Scientific American

4 Medical Implants That Escaped FDA Scrutiny

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:30:00 EST

Medical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls have increased. The FDA and the industry maintain that a speedy approval process gives patients faster access to life-saving devices. But critics say that unlike drugs, a substantial number of risky devices are cleared without clinical testing, and receive almost no oversight once on the market.

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Blood Flow Fingered in Ice Cream Headaches

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:43:08 EST

The infamous ice cream headache has been a bit of a medical mystery. Until recently.

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How Do Painkillers Buffer against Social Rejection?

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 07:30:00 EST

How do painkillers buffer against social rejection? [More]

A Broken Sense of Self Underlies Eating Disorders (preview)

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Nell (not her real name) was shivering, but she did not realize she was cold. Only when a colleague pointed out her goose bumps and blue lips did she think to put on a sweater. Nor does she register feelings such as exhaustion. “Sometimes I don’t realize I’m tired until three in the morning,” she says. “I just don’t get those clues correctly.”

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A Periodic Stress Meter

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:02:00 EST

Overwhelming stress cripples. Neuroscientists have begun to learn that even acute, everyday stress can turn off the brain’s command-and-control center, the prefrontal cortex. Without our mental executive, we feel helpless and out of control.

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Why Some Pain Relievers Cause Intense Itching

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

Millions of patients benefit from opioids such as morphine and codeine, but the pain relief they provide often comes with intense itching. In some cases, the irritation is so bad that patients will opt to cut back on painkillers. Now a study in the October 14 issue of Cell has found a possible explanation--the first step to creating drugs that will not make patients choose between experiencing itchiness and pain.

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Food Poisoning's Hidden Legacy

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

Colette Dziadul struggled for years to understand her daughter’s joint problems. Dana, who is now 14 years old, complained from toddlerhood that her knees and ankles hurt. The aches kept her up at night, made her wake her parents to ask for painkillers and forced her to sit out school sports. Nevertheless, two pediatricians and an orthopedist diagnosed the problem as “growing pains” that would fade as she grew older.

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How Hospital Gardens Help Patients Heal

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 07:30:00 EST

To get an inkling of what a well-designed hospital garden can mean to a seriously ill child, watch the home video posted on YouTube last August of Aidan Schwalbe, a three-year-old heart-transplant recipient. The toddler is shown exploring the meandering paths, sun-dappled lawn and gnarled roots of a branching shade tree in the Prouty Garden at Children’s Hospital Boston. “He loves to be out in the garden feeding the birds and squirrels,” wrote Aidan’s grandmother in an August blog entry. “They will all weigh 30 lbs. each by the time we leave here!”

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Deadly Duo: Mixing Alcohol and Prescription Drugs Can Result in Addiction or Accidental Death

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:47:00 EST

The mystery of Whitney Houston's death will not be solved for several weeks, as the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office awaits a full toxicology report. But many experts speculate that the singer's tragic demise involved a deadly cocktail of alcohol and prescription drugs, including Xanax.

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Marijuana Mouth Spray: Will Cancer Pain Reliever Be Abused?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:30:00 EST

The medical marijuana drug Sativex, which could be approved in the United States in the coming years as a treatment for pain relief, has little potential for abuse, experts say.

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MIND Reviews: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

Thinking, Fast and Slow [More]

Women Feel Pain More Intensely Than Men Do

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:00:00 EST

When a woman falls ill, her pain may be more intense than a man's, a new study suggests.

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New Target Discovered for Pain Relief

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 21:30:00 EST

An uncharted trawl through thousands of small molecules involved in the body's metabolism may have uncovered a potential route to treating pain caused by nerve damage.

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PAIN Relief: India on Track to Be Declared Polio-Free Next Month

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:30:00 EST

In the mid-2000s, when scientists questioned whether the campaign to rid the world of polio could succeed, skeptics pointed to a problem that some called PAIN .

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Silky Micro-Needles Could Make Shots Pain-Free

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:33:08 EST

Nobody likes getting shots. But what if you could make the needles so tiny that they broke the skin painlessly? Engineers from Tufts University have created such micro-needles--made from the major protein in silk, fibroin. The work is in the journal Advanced Functional Materials .[Konstantinos Tsioris et al., " Fabrication of Silk Micro-Needles for Controlled-Release Drug Delivery "]

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Common Brain Mechanisms Underlie Supernatural Perceptions (preview)

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:00:00 EST

You may have never personally caught sight of Jesus Christ’s face in a potato chip, but you have likely succumbed to an equally improbable belief at some point in your life. Many people claim that ghosts exist or that their dreams can predict the future. Some individuals even think they have seen the face of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.

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It's Plain the Rain Ups Chili Peppers' Pain

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:25:08 EST

Spiciness is a chili pepper's best defense against seed-attacking microbes. But not all chilies are hot. Because producing that heat comes at a price. So says a study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B . [David C. Haak et al., " Why are not all chilies hot? A trade-off limits pungency "]

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Fiction Hones Social Skills (preview)

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

We recognize Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver by his commanding presence, his stoicism and the absence of his left leg, cut off below the hip. Although we think we know the roguish Silver, characters such as he are not of this world, as Stevenson himself admitted in Longman’s Magazine in 1884. He described fictional characters as being like circles--abstractions. Scientists use circles to solve problems in physics, and writers and readers likewise use fictional characters to think about people in the social world.

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Glucose Test Swaps Tears for Blood

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 11:05:08 EST

People with diabetes may have to endure multiple, painful finger sticks every day to get blood samples for testing. But a new glucose test may do away with the pain even as it brings on the tears. Because the test uses tears instead of blood to measure glucose levels. The report is in the journal Analytical Chemistry . [Qinyi Yan et al., " Measurement of Tear Glucose Levels with Amperometric Glucose Biosensor/Capillary Tube Configuration "]

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Many Teens Rely on the Pill for Non-Sexual Reasons

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:00 EST

Many women are popping the pill for more than its pregnancy-prevention benefit, according to a study by the Guttmacher Institute. The study finds 33 percent of U.S. teens and 14 percent of all U.S. women taking the oral contraceptive are doing so solely to treat menstrual cramps or for another purpose not related to birth control.

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