Tag Archives: medicine

How Medicine Became the Stealth Family-Friendly Profession – The New York Times

Britni Hebert was chief resident, on track for a career in the highly demanding field of oncology, when she found out she was having twins. “Everything kind of just tilted on its head,” she said. She couldn’t imagine 80-hour workweeks with two newborns at home, while her husband was doing an equally intensive radiology fellowship.… Read More »

There needs to be a shift in the culture of medicine | TheHill – The Hill

Since the implementation of the 80-hour physician residency training work week in 2003 by the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the medical community has debated whether or not this was going to impact patient care and mortality.   A new observational study in the British Medical Journal, demonstrated no difference in patient mortality, admission,… Read More »

A New Kind of Space Camp Teaches the Art of Martian Medicine – WIRED

Ben Easter was delighted with the way his students were performing. He was especially delighted that a husband had just voted to kill his wife. The couple were both enrolled in the Martian Medical Analogue and Research Simulation, a continuing-education course for medical professionals who wanted to learn about health care in space by pretending… Read More »

The most expensive medicine ever treats a rare condition. The price: $2.13 million – Los Angeles Times

Evelyn Villarreal was one of the first children treated, at 8 weeks. Her family, from Centreville, Va., had lost their first child to spinal muscular atrophy at 15 months. Two years later when Evelyn was born a test showed she also had the disease, so the family enrolled her in the gene therapy study at… Read More »

Gene-silencing: ‘New class’ of medicine reverses disease porphyria

Doctors have used a new type of medicine called “gene silencing” to reverse a disease that leaves people in crippling pain. The condition, acute intermittent porphyria, also causes paralysis and is fatal in some cases. The novel approach fine-tunes the genetic instructions locked in our DNA. Doctors say they are “genuinely surprised” how successful it… Read More »