Medical Treatments

Vertigo. For most people, the word summons images of Jimmy Stewart dangling from high places in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller by the same name. It means something else, however, to hundreds of thousands of people who experience the strange, dizzying affliction. The most common cause of vertigo, known as benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, usually can be treated with one visit to the doctor.

The 911 call last month that led to an emergency dispatcher begging workers at a Bakersfield senior living facility to perform CPR on a woman captured the attention of the public. A staff worker told the dispatcher it was against the facility's policy to intervene. The woman, Lorraine Bayless, died. It is difficult to understand how liability concerns could dissuade anyone from helping a person in distress. However, this stark event should awaken us to another question: Should we be performing CPR on 87-year-olds in a community setting such as a senior home?

The products: Over the years, inventors have patented hundreds of gadgets to combat snoring. If necessity breeds invention, it's safe to say that lots of people desperately need a quiet night's sleep. The National Sleep Foundation estimates that 37 million Americans snore habitually, which translates to millions of bleary-eyed partners and probably billions of nights spent on the couch.

WASHINGTON - Nearly 100 medical procedures, tests and therapies are overused and often unnecessary, a coalition of leading medical societies says in a new report aimed at improving healthcare and controlling runaway costs. The medical interventions - including early caesarean deliveries, CT scans for head injuries in children and annual Pap tests for middle-aged women - may be necessary in some cases, the physician groups said. But often they are not beneficial and may even cause harm.

Patients who receive treatment for a minor stroke within 24 hours reduce their risk of a second stroke by 80% compared with those who wait three days or more to see a doctor, according to a new study released today. Many patients who experience the relatively mild and temporary symptoms of a minor stroke -- slurred speech, arm weakness and dizziness -- often forgo seeing a doctor for days or weeks. Some doctors also fail to initiate immediate treatment for such symptoms.

Education has long been preached as a way to keep kids away from drugs. It's the walk to school that has Supt. Tom Barnett worried. This hardscrabble Northern California town has become a hotbed for medical marijuana farming. Kids stroll much of the year past pungent plants flourishing in gardens and alleys. The red-and-black-clad Timberjacks football team moved its halftime huddle on a recent Friday night to avoid the odor of marijuana smoke wafting over the gridiron from nearby houses.

After years as a slave to heroin, Craig Einhorn feared that he would never get clean--let alone in a single day. Even though he was on methadone, he was spending as much as $800 a day on the street to buy more drugs just to keep from getting sick. As his weight ballooned to 265 pounds, his vital signs were heading toward zero. And then he got busted. Facing charges of possession with intent to distribute, "I had two choices: jail or death," said Einhorn, 39, a Miami meat cutter.

The government cautioned consumers Tuesday not to expect a new type of tinted glasses produced by a Tustin manufacturer to cure colorblindness, but the company says it can help a lot. ColorMax Technologies Inc. won Food and Drug Administration approval earlier this month to sell tinted prescription eyeglasses to aid people who cannot properly distinguish shades of red or green from other colors. The company's stock price has more than doubled since the Dec.

Vin Diesel has embraced his baldness. And it's doubtful Michael Stipe spends much time browsing for toupees. But not all of the 40 million American men with follicularly challenged scalps are going quietly into that bald night. They're raging -- with Rogaine, among other things. Men who want to hang on to their hair have many options, including medications and surgical transplants, says Dr. Marc Avram, hair transplant surgeon and clinical professor of dermatology at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Ruth Deadmon, a near mute, waits outside the office of Dr. Daniel Truong, desperately hoping her voice can be restored. Deadmon is typical of Truong's patients: She awoke one day with what she thought was laryngitis. It has lasted seven years. Deadmon's condition has become so severe she sometimes cannot eat. She no longer answers her phone.

