Medical Laboratory Quotes

Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.

Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.

We fight good wars in medical laboratories, endlessly seeking to cure the scourges of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and mental illness. We fight good wars when we devote time, energy, and money to relieve the suffering of hungry people around the world. We fight good wars when we come to the aid of those struck by the overwhelming forces of capricious nature: fire, flood, drought, hurricanes, and earthquakes. We fight good wars when we refuse to allow injustice to be done to others. We fight good wars when we oppose hate, bigotry, and ignorance. These

Soon after Harris’s HeLa-chicken study, a pair of researchers at New York University discovered that human-mouse hybrids lost their human chromosomes over time, leaving only the mouse chromosomes. This allowed scientists to begin mapping human genes to specific chromosomes by tracking the order in which genetic traits vanished. If a chromosome disappeared and production of a certain enzyme stopped, researchers knew the gene for that enzyme must be on the most recently vanished chromosome. Scientists in laboratories throughout North America and Europe began fusing cells and using them to map genetic traits to specific chromosomes, creating a precursor to the human genome map we have today.

One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in medical research. Uganda was one of the biggest sources of these animals. As the monkey trade was established throughout central Africa, the native workers in the system, the monkey trappers and handlers, were exposed to large numbers of wild monkeys, some of which were carrying unusual viruses. These animals, in turn, were being jammed together in cages, exposed to one another, passing viruses back and forth. Furthermore, different species of monkeys were mixed together. It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation of HIV. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade?

John P. Ioannidis published a controversial paper titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”39 The paper studied positive findings documented in peer-reviewed journals: descriptions of successful predictions of medical hypotheses carried out in laboratory experiments. It concluded that most of these findings were likely to fail when applied in the real world. Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis’s hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings claimed in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves.40

Over his career, Buteyko would be censured by medical critics; he’d be physically attacked and, at one point, have his laboratory torn up. But he pressed on. By the 1980s, he had published more than 50 scientific papers and the Soviet Ministry of Health had

First, a sad paradox. Medical research has become more laboratory oriented in the last fifty years. To be sure, this shift has produced some impressive results. But at the same time, human biology is not exclusively mechanical, and there are limits to what the laboratory can accurately study. The laboratory study of infectious diseases has been magnificent—it is very straightforward. But its very success has deflected attention from the influence of emotions. As a result, medical research has failed abysmally in many areas.

the time of writing, there is only one other probiotic bacteria species that is as well researched as the two mentioned above: E. coli Nissle 1917. This strain of E. coli was first isolated from the faeces of a soldier returning from the Balkan War. All the soldier’s comrades had suffered severe diarrhoea in the Balkans, but he had not. Since then, many studies have been carried out to show that this bacterium can help with diarrhoea, gastrointestinal disease, and a weakened immune system. Although the soldier died many years ago, scientists continue to breed his talented E. coli in medical laboratories and package it up for sale in pharmacies so it can work its wonders in other people’s guts.

...[S]o many people look only to their bank balance for peace or to fellow human beings for models to follow. Clinicians, academicians, and politicians are often put to a test of faith. In pursuit of their goals, will their religion show or will it be hidden? Are they tied back to God or to man? I had such a test decades ago when one of my medical faculty colleagues chastised me for failing to separate my professional knowledge from my religious convictions. He demanded that I not combine the two. How could I do that? Truth is truth! It is not divisible, and any part of it cannot be set aside. Whether truth emerges from a scientific laboratory or through revelation, all truth emanates from God.

Working simultaneously, though seemingly without a conscience, was Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose base was a laboratory in Canada's McGill University, in Montreal. Since his death in 1967, the history of his work for both himself and the CIA has become known. He was interested in 'terminal' experiments and regularly received relatively small stipends (never more than $20,000) from the American CIA order to conduct his work. He explored electroshock in ways that offered such high risk of permanent brain damage that other researchers would not try them. He immersed subjects in sensory deprivation tanks for weeks at a time, though often claiming that they were immersed for only a matter of hours. He seemed to fancy himself a pure scientist, a man who would do anything to learn the outcome. The fact that some people died as a result of his research, while others went insane and still others, including the wife of a member of Canada's Parliament, had psychological problems for many years afterwards, was not a concern to the doctor or those who employed him. What mattered was that by the time Cheryl and Lynn Hersha were placed in the programme, the intelligence community had learned how to use electroshock techniques to control the mind. And so, like her sister, Lynn was strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock. The experience was different for Lynn, though the sexual component remained present to lesser degree...

In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished. Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193 p193-194 "...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...] p194 "The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group activities or decisions, saying it was too much trouble to deal with the others; some men became scapegoats or targets of aggression for the rest of the group. Food - one's own food - became the only thing that mattered. When the men did talk to one another, it was almost always about eating, hunger, weight loss, foods they dreamt of eating. They grew more obsessed with the subject of food, collecting recipes, studying cookbooks, drawing up menus. As time went on, they stretched their meals out longer and longer, sometimes taking two hours to eat small dinners. Keys's research has often been cited often in recent years for this reason: The behavioral changes in the men mirror the actions of present-day dieters, especially of anorexics.

