I Heart Guts » Medical Guts

The Popular Pineal

gutsy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:11:26 +0000

The pineal gland may be small, but it looms large in the minds of literary types. Did you know the pineal gland was a source of fascination to philosophers like Descartes, who called it the “seat of the soul“? The pineal gland captured the imagination of authors like Hunter S. Thompson, whose character Dr. Gonzo feared the psychoactive properties of pineal gland extract in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Man, I’ll try just about anything, but I’d never in hell touch a pineal gland,” Dr. Gonzo said in the movie version of the book. In his novel Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace’s fictional corporation Stonecipheco worked on putting a pineal additive in baby food. More pop culture pineal stuff here.

Planting Eggs

gutsy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:18:28 +0000

I didn’t even know that ovarian transplants were possible, but indeed they are. Not only that, but one cancer survivor who underwent an ovarian transplant later gave birth to a child naturally, even though her chemo treatment put her in early menopause earlier. After the Danish woman was diagnosed with Ewings sarcoma, they preserved part of her ovary before undergoing radiation therapy. The case was reported in the journal Human Reproduction. {via WebMD}

Drama in the ER

gutsy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:04:37 +0000

Well, whaddya know it’s another medical show! We didn’t think there could possibly be room for another hospital procedural, but apparently the public is still hungering for more. Either that, or television execs are desperate for ratings. Anyway. The new CBS show Miami Medical follows the adrenaline-fueled lives of a team of docs working in a South Florida trauma hospital unit. Debuts in April.

Surgery Lesson

gutsy — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:57:59 +0000

“What a surgeon does to a patient — if it were done without consent — would be a felony.” surgeon and inventor Dr. Catherine Mohr tells TED in a fascinating podcast about the past, present and future of surgery. Learn about the brutalities of old-school surgery, performed without anesthesia and often without even clean hands, and familiarize yourself with surgery’s robotic future. This skull dates back 5,000-10,000 years, waaay before aseptic surgical techniques and certainly way before anesthetics. The crazy thing? Anthropologists have determined that from the healing seen on this trephinated skull that the “patient” actually survived this brutal and crude brain surgery. The surgical future includes amazing things like repairing the heart without cracking the ribcage.

For Your Bones

gutsy — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:09:10 +0000

You break it, you can buy it — an xray depiction of the mess inside your cast by Casttoo. They even use your actual x-ray! It tells a story and of course if more exciting than your usual signatures and the retelling of “Yes, I really broke my wrist opening a can of cat food.” {JWZ via Boing Boing}

Let the Sun Shine In

gutsy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:43:59 +0000

We all know getting a few rays of sunshine can be good for you, but we didn’t know that the vitamin D synthesized by the body is actually crucial to your thymus gland — and your immune system. Infection fighting T-cells (which mature in the thymus) need plenty of vitamin D from the bloodstream to do their job, according to a paper published in Nature Immunology (a magazine which, not coincidentally, features the thymus gland quite a bit). “If the T cells cannot find enough vitamin D in the blood, they won’t even begin to mobilize,” says University of Copenhagen prof Carsten Geisler told Cordis News. So get outside and catch a few rays, why don’t ya? Doctor’s orders.

Germ Hell

gutsy — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:19:44 +0000

For all you nurses out there tired of the non-stop handwashing associated with your job, there is a new technology set to kill germs with the push of a button. Plasma gas hand sanitizers, which kill microbes — even stubborn ones like MRSA, the drug-resistant bug that is the scourge of hospitals everywhere — with a zap of gas. They even clean under fingernails! For nurses and doctors sick and tired of chapped hands and Purell, these gadgets could be pretty cool. {via New York Times}

Just Hanging Out

gutsy — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:59:21 +0000

Wondering why testicles hang at slightly different heights sounds more like locker-room banter than the subject of a scientific paper, but questions about scrotal irregularity loom large even in the minds of doctors. “Swinging high and low: why do the testes hang at different levels? A theory on surface area and thermoregulation,” published in Med Hypotheses in 2008, thinks balls that hang at different levels cool off more efficiently than evenly hanging testes. “In effect, just by suspension at two levels, nearly one entire extra surface is available for thermoregulation and cooling,” the paper, co-authored by Kuma A and Kumar CJ, explains. {via DiscoBlogs}

Big Fat Brains

gutsy — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:05:47 +0000

Are bigger brains necessarily better brains? Sometimes, yes, but not always. It’s the quality of the grey matter that counts and, of course, how you use it. For instance, Einstein had an average size brain, but had a humungous area of his parietal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for visual imagery and mathematical thinking. Women have smaller brains than men overall because we tend to be physically smaller. But that doesn’t make us dumber, we just use our noodles differently, and, some say, make better use of a smaller space. Also, the additional surface area offered by deeper folds and convolutions on the brains surface can also give the average size brain more thinking power. {via Boing Boing, brain cupcake image courtesy of Me, Myself and Meningioma}

Print Me An Organ

gutsy — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:22:14 +0000

This article sounded so sci-fi I almost didn’t believe it was real, but according to The Economist, the era of being able to print 3-D human organs is no just coming — it’s here. A company specializing in regenerative medicine, Organovo, and engineering firm Invetech have teamed up to make a bio-printer capable of making simple body parts such as snippets of blood vessels, tissue and skin, all formed from the patient’s own cells (to avoid the usual rejection). The article points out that printing more complex biological parts, like livers, kidneys and even hearts, can’t be far behind, after all, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina made seven brand-new bladders for patients and all are still working just fine, thank you.