looked at the damage chemotherapy was causing to the fibroblast cells surrounding tumours. Because the radiation caused DNA damage, the fibroblasts produced up to 30 times more of a specific protein, Wnt16B, than they should. The protein fuels cancer cells to invade and attack surrounding tissues and evade chemotherapy treatments.

It was already known that Wnt16B was involved in the development of cancers, but not in treatment resistance. The researchers hope they can put a stop to the protein response, and greatly improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy, especially for those patients with multiple cancers. 

Professor Fran Balkwill, a Cancer Research UK expert on the microenvironment around tumours, said: “This work fits with other research showing that cancer treatments don’t just affect cancer cells, but can also target cells in and around tumours. Sometimes this can be good - for instance, chemotherapy can stimulate surrounding, healthy immune cells to attack tumours. But this work confirms that having healthy cells around the tumour can help the tumour become resistant to treatment. 

“The next step is to find ways to target these resistance mechanisms to help make chemotherapy more effective.”

Top image: A human fibroblast cell. Bottom image: Mouse fibroblast cells.

The original paper was published in Nature Medicine. A brief synopsis, and link to the full paper, can be found here.

neurosciencestuff:

The World’s Most Famous Brain

In the summer of 1953, Henry Gustav Molaison (1926-2008) underwent brain surgery to contain epileptic seizures that had become critically debilitating. The intervention brought some relief from convulsions, but these positive results were overshadowed by an astonishing and indelible side effect. Soon after the operation, it became apparent that he could no longer recognize hospital staff, he did not remember the way home, he did not remember newspaper articles he had just read, nor the crossword puzzles he had solved; otherwise, he was completely normal. Since the time of the surgery, more than five decades of scrupulous neuropsychological research examined the nature of patient H.M.’s amnesia which proved to be both persistent and remarkably selective.

The goal of our project is to provide a window into the brain of the man who helped establish the scientific study of memory and unfailingly forgot the enormously generous contribution he made to medical research.

You do not see a lot of young doctors these days. Now by the time everyone is finished their residency, everyone is into their late twenties or their thirties even. When I was about your age I was ready to work. Now the training has increased, the residencies are longer, and the knowledge we expect of you grows. It kind of makes you wonder: when does it end? —An older physician reflects on how the times have changed and how the newer generation of doctors have finished training progressively later than when he was in medical school. (via medicalstate)

dailymedical:

Your Pupils Reveal More Than You Might Think: How Subtle Eye Movements Give You Away

Your eyes may give your thoughts away, according to new research.

Eye movements can reflect emotional state, influence memories and provide clues about the way someone thinks, according to scientists from Arizona State University.

Learn more

medicalschool:

Angiogram: X-ray postmortem normal coronaries

Medical State of Mind: An ER Minute

medicalstate:

The time is eight thirty.
The ventilation whirs softly above me as I write a chart.
The main screen blinks and blips as the heart monitor syncs;
stretcher #3: bradycardia.

Distressed eyes gaze at me from across the hall.
Curtains half pulled, the patient leans in his stretcher
anxious, looking…

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea,
but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all. —Sir William Osler (via medicalstate)

Medical Expert Recommends Ditching Pills for Gardening to Treat Depression

indiancountry:

A medical expert in the United Kingdom recommends doctors prescribe gardening to help patients beat depression, reported the Fraser Coast Chronicle.

anncv:

A quick video explanation of optogenetics - the 2010 Method of the Year.