Actually, very few topics of scientific research can be studied with controlled experiments. There are many fields that everyone accepts as science, even though laboratory experiments are difficult if not impossible—fields like astronomy, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology. The prestigious British Medical Journal published a tongue-in-cheek article claiming to examine whether parachutes help prevent deaths in people who jump out of airplanes. The authors had eliminated anecdotal evidence from consideration, including in their review only randomized controlled trials. Of course, they couldn’t find a single experiment in which people were randomly assigned to jump out of an airplane either with or without a parachute. They concluded: “The perception that parachutes are a successful intervention is based largely on anecdotal evidence.

And so far, their most recent results had been perfect. Their meetings in Germany and Switzerland had gone brilliantly. The testing done in their laboratories there was even more rigorous than what had been done in the States. They were sure now. It was safe. They could move ahead to Phase One Human Trials, as soon as the FDA approved it, which meant giving low doses of the medication to a select number of willing, well-informed subjects, and seeing how they fared.

Those who nowadays see inconveniences to living in this laboratory often come up against the incomprehension and disapproval of their peers. They are accused of opposing the technological society on which they are nonetheless dependent and the comforts of which they enjoy—even if this argument is losing credence as the effects of the ecological crisis become ever more direct and flagrant. This logic follows the same pattern as attempts to silence patients criticizing the medical system on the pretext that their health and sometimes their lives depend on it. We are thus to be neutralized by guilt and condemned to submission and resignation. Can we be held responsible for the society into which we were born and in relation to which our room for maneuver is inevitably limited? To use this as grounds to ban all critique of our society amounts to tying our hands in the face of disaster, hamstringing thought and, more broadly, stifling imagination, desire and the capacity to recall that things are not doomed to be as they currently are.

Yet skill in the most sophisticated applications of laboratory technology and in the use of the latest therapeutic modality alone does not make a good physician. When a patient poses challenging clinical problems, an effective physician must be able to identify the crucial elements in a complex history and physical examination; order the appropriate laboratory, imaging, and diagnostic tests; and extract the key results from densely populated computer screens to determine whether to treat or to “watch.” As the number of tests increases, so does the likelihood that some incidental finding, completely unrelated to the clinical problem at hand, will be uncovered. Deciding whether a clinical clue is worth pursuing or should be dismissed as a “red herring” and weighing whether a proposed test, preventive measure, or treatment entails a greater risk than the disease itself are essential judgments that a skilled clinician must make many times each day. This combination of medical knowledge, intuition, experience, and judgment defines the art of medicine, which is as necessary to the practice of medicine as is a sound scientific base.

Revitalized and healthy, I started dreaming new dreams. I saw ways that I could make a significant contribution by sharing what I’ve learned. I decided to refocus my legal practice on counseling and helping start-up companies avoid liability and protect their intellectual property. To share some of what I know, I started a blog, IP Law for Startups, where I teach basic lessons on trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and patents and give tips for avoiding the biggest blunders that destroy the value of intellectual assets. Few start-up companies, especially women-owned companies that rarely get venture capital funding, can afford the expensive hourly rates of a large law firm to the get the critical information they need. I feel deeply rewarded when I help a company create a strategy that protects the value of their company and supports their business dreams. Further, I had a dream to help young women see their career possibilities. In partnership with my sister, Julie Simmons, I created lookilulu.com, a website where women share their insights, career paths, and ways they have integrated motherhood with their professional pursuits. When my sister and I were growing up on a farm, we had a hard time seeing that women could have rewarding careers. With Lookilulu® we want to help young women see what we couldn’t see: that dreams are not linear—they take many twists and unexpected turns. As I’ve learned the hard way, dreams change and shift as life happens. I’ve learned the value of continuing to dream new dreams after other dreams are derailed. I’m sure I’ll have many more dreams in my future. I’ve learned to be open to new and unexpected opportunities. By way of postscript, Jill writes, “I didn’t grow up planning to be lawyer. As a girl growing up in a small rural town, I was afraid to dream. I loved science, but rather than pursuing medical school, I opted for low-paying laboratory jobs, planning to quit when I had children. But then I couldn’t have children. As I awakened to the possibility that dreaming was an inalienable right, even for me, I started law school when I was thirty; intellectual property combines my love of law and science.” As a young girl, Jill’s rightsizing involved mustering the courage to expand her dreams, to dream outside of her box. Once she had children, she again transformed her dreams. In many ways her dreams are bigger and aim to help more people than before the twists and turns in her life’s path.

