BUSINESS
August 1, 2006 | Rong-Gong Lin II, Times Staff Writer
Since the moment a decade ago when Dane Titsworth picked up a box and a disc in his spine burst, he has been in ever-worsening pain. So it was with great hope that the Bakersfield building maintenance manager agreed last year to a new procedure. It meant replacing the deteriorating disc in his lower back with a Charite-brand artificial one -- the first artificial replacement disc approved in the U.S.
NEWS
April 27, 1993 | MARLENE CIMONS, TIMES STAFF WRITER
The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that it has warned the nation's six largest manufacturers of hearing aids to stop "misleading the public" about the effectiveness of their products or face regulatory action. In letters sent April 16, the agency told the companies that their advertising, promotion and labeling create "unrealistic expectations" about the performance of the devices. About 5.
BUSINESS
June 15, 1988 | CHARLES HILLINGER, Times Staff Writer
The Grateful Dead bought eight, Knotts Berry Farm ordered several. Doctors, medical schools, nursing schools, universities, research labs, high schools, anatomists, attorneys, physical therapists, athletic trainers and the entertainment industry buy them. All have purchased authentic plastic reproductions of life-sized human skeletons from Medical Plastics Laboratory, a life-sized plastic human skeleton factory, in existence 39 years in this Texas town 110 miles south of Ft. Worth.
BUSINESS
October 23, 1999 | (Robin Fields)
A federal judge has dismissed Amway Corp.'s lawsuit accusing Irvine-based Nikken U.S.A. Inc. of copying patented designs for pain-blocking magnets. Amway, headquartered in Ada, Mich., filed the suit in Nashville in June. The direct marketing giant alleged that shortly after it introduced a line of magnetic pads that purportedly block pain signals from reaching the brain, Nikken did too. Nikken countersued in U.S.
NEWS
July 4, 2001 | ROSIE MESTEL, TIMES MEDICAL WRITER
Surgeons in Louisville, Ky., placed an artificial heart in a patient's chest Monday--the first fully self-contained artificial heart to be implanted in a human being. The patient, who was not identified by either name or gender, was believed by doctors to be within a month of death at the time of the operation and is not expected to survive more than a few weeks with the new titanium-and-plastic heart, which remains an experimental device.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 17, 1999 | KAREN ALEXANDER and LOUISE ROUG, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
More than 1,000 hypodermic needles washed ashore at Huntington Beach on Thursday afternoon, forcing the closure of more than two miles of shoreline, authorities said. The first needles were discovered by a city lifeguard at about 3:30 p.m. Soon the devices were surfacing hundreds at a time, prompting Orange County health officials to declare the beach off-limits and order it roped off with yellow police tape.