After all those well-intentioned New Year's resolutions have yielded to the force of habit, many of the nation's 79 million obese adults will have a day of reckoning with their primary care physicians. Lose weight and get active, the doctor will order, or risk developing diabetes. Then the MD will scribble a prescription. For most patients, the prescribed treatment will not be a pill. It will be a 12-week program aimed at preventing Type 2 diabetes by getting obese adults to shed as little as 10 pounds and exercise for a little more than 20 minutes a day. That regimen -- the Diabetes Prevention Program -- may soon become the blockbuster prescription medicine you've never heard of. In 2013, it is poised to become the envy of pharmaceutical companies, a new rival to programs such as Weight Watchers, and a target of opportunity for healthcare entrepreneurs.

On one side of the Los Angeles Sports Arena on Thursday morning, doctors treated patients for swollen feet, breathing problems and high blood pressure. On the other side, county health workers began enrolling them in a free coverage program in preparation for the federal healthcare overhaul. Many of the 4,800 people seeking care at the annual massive free clinic this weekend will become eligible for health insurance in 2014 when the national law takes effect. Organizers said raising awareness about the healthcare changes is crucial.

I began worrying more than seven years ago, when I first brought him the violins donated by readers. Would they make my new friend, a Juilliard-trained musician who'd suffered a breakdown 35 years earlier, less safe on the streets of skid row? Would he be attacked by thieves? And that was just the beginning of the worries. As I got to know Nathaniel Anthony Ayers better, I fretted not just about whether I could protect him, but also about how to help him. Time passes; the worries never do. Uncertainty lingers constantly when you have a relationship with someone who has a severe mental illness, and watching the video this week of the Kelly Thomas beating was a reminder of how quickly things can go horribly awry.

Vin Diesel has embraced his baldness. And it's doubtful Michael Stipe spends much time browsing for toupees. But not all of the 40 million American men with follicularly challenged scalps are going quietly into that bald night. They're raging -- with Rogaine, among other things. Men who want to hang on to their hair have many options, including medications and surgical transplants, says Dr. Marc Avram, hair transplant surgeon and clinical professor of dermatology at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh left his battered nation Sunday for medical treatment in the U.S., asking his countrymen to forgive him for years of turmoil and vowing to return to the Arabian Peninsula state he has ruled for decades. It was not immediately evident what effect Saleh's absence from Sana would have on a government weakened by protests, resurgent Al Qaeda militants, secessionist rumblings in the south and a rebellion in the north. The president's departure was characteristic of his brash, often unpredictable nature that has long kept his friends and enemies off balance.

Tucson shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner can refuse anti-psychotic medication until his appeal of the treatment prescribed by prison doctors is decided, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. Loughner, who has been deemed mentally ill and incompetent to stand trial in the Jan. 8 shooting rampage that killed six and injured 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is in custody at a federal prison medical center in Missouri. Doctors there began treating him against his will with psychotropic drugs a month ago, prompting his lawyers to ask the courts to halt the forced medication that they said could irreparably harm or even kill the 22-year-old suspect.

The first outbreak was devastating enough. But within weeks came another outbreak. Then another and another. For Gina Caprio, then 22, the virus that causes genital herpes was nightmarish, "like my life was over." An antiviral drug managed to keep the virus under control, preventing recurrences, but she had to take it every day, year-round.

Early administration of morphine to military personnel wounded on the front lines during Operation Iraqi Freedom appears to have done more than relieve excruciating pain. Scientists believe it also prevented hundreds of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, the debilitating condition that plagues 15% of those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. That conclusion is based on findings published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. They suggest that a simple treatment can stop a single horrifying event from escalating into a chronic, incapacitating illness.

He was chained to a cot, a lone prisoner in a small cell facing eight guards who beat him while a summoned ambulance crew was kept waiting outside. When the doctors were finally admitted to the prison, they found Moscow lawyer Sergei Magnitsky dead, his body bruised, most of his knuckles smashed, one of his arms dark blue from a grip of the handcuffs lying nearby. The attorney's death in Moscow's infamous Sailor's Silence prison was described Tuesday in a report delivered to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev by his advisory human rights council.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said Monday that it would review old unsolved homicide cases to determine whether any are linked to a man accused of four home invasion killings this fall in the South Bay. The move came amid questions raised by The Times about how John Wesley Ewell was able to stay out of jail at the time of the killings even though he had recently been convicted of second-degree burglary for stealing from a Home Depot...