For the longest time, the crucial importance to health of just moving around was hardly appreciated. But in the late 1940s a doctor at Britain’s Medical Research Council, Jeremy Morris, became convinced that the increasing occurrence of heart attacks and coronary disease was related to levels of activity, and not just to age or chronic stress, as was almost universally thought at the time. Because Britain was still recovering from the war, research funding was tight, so Morris had to think of a low-cost way to conduct an effective large-scale study. While traveling to work one day, it occurred to him that every double-decker bus in London was a perfect laboratory for his purposes because each had a driver who spent his entire working life sitting and a conductor who was on his feet constantly. In addition to moving about laterally, conductors climbed an average of six hundred steps per shift. Morris could hardly have invented two more ideal groups to compare. He followed thirty-five thousand drivers and conductors for two years and found that after he adjusted for all other variables, the drivers—no matter how healthy—were twice as likely to have a heart attack as the conductors. It was the first time that anyone had demonstrated a direct and measurable link between exercise and health.

As many speakers noted, this tool wasn’t particularly well suited for assessing outcomes of a psychiatric drug. How could a study of a neuroleptic possibly be “double-blind”? The psychiatrist would quickly see who was on the drug and who was not, and any patient given Thorazine would know he was on a medication as well. Then there was the problem of diagnosis: How would a researcher know if the patients randomized into a trial really had “schizophrenia”? The diagnostic boundaries of mental disorders were forever changing. Equally problematic, what defined a “good outcome”? Psychiatrists and hospital staff might want to see drug-induced behavioral changes that made the patient “more socially acceptable” but weren’t to the “ultimate benefit of the patient,” said one conference speaker.11 And how could outcomes be measured? In a study of a drug for a known disease, mortality rates or laboratory results could serve as objective measures of whether a treatment worked. For instance, to test whether a drug for tuberculosis was effective, an X-ray of the lung could show whether the bacillus that caused the disease was gone. What would be the measurable endpoint in a trial of a drug for schizophrenia? The problem, said NIMH physician Edward Evarts at the conference, was that “the goals of therapy in schizophrenia, short of getting the patient ‘well,’ have not been clearly defined.

Because the second wave was so much more severe than the first, a lot of people refused to believe it could be the same disease. It had to be terrorism. They didn't care what medical experts kept telling them, about how it was the nature of influenza to occur in waves and that there was nothing about this pandemic, terrible though it was, that wasn't happening more or less as had long been predicted. No, not bioterrorism, others said, but a virus that had escaped from a laboratory. These were the same people who believed that both Lyme disease and West Nile virus were caused by germs that had escaped many years ago from a government lab off the coast of Long Island. They scoffed at the assertion that it was impossible to say for sure where the flu had begun because cases had appeared in several different countries at exactly the same time. Cover-up! Everyone knew the government was involved in the development of bioweapons. And although the Americans were not the only ones who were working on such weapons, the belief that they were somehow to blame--that the monster germ had most likely been created in an American lab, for American military purposes--would outlive the pandemic itself. In any case, according to a poll, eighty-two percent of Americans believed the government knew more about the flu than it was saying. And the number of people who declared themselves dead set against any vaccine the government came up with was steadily growing.

The second development, in 1960, was the development of a new technology that allowed researchers for the first time ever to measure accurately the level of hormones circulating in the bloodstream. It was the invention of Rosalyn Yalow, a medical physicist, and Solomon Berson, a physician, and was called the radioimmunoassay. When Yalow won the Nobel Prize for the work in 1977 (Berson by then was not alive to share it), the Nobel Foundation would describe it aptly as bringing about “a revolution in biological and medical research.” Those interested in obesity could now finally answer the questions about which the pre–World War II European clinicians could only speculate: which hormones were regulating the storage of fat in fat cells and its use for fuel by the rest of the body? Answers began coming with the very first publications out of Yalow and Berson’s laboratory and were swiftly confirmed by others. As it turns out, virtually all hormones work to mobilize fat from fat cells so that it can then be used for fuel. Hormones are signaling our bodies to act—flee or fight, reproduce, grow—and they also signal the fat cells to make available the fuel necessary for these actions. The one dominant exception to this fuel-mobilization signaling is insulin, the same hormone that researchers still assumed in the early 1960s to be deficient in all cases of diabetes. Insulin, Yalow and Berson reported, can be thought of as orchestrating how the body uses or “partitions” the fuel it takes in.

