Health, Medical | featured news

Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer. The investments are based on the belief that the medical establishment is moving toward the routine sequencing of every patient’s genome in the quest for “precision medicine,” a course for prevention and treatment based on the special, even unique characteristics of the patient’s genes.

Genetically altering a patient’s immune cells has, for the first time, produced remissions in adults with a deadly type of acute leukemia. In one patient, all trace of the disease vanished in 8 days.

Scientists in Tanzania turned an iPhone into an amateur microscope to check schoolchildren for intestinal worms.

A baby born with the AIDS virus appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who's now 2 1/2 and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection....

Flying increases flatulence, according to an article published Friday in the peer-reviewed New Zealand Medical Journal, and passengers should release the gas -- or risk painful medical consequences.

Don't be afraid to question your doctor and ask, "Do I really need that?" That's the advice from leading medical groups who came up dozens of tests and treatments that physicians too often prescribe when they shouldn't. No worrisome stroke signs? Then don't screen a healthy person for a clogged neck artery, the family physicians say. It could lead to risky surgery for a blockage too small to matter.

The U.S. health regulator approved the first implantable device for treating a rare, genetic, eye disease that can lead to blindness.

Totally blind mice have had their sight restored by injections of light-sensing cells into the eye, UK researchers report.

A former beauty queen has undergone an incredible surgery where a quarter of her skull was removed and stored in her stomach while she recovered from a devastating head injury. Surgeons removed the rear quarter of Jamie Hilton's skull and placed in her abdomen so that the bone would remain sterile and nourished as her brain swelling subsided. When the mother-of-three and former Mrs. Idaho woke up from the operation she found the large, hard lump in her stomach and a portion of her head missing.

Scientists reported Thursday that they succeeded in creating tiny medical devices sealed in silk cocoons that did the work they were designed for, then dissolved in the bodies of lab mice. It's an early step in a technology that may hold promise not only for medicine but also for disposal of electronic waste.