Health, Medicine | featured news

More than 100 cancer specialists have banded together to persuade pharmaceutical companies to bring prices down, suggesting that the high prices for medicine needed to keep someone alive is profiteering.

A tiny magnetic bracelet implanted at the base of the throat is greatly improving life for some people with chronic heartburn who need more help than medicine can give them. It's a novel way to treat severe acid reflux, which plagues millions of Americans and can raise their risk for more serious health problems.

A terrible future could be on the horizon, a future which rips one of the greatest tools of medicine out of the hands of doctors. A simple cut to your finger could leave you fighting for your life. Luck will play a bigger role in your future than any doctor could. The most basic operations - getting an appendix removed or a hip replacement - could become deadly.

In 1954, Murray successfully transplanted a healthy kidney from a man and implanted it in his identical twin. He was awarded the 1990 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine.

Pharmacy compounding has come under a spotlight in recent months, after a center produced pain medicine contaminated with fungus that caused a national meningitis outbreak.

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.

For some people with diabetes, surgery may be the best medicine. Two studies have found that weight loss operations worked much better than the standard treatments to control Type 2 diabetes in obese and overweight people. Those who had surgery to staple the stomach and reroute the small intestine were much more likely to have their diabetes go into complete remission, or to need less medicine, than people given the typical regimen of drugs, diet and exercise, the studies found. The surgery also helped many to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol.

Researchers believe they have identified why a mutation in a particular gene can lead to obesity.

We all want to think of medicine as an honorable profession and that the people in it work with integrity, but a new survey shows that may not be exactly true.

Vaccines can cause certain side effects but serious ones appear very rare - and there's no link with autism and Type 1 diabetes, the Institute of Medicine says in the first comprehensive safety review in 17 years....