Thakur’s findings were not news to Ranbaxy’s top executives. Just ten months earlier, in October 2003, outside auditors started investigating Ranbaxy facilities worldwide. In this case, the audits had been ordered up by Ranbaxy itself. This was a common industry practice: drug companies often hired consultants to audit their facilities as a dry run to see how visible their problems were. If the consultants could find it, they reasoned, then most likely regulators could too. The fact-finding mission by Lachman Consultant Services left Ranbaxy officials under no illusion as to the extent of the company’s failings. At Ranbaxy’s Princeton, New Jersey, facility, auditors found that the company’s Patient Safety Department barely functioned and training was essentially “non-existent.” The staff had no written protocols for investigating patient complaints, which piled up in boxes, uncategorized and unreported. They had no clerical help for basic tasks like mailing out the patients’ samples for testing. “I don’t think there’s the same medicine in this medicine,” was a common refrain from patients. Even when there were investigations, they were so perfunctory and half-hearted that expiration dates were listed as “unknown,” even when they could easily have been found from a product’s lot number. An audit of Ranbaxy’s main U.S. manufacturing plant, Ohm Laboratories in New Jersey, found that the company, though required to report adverse events to the FDA, rarely did so. There was no system to capture patient complaints after hours, and no global medical officer to ensure that any potential negative consequences for patients were being monitored. The consultants from Lachman urged Ranbaxy to address these problems globally. Ranbaxy’s initial reaction to the findings was to question the number of hours, and the resulting invoice, that Lachman had sent for its work.

Today, such studies are illegal. Medical scientists cannot offer inducements like pardons to persuade prisoners to take part in their studies. Although they can award small cash payments to research subjects, they are forbidden from giving anyone so much money or such tempting favors that their compensations might constitute what ethicists term an inappropriate inducement, an irresistible temptation to join the study. Now, more than eighty years after the 1918 flu, people enter studies for several reasons—to get free medical care, to get an experimental drug that, they hope, might cure them of a disease like cancer or AIDS, or to help further scientific knowledge. In theory at least, study participants are supposed to be true volunteers, taking part in research of their own free will. But in 1918, such ethical arguments were rarely considered. Instead, the justification for a risky study with human beings was that it was better to subject a few to a great danger in order to save the many. Prisoners were thought to be the ideal study subjects. They could offer up their bodies for science and, if they survived, their pardons could be justified because they gave something back to society. The Navy inmates were perfect for another reason. Thirty-nine of them had never had influenza, as far as anyone knew. So they might be uniquely susceptible to the disease. If the doctors wanted to deliberately transmit the 1918 flu, what better subjects? Was influenza really so easily transmitted? the doctors asked. Why did some people get it and others not? Why did it kill the young and healthy? Could the wartime disruptions and movements of troops explain the spread of the flu? If it was as contagious as it seemed, how was it being spread? What kind of microorganism was causing the illness? The normal way to try to answer such questions would be to study the spread of the disease in animals. Give the disease to a few cages of laboratory rats, or perhaps to some white rabbits. Isolate whatever was causing the illness. Show how it spread and test ways to protect animals—and people—against the disease. But influenza, it seemed, was a uniquely human disease. No animal was known to be susceptible to it. Medical researchers felt they had no choice but to study influenza in people. Either the Navy doctors were uncommonly persuasive or the enticement of a pardon was overwhelmingly compelling. For whatever reason, the sixty-two men agreed to be subjects in the medical experiment. And so the study began. First the sailors were transferred to a quarantine station on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor. Then the Navy doctors did their best to give the men the flu. Influenza is a respiratory disease—it is spread from person to person, presumably carried on droplets of mucus sprayed in the air when sick people cough or sneeze, or carried on their hands and spread when the sick touch the healthy. Whatever was causing the flu should be present in mucus taken from the ill. The experiments, then, were straightforward. The Navy doctors collected mucus from men who were desperately ill with the flu, gathering thick viscous secretions from their noses and throats. They sprayed mucus from flu patients into the noses and throats of some men, and dropped it into other men’s eyes. In one attempt, they swabbed mucus from the back of the nose of a man with the flu and then directly swabbed that mucus into the back of a volunteer’s nose.

S.P. is a 68-year-old retired painter who is experiencing right leg calf pain. The pain began approximately 2 years ago but has become significantly worse in the past 4 months. The pain is precipitated by exercise and is relieved with rest. Two years ago, S.P. could walk two city blocks before having to stop because of leg pain. Today, he can barely walk across the yard. S.P. has smoked two to three packs of cigarettes per day (PPD) for the past 45 years. He has a history of coronary artery disease (CAD), hypertension (HTN), peripheral vascular disease (PVD), and osteoarthritis. Surgical history includes quadruple coronary artery bypass graft (CABG × 4) 3 years ago. He has had no further symptoms of cardiopulmonary disease since that time, even though he has not been compliant with the exercise regimen his cardiologist prescribed, he continues to eat anything he wants, and continues to smoke two to three PPD. Other surgical history includes open reduction internal fixation of the right femoral fracture 20 years ago. S.P. is in the clinic today for a routine semiannual follow-up appointment with his primary care provider. As you take his vital signs, he tells you that, besides the calf pain, he is experiencing right hip pain that gets worse with exercise, the pain doesn't go away promptly with rest, some days are worse than others, and his condition is not affected by a resting position. � Chart View General Assessment Weight 261 lb Height 5 ft, 10 in. Blood pressure 163/91 mm Hg Pulse 82 beats/min Respiratory rate 16 breaths/min Temperature 98.4° F (36.9° C) Laboratory Testing (Fasting) Cholesterol 239 mg/dL Triglycerides 150 mg/dL HDL 28 mg/dL LDL 181 mg/dL Current Medications Lisinopril (Zestril) 20 mg/day Metoprolol (Lopressor) 25 mg twice a day Aspirin 325 mg/day Simvastatin (Zocor) 20 mg/day Case Study 4 Name Class/Group Date ____________________ Group Members INSTRUCTIONS All questions apply to this case study. Your responses should be brief and to the point. When asked to provide several

