Latest News

Wanted: A Test With Less Recoil; Every Attempt to Create Sensitive but Less Unpleasant Colon Cancer Screen, Including the Latest, Falls Short
_____Another imperfect new test for colon cancer has entered the market -- the second screening method to draw wide attention in six months -- and the impetus is no mystery. Dissatisfaction with the gold standard test, colonoscopy, is driving the hunt for more patient-friendly alternatives, but so far all fall short of the ideal.
_____The latest test, called Pregen-Plus and developed by Exact Sciences in Marlborough, Mass., looks for DNA patterns in a patient's stool sample. But while the test is noninvasive -- an advantage for the colonoscopy-adverse -- and needn't be administered by a gastroenterologist, it's also far less sensitive in its detection capability and it's expensive.
Washington Post, March 9

Out for Blood: Can Leeches End Your Knee Pain?
_____Could voracious bloodsucking creatures, looking for a new post-Halloween role, find it in medicine? In a paper published today, a group of researchers suggests that letting four to six leeches suck away for an hour or so can dull the pain of osteoarthritis of the knee for weeks.
_____The work, done by a group of German doctors and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, compared 24 patients who received one round of leech therapy -- just over an hour of sucking by four to six of the worms -- to 27 patients who received a single dose of a painkilling gel. A week after the treatments, the bloodletting group reported feeling significantly better than their undrained peers. Three months later, this difference was not statistically significant, though patients in both groups reported feeling better than before they started.
_____"Currently, no pharmacologic agent has similar lasting effects after a single, local administration," wrote the authors, from the academic teaching hospital of the University of Duisburg-Essen. While acknowledging that the mechanism by which leech feeding might relieve pain was unknown, they speculated that leech saliva may contain pain-fighting chemicals.
Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2003

Bed Medicine?: It's Not a Drug. But Ads for a 'Viagra-Like' Product for Women Might Fool You
_____For those for whom the sexual revolution has deteriorated into some sort of battle-of-the-sexes arms race, a company called Warner Health Care says it can offer women something to keep competitive with their Viagra-enhanced mates in the quest for sexual satisfaction.
_____Warner's product, Avlimil, is a widely advertised, slickly packaged set of pills designed to be taken daily. Readers of magazines as varied as Parenting and Forbes have seen the ads, with their soft-focus photos suggesting a solution to a problem called female sexual dysfunction. "They have Viagra," goes the two-page pitch. "Now we have Avlimil." The fine print (and what worth-its-salt medical ad would be without fine print?) suggests the pill "is an effective formula for improving female sexual response."
_____The fine print also mentions one distinction between the little blue pill and Avlimil: "Avlimil is not a prescription drug. It is a non-synthetic, once-daily, non-hormonal supplement." Skip the fine print and you might never know.
Washington Post, July 29, 2003

Think it Out: 6 proven ways to use your mind to heal your body
_____The man who walked into Dr. Herbert Benson's Boston office was a mess. He was a stress case at work, he suffered awful headaches, and his stratospheric blood pressure did not respond to high doses of prescription medicines. But rather than throw more drugs at him, Dr. Benson, an M.D. who works at a Harvard-affiliated health center called the Mind/Body Medical Institute, prescribed a 10- to 20-minute daily dose of what he calls the "relaxation response": a calming exercise of muscle relaxation and controlled breathing. "He found that, slowly and inexorably, the headaches became less profound," Dr. Benson says. "Eventually, they totally disappeared. His hypertension, which required relatively high doses of two medications, dropped so significantly that he needed only a fraction of the dose of one medication. This man gained a new perspective."
_____Stories of patients using meditation and positive energy to will themselves to health have been floating around since the days of leeches and bloodletting. For the most part, physicians have treated the mind-over-disease idea as an offshoot of voodoo medicine. Until recently, that is. Within the past 20 years, doctors and scientists have begun studying the mind-body connection in earnest, and now they're pinning down the science behind the brain's ability to influence healing. While you can't tell your immune-system cells where to go, it's becoming increasingly clear that you can nudge them along.
_____T "These aren't trivial effects," says Michael Irwin, M.D., director of the Cousins Center of Psychoneuroimmunology (that's 39 Scrabble points, not counting double word bonuses) at UCLA. He's testing what happens when people are taught to lighten up. "The effects we see with these behavioral interventions are bigger than those found with a placebo."
Men's Health, May 2003