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.
Archive for the ‘Newsy Guts’ Category
Drama in the ER
Posted: Tuesday, March 16th, 2010Surgery Lesson
Posted: Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
“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.
High Fashion Guts
Posted: Monday, March 8th, 2010
Organic fashion just got a new look courtesy of Rei Kawakubo’s fall 2010 collection for Comme des Garçons. Her dresses were decorated with blobby shapes that resembled kidneys, pancreases, stomachs, hearts and intestines, but worn on the outside. The theme for the collection? Inside decoration. We love it! {photos courtesy Hint Magazine and Style.com}
Talk to the Hand
Posted: Monday, March 8th, 2010
If today was April 1st, I might think this story was a joke: Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a technology that turns any part of the human body into a touch screen like those found on smartphones. I’m still waiting for the chip I can implant into my body, but maybe this kind of non-surgical cyborgism is what I really need instead. {via Techjackal}
Let the Sun Shine In
Posted: Monday, March 8th, 2010
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
Posted: Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
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
Posted: Monday, March 1st, 2010
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
Posted: Friday, February 26th, 2010
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
Posted: Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
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.
Gimme Your Uterus
Posted: Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Hysterectomies are such a common way of solving lady-part woes that the idea of a uterus transplant sounds totally foreign. Oddly enough, the uterus transplant, while rare now, might become more commonplace in the future. We can only imagine how difficult it would be to transplant such a blood-vessel rich organ, and that’s only the beginning of the trouble with this particular transplant. The first uterus transplant, performed in Saudi Arabia in the year 2000, was rejected after 99 days because of major blood clotting. Weirdly enough, the woman who received the transplant was 26 years old, and her donor was a 46 year old woman with a history of ovarian cysts who was advised to have a hysterectomy (uh, correct me if I’m wrong, but if one doctor says to take it out, maybe don’t transplant it into someone else?). On those days when one feels like ripping out her uterus with a fork, the idea of a uterus transplant actually sounds pretty good. {photo courtesy of the Washington Post}