researchers like Dr. Eva Sapi have shown Lyme is like some other spirochetes—it has biofilms. These are very tough biofilms to defeat unless caught in the “acute stage.” A tough, “mature biofilm” allows organisms to “laugh at” many antibiotics. Some medical professionals interested in Lyme often ignore the immune suppressing Bartonella bacterium, which is more common than Lyme. Ignoring coinfections may increase the risk of fatality with Babesia and possibly FL1953. These healers also may not realize that the highly genetically complex Lyme spirochete appears to have a troublesome biofilm. Performing a simple direct test at laboratory companies whose testing kits have reduced sensitivity will probably result in more negatives for tick-borne diseases. The ultimate result is anti-science and anti-truth. Searching for tick infections with one test is like writing in “Lincoln” at the next presidential election.

Zombie science is a science that is dead, but is artificially kept moving by a continual infusion of funding. From a distance Zombie science looks like the real thing, the surface features of a science are in place – white coats, laboratories, computer programming, PhDs, papers, conference, prizes, etc. But the Zombie is not interested in the pursuit of truth – its citations are externally-controlled and directed at non-scientific goals, and inside the Zombie everything is rotten…

We have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material, a very light material called carbon-carbon. One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three kilograms each, dragging their feet around. He said to me, “Please remove the pain of my patients” In three weeks, we made these floor-reaction Orthosis 300-gram calipers and took them to the orthopedic center. The children didn’t believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kilogram load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes.

Over his career, Buteyko would be censured by medical critics; he’d be physically attacked and, at one point, have his laboratory torn up. But he pressed on. By the 1980s, he had published more than 50 scientific papers and the Soviet Ministry of Health had recognized his techniques as effective. Some 200,000 people in Russia alone had learned his methods. According to several sources, Buteyko was once invited to England to meet with Prince Charles, who was suffering from breathing difficulties brought on by allergies. Buteyko helped the prince, and he helped heal upward of 80 percent of his patients suffering from hypertension, arthritis, and other ailments. Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing was especially effective in treating respiratory diseases. It seemed to work like a miracle for asthma. • • •

Physicians and writers,” Stone argues, “draw on the same source: the human encounter, people and their indelible stories. And the works of both depend on skillful use of the senses. As with [Sherlock] Holmes, success rests with the powers of observation. . . . Literature, indeed, can have a kind of laboratory function. . . . The medical ear must be properly trained to hear stories—a medical history, after all, is a short story.” “I believe that the writing of poems makes me a better medical practitioner,” says physician-poet Jack Coulehan. “Poetry demands a style of seeing and responding that enhances my ability to form therapeutic bonds with patients.

And then there is the mounting evidence for self-medication. Some of it is widespread in all sort of animals, such as the eating of clay, which contains absorbent components resembling Kaopectate, a commercial drug against diarrhea and stomach upsets. But apes are also known to chew the bitter pith of certain plants and to swallow whole leaves of others, both of which are assumed to have health benefits. Michael Huffman saw chimpanzees remove the outer bark and leaves of young shoots of Vemonia amygdalina to extract extremely bitter juice. Nearly all these chimpanzees showed diarrhea, listlessness, and worm infections. Fecal analysis revealed a striking drop in one chimpanzee's nematode infection following bitter pith chewing, a drop not seen in chimpanzees not taking this medicine. The same plants' bark and leaves contain toxins that can kill laboratory mice, but the chimpanzees must have learned to avoid these parts and extract only the beneficial compounds. For many African ethnic groups Vernonia is an essential ingredient in concoctions to treat malaria, dysentery, and a number of intestinal parasites.

Praise for Nurses and Health Professionals Back in 1976, Dr. Frank Speizer at the Channing Laboratory of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health started the Nurses’ Health Study. Its initial aim was to investigate the potential long-term consequences of oral contraceptives, which were then being taken by millions of women. Nurses were chosen as the study population because of their knowledge about health and their ability to provide complete and accurate information about various diseases, thanks to their nursing education. The research team signed up 121,700 female registered nurses between the ages of thirty and fifty-five. Since then, the aims of the Nurses’ Health Study have broadened to look at the effects of diet and other lifestyle factors on cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, mental health, and other conditions.

