Medical Treatments

In an unprecedented feat, British surgeons implanted a donor heart in a dying toddler whose own heart was too weak to sustain life, then removed it 10 years later after the girl's own heart had fully recovered. The technique is unlikely to become widespread because of the severe shortage of pediatric donor hearts, but it suggests that better mechanical assist devices that take some or all of the load off a diseased heart could allow time for weakened hearts to heal themselves.

Citing "overwhelming" evidence that marijuana eases pain and anxiety for the chronically ill, medicinal pot advocates told a federal appeals panel Tuesday that the federal government should be stopped from spreading "false information" about marijuana. As was argued in the debate over whether stem cell research should be resumed, Americans for Safe Access cast the Bush administration's opposition to any legalized use of marijuana as being shaped by conservative sentiments instead of hard facts.

At his home just off Sheik Said Road, Ala Thabit Fattah waits for word from America about whether doctors can save his 2-year-old daughter, Amenah. Iraqi doctors had known since she was only a few weeks old that Amenah had an oxygen deficiency problem in her heart that probably would prove fatal before she reached school-age. But her doctor told Fattah that the only surgeons he knew who could save Amenah had fled Iraq in the turmoil since the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime.

For thousands of years, humans have sipped, swallowed and chewed endless remedies to soothe frayed nerves: fermented ales in medieval Europe, coca tea and tobacco in the ancient Americas, and kava kava concoctions in the South Pacific, to name a few. For the last century or so, with varied success, researchers have tried to perfect the packaging of anxiety relief into a simple little pill. In the 1800s in the U.S.

In the 1890s, a New York surgeon named William Coley tested a radical cancer treatment. He took a hypodermic needle teeming with bacteria and plunged it into the flesh of patients. After suffering through weeks of chills and fevers, many showed significant regression of their tumors, but even Coley himself could not explain the phenomenon. His experiments were sparked by the observation that certain cancer patients improved after contracting infections.

When Nick Rous feels a cold coming on, he starts taking vitamin C and lots of garlic. When people around him come down with the flu, he reaches for echinacea and a homeopathic remedy, Oscillococcinum. As a last resort, Rous, 30, says he turns to Tylenol and the nasal spray Afrin. "But I try to avoid that stuff as much as possible," says the saxophone player, who lives in San Francisco.

Improvements in angioplasty in the last few years have made the procedure for unblocking coronary arteries much safer, allowing cardiologists to perform procedures they were reluctant to do in the past. The procedures include performing angioplasty after clot-busting drugs have been given and using it in hospitals that don't have a heart surgery team available for emergencies, researchers said during a weekend cardiology meeting in Chicago.

Contrary to the prevailing belief among cardiologists, reducing blood pressure in people over the age of 80 can sharply reduce the number of heart attacks, strokes and deaths, researchers said Monday. Treatment with one or two inexpensive, well-tolerated drugs produced a 21% drop in overall mortality -- such a significant decrease that the study was ended prematurely so that all of the participants could benefit from the treatment, British researchers said.

Researchers have reported the development of a new combination drug that will allow patients to take high doses of the cholesterol-lowering vitamin niacin without a painful and embarrassing side effect known as flushing.