Throughout your administration, you have carried out a policy of scientific aid to the Kingdoms. You have given them atomic power. You have helped rebuild power plants on their territories. You have established medical clinics, chemical laboratories and factories.’ ‘Well? And your objection?’ ‘You have done this in order to keep them from attacking us. With these as bribes, you have been playing the fool in a colossal game of blackmail, in which you have allowed Terminus to be sucked dry – with the result that now we are at the mercy of these barbarians.

But laboratory, radiology, and pathology results were computerized relatively early (many hospitals and clinics did so in the 1990s), and some healthcare systems began experimenting with giving patients access to them.21 While this information was less fraught than doctors’ notes, many in the medical establishment still worried about how patients might handle seeing such results unfiltered.

From a wellness perspective, our current culture, viewed as a laboratory experiment, is an ever-more globalized demonstration of what can go awry. Amid spectacular economic, technological, and medical resources, it induces countless humans to suffer illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty, and social isolation.

Medical Benefits of Fasting Here are a few medical benefits from an article from John Hopkins Health Review Spring Summer 2016. Mark Mattson is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and also serves as chief of the Laboratory of Neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging. According to the research conducted by him and others, cutting your energy intake by fasting several days a week might help your brain ward off neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s while at the same time improving memory and mood. Mattson explains that every time you eat, glucose is stored in your liver as glycogen, which takes about 10 to 12 hours to be depleted. After the glycogen is used up, your body starts burning fats, which are converted to ketone bodies, acidic chemicals used by neurons as energy. Ketones promote positive changes in the structure of synapses important for learning, memory, and overall brain health. But if you eat three meals a day with snacks between, your body doesn’t have the chance to deplete the glycogen stores in your liver, and the ketones aren’t produced.

Bernard’s theory of a new medical epistemology made him a crucial transitional figure. He looked beyond the hospital ward, which had applied the idea of specificity to disease, to the laboratory, which alone would permit the exploration of the microbial world and its relationship to etiology, or disease causation.

The bird strike hadn’t only cost Kaz an eye. Without binocular vision, he’d lost his medical as both a test pilot and an astronaut selectee who’d been assigned to fly on MOL, the military’s planned Manned Orbiting Laboratory spy space station. His work and dreams had disappeared in a bloody flurry of feathers.

Many if not the vast majority of the individuals in the psych unit were subjected to extremities of violence themselves as children. If there is a laboratory experiment in how to create people at the margin of functionality by eliminating all resources and social supports, education, medical care, and community involvement, these are the guinea pigs who have been dumped out of their cages and turned loose on the streets. The prosecuting attorneys lock them up in the city’s penitentiaries, and we treat them for the medical and psychiatric problems that flourish in the hothouse atmosphere of a prison system. In forty years, that system has gone 180 degrees from rehabilitation to punishment, without regard for the long-term self-inflicted collateral damage.

Nutritional supplements may give you false or inaccurate results on medical laboratory tests.

During his life, Brunetti had often heard people begin sentences with, ‘If it weren’t for him . . .’ and he could not hear the words without substituting Sergio’s name. When Brunetti, always the acknowledged scholar of the family, was eighteen, it was decided that there was not enough money to allow him to go to university and delay the time when he could begin to contribute to the family’s income. He yearned to study the way some of his friends yearned for women, but he assented to this family decision and began to look for work. It was Sergio, newly engaged and newly employed in a medical laboratory as a technician, who agreed to contribute more to the family if it would mean that his younger brother would be allowed to study. Even then, Brunetti knew that it was the law he wanted to study, less its current application than its history and the reasons why it developed the way it had. Because there was no faculty of law at Ca Foscari, it meant that Brunetti would have to study at Padova, the cost of his commuting adding to the responsibility Sergio agreed to assume. Sergio’s marriage was delayed for three years, during which time Brunetti quickly rose to the top of his class and began to earn some money by tutoring students younger than himself. Had he not studied, Brunetti would not have met Paola in the university library, and he would not have become a policeman. He sometimes wondered if he would have become the same man, if the things inside of him that he considered vital would have developed in the same way, had he, perhaps, become an insurance salesman or a city bureaucrat. Knowing idle speculation when he saw it, Brunetti reached for the phone and pulled it towards him.

Go back! I have a household to run. A medical practice. My treatise! I’ve been working on a treatise—a sort of manual of medicine and anatomy, and my papers will be all over my laboratory.

Ginkgo biloba has a long history of use in treating blood disorders and memory issues. It is best known today as way to potentially keep your memory sharp. Laboratory studies have shown that ginkgo improves blood circulation by opening up blood vessels and making blood less sticky. It is also an antioxidant.

True albino animals are much worse. A study by Donnell Creel, research professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Utah, looked at all the problems and differences in albino animals, and concluded that researchers should not be using albino animals in their research, because albino animals are not normal. Albino animals like the white laboratory rats people used for years probably aren't even good for drug research, because melanin binds to some of the chemicals used in medications, so an albino animal's response to a medication can be completely different from a non.Albino animal's.

These homegrown American medical Mengeles most often targeted impoverished American Indians and Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, and in the United States as their laboratory rats.

Cardamom, an ancient spice that you’ll find in Indian cooking, is often used as a digestive aid and a breath freshener. But it also stimulates the flow of bile, which enhances liver health and fat metabolism. Cinnamon contains phytochemicals that increase glucose metabolism in cells (and when glucose is metabolized, it doesn’t get stored as fat). It also can help to lower blood sugar, decrease blood pressure, and reduce triglyceride levels and “bad” (low-density lipoprotein [LDL]) cholesterol. Ginger helps control nausea, but it also decreases the stickiness of blood, which helps to prevent blood clots, and decreases inflammation. In animal studies, it lowered cholesterol and slowed the development of atherosclerosis. Turmeric contains curcumin, one of the most powerful compounds in the plant kingdom. Curcumin has been used at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in cancer trials. It’s being studied in memory loss research at Columbia University Medical Center (it was shown to slow memory loss in laboratory animals) and at the University of California. It’s extremely healthy for the liver, which is “ground zero” for detoxification. Curcumin has also been shown to improve arthritis symptoms, not surprising in view of its enormous anti-inflammatory firepower. (Both of us take curcumin in supplement form; see more on supplements in Chapter 8.)

Another little rule (for medical scientists especially) is that mice, rats, and other laboratory animals should never be injected. Few hypodermic needles are large enough for even the smallest mouse to pass through, especially if it is injected with something. ("Mice were injected wiht rabbit serum albumin mixed with Freund's adjuvant," we read. "Ah, but what into?" the cry goes up.)

In nature, ecosystems consist of fauna and flora, climatic characteristics, soil conditions, geologic features, and a host of other interacting influences. Similarly, the precision medicine ecosystem is made of many interacting components, including patients, clinicians, researchers, laboratory services, CDS software, genomic databases, smartphones, servers, claims data, mobile apps, biobanks to store clinical specimens, and EHRs. EHRs need to serve as gateways to this ecosystem. And for the EHR to become an effective conduit, it needs a way to organize these diverse sources in a way that lets clinicians and patients make more effective diagnostic and treatment decisions.

The funding of research projects, laboratories, and entire academic centers by the food and pharmaceutical industries is now a fact of life in modern medical research, which is why many journals require that their authors declare potential conflicts of interest. But it raises important questions, just the same.

Assured by a consensus of the leading medical authorities for fifty years that the danger was past, federal and state governments in the United States dismantled their public health programs dealing with communicable diseases and slashed their spending; investment by private industry on the development of new vaccines and classes of antibiotics dried up; the training of health-care workers failed to keep abreast of new knowledge; vaccine development and manufacturing were concentrated in a few laboratories; and the discipline of infectious diseases no longer attracted its share of research funds and the best minds.

But a knowledge of all studies carried out on a new product and comparison with already existent medications are indispensable for doctors to be able to prescribe the most effective medicine. Today, doctors have only results that are pre-selected by laboratories. In fact, the few systematic studies, long and costly, that have been carried out indicate that the majority of new medications placed on the market are no more effective than those that exist already. And, sometimes, they are even less effective. We’ll cite a revealing example, that of Tamiflu. In 2005, fearing an avian flu pandemic, governments all over the world spent billions of dollars to buy and store this medication purported to reduce complications from flu, which can be fatal. In England, there was enough to treat 80% of the population. However, to date, Roche, the manufacturer, has published no data showing that Tamiflu effectively reduced the rate of pneumonia and death. Roche’s Internet site, however, announces that this medication reduces complications by 67%.

Concierge Medical Vacations provides the ability for people in other countries the ability to access excellent healthcare, at affordable prices while on vacation. We have access to JCAHO (Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations) certified hospitals, as well as doctors, dentists, clinical laboratories, as well as other medical professionals and Medi spas, all at affordable prices. For example, we can arrange the Medical, Dental, Medi Spa, Clinical Laboratory.

three associates of the William Pepper Clinical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania used well over a hundred children under the age of eight at the St. Vincent’s Home for Orphans, a Catholic orphanage in Philadelphia, for a series of diagnostic tests in which a tuberculin formula was placed in the test subjects’ eyes. 23

anyone I apologize. Students in my laboratory at the University of Oregon Medical School (including MD-MS students) 1959-1967: Lew Bettinger, David Bliss, Joel Davis,

The Pertussis vaccine itself was awarded a big part in this ongoing drama when, in 1959, it was found to have a particularly powerful allergenic effect on all sorts of laboratory animals. Experiments to produce anaphylactic shock are facilitated by addition of pertussis vaccine to the solution: the mice (or rabbits, or hamsters, or whatever) die more rapidly, and in larger numbers. By the same token, addition of the vaccine to the sterile brain and spinal cord solution greatly enhances it's ability to generate an allergic encephalitis. For these reasons pertussis vaccine is the preferred "adjuvant" in experiments to produce allergic encephalomyelitis.

There is no time to discuss the fact that this horrible, horrible system is not working, or to assert that we are neither criminals or machines. There are only endless medication orders, given by exhausted people with nobody better than us to depend on.

Project Mercury, the human cannonball approach, looked like a Larry Light-bulb scheme, and it gave off the funk of panic. Any pilot who went into it would no longer be a pilot. He would be a laboratory animal wired up from skull to rectum with medical sensors. The rocket pilots had fought this medical crap every foot of the way. Scott Crossfield had reluctantly allowed them to wire him for heartbeat and respiration in rocket flights but had refused to let them insert a rectal thermometer. The pilots who signed up to crawl into the Mercury capsule—the capsule, everybody noted, not the ship—would be called “astronauts.” But, in fact, they would be lab rabbits with wires up the tail and everywhere else.

William Park, Oswald Avery, and Paul Lewis each approached science in his own way. Park, a man who almost became a medical missionary, saw it as a means to a larger end; he saw it as a tool to relieve suffering. Disciplined and methodical, his interest lay chiefly in immediate results that he could apply to his purpose. His contributions, particularly those made with Anna Williams, were enormous; their improvement of diphtheria antitoxin alone doubtless saved hundreds of thousands of lives over the past century. But his purpose also limited him, narrowed him, and limited the kind of findings he and those under him would make. Avery was driven and obsessive. Part artist and part hunter, he had vision, patience, and persistence. His artist’s eye let him see a landscape from a new perspective and in exquisite detail, the hunter in him told him when something, no matter how seemingly trivial, was out of place, and he wondered. The wonder moved him to the sacrifice of all else. He had no choice but to sacrifice. It was his nature. Cutting a Gordian knot gave him no satisfaction. He wanted to unfold and understand mysteries, not cut through them. So he tugged at a thread and kept tugging, untangling it, following where it led, until he unraveled an entire fabric. Then others wove a new fabric for a different world. T. S. Eliot said any new work of art alters slightly the existing order. Avery accomplished that all right, and far more. Paul Lewis was a romantic, and a lover. He wanted. He wanted more and loved more passionately than Park or Avery. But as is true of many romantics, it was the idea of the thing as much or more than the thing itself that he loved. He loved science, and he loved the laboratory. But it did not yield to him. The deepest secrets of the laboratory showed themselves to Lewis when he was guided by others, when others opened a crack for him. But when he came alone to the laboratory, that crack closed. He could not find the right loose thread to tug at, the way to ask the question. To him the laboratory presented a stone face, unyielding to his pleadings. And whether his death was a suicide or a true accident, his failure to win what he loved killed him. One could consider Lewis, in a way meaningful only to him, the last victim of the 1918 pandemic.

At this time, our personal dosimeters—accumulators that registered doses of contamination a person got during his working time—were checked. Usually, these small badges were fastened to the outer part of our clothes, on our chests. Periodically, the dosimeters were examined in the laboratory, where they were burned in a special way, doses were measured, and then the badges were returned to their owners. With this procedure, the dosimeter “forgot” its previous history and was ready to register doses again. We fought against dosimeters constantly and secretly. The point was that a person having received a dose of 25 roentgen (25 R/h) should, according to the medical terms, leave Chernobyl immediately. With this, he got five months’ salary. Good money in this time. Why 25 R/h was the limit, it is difficult for me to say. I am not a specialist. I just remembered for myself that if you got more than 100 R/h, you got radiation sickness. When the authorities came to this decision, those working at the station became diametrically opposed to it. One pole—not very numerous—consisted of those who wanted to leave the Zone as soon as possible and with the five-month salary. These people, who aspired later to the reputation of Chernobyl heroes, usually tried to “forget” their accumulators and other types of dosimeters in dangerous, high-radiation places, and then would return secretly to get them. During the checking, the desired dose of 25 R/h was discovered; and if everything was done well and there was no evidence of swindle, the “hero” went back to his motherland with money and respect. There he started his struggle for privileges with more energy than a person who had actually gotten such a high dose could possibly have. The major part of the Kurchatovers—and it did them credit—took the opposite pole. People who did research in areas with doses of hundreds and thousands roentgen per hour tried to leave their dosimeters in safe places, or to shield the instruments so that they couldn't register that fatal 25 R/h. Then they could stay in Chernobyl. This was the secret war with our accumulators. The authorities knew everything about it, but did nothing. They needed specialists like air.