Two doctors from the Texas Heart Institute successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a device—proving that it is possible for your body to be kept alive without a heart, or a pulse.

The turbine-like device, that are simple whirling rotors, developed by the doctors does not beat like a heart, rather provides a ‘continuous flow’ like a garden hose.

If you listened with a stethoscope, you wouldn’t hear a heartbeat. If you examined [the] arteries, there’s no pulse. Hooked up to an EKG, [he'd] be flat-lined.”

Three-year-old Isbac Pacunda absorbed his twin brother as they developed in their mother’s womb. The result? A parasitic twin in the stomach of the living boy.

The partially formed fetus weighs a pound and a half and is 9 inches long, according to Dr. Carlos Astocondor of Las Mercedes Hospital in Chiclayo, Peru. Doctors in Peru found the parasitic twin and planned to surgically remove the tissue Monday. It has some hair on the cranium, eyes and some bones.

A newly published paper from Rhode Island Hospital reports on the impact to patients if five personality disorders are removed from the upcoming revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (DSM-5).

Based on their study, the researchers believe these changes could result in false-negative diagnoses for patients. The paper is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and is now available online in advance of print.

The DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders work group made several recommendations to change the approach toward diagnosing personality disorders. One of those recommendations is to delete five personality disorders as a way to reduce the level of comorbidity among the disorders. The ones originally slated to be removed include paranoid, schizoid, histrionic, narcissistic and dependent personality disorders.

More recently, the Work Group recommended that narcissistic be retained. Lead author Mark Zimmerman, M.D., director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, points out, however, that no data were cited describing the impact this deletion had, or might have, on the overall prevalence of personality disorders. Likewise, no research was cited for the Work Group’s reversal in deciding to retain narcissistic personality disorder …

Read more here.

Magic mushrooms could one day be prescribed for depression after Professor David Nutt, the controversial sacked government drugs advisor, claimed research on healthy volunteers proved what a mistake it was to abandon therapeutic psychedelic drugs more than 50 years ago.

The first clinical trial into magic mushroom therapy could start by the end of the year after two small studies suggested the active chemical, psilocybin, had a profound affect on key regions of the brain.

Professor Nutt’s team, at Imperial College London, hope to test the hallucinogen on depressed patients who have not benefited from antidepressants or behavioural therapy.

Psilocybin would be infused into their bloodstreams before a psychotherapy session, tailored to elicit positive memories. If funding is approved by the Medical Research Council it would represent a major step towards mainstream rehabilitation for such drugs since LSD was banned in 1966.

The first study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved scanning the brains of 30 people given the drug intravenously to measure changes in blood flow and activity. Unexpectedly, the MRI scans showed the drug caused activity to decrease in hub areas with dense connections to other areas. It disconnected two key hubs: the medial prefrontal cortex, which is hyperactive in people with depression, and the posterior cingulate cortex, thought to play a role in self-awareness.

Sputum sample containing Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Are we approaching the end of the wondrous age of antibiotics? Scientists have nothing to combat this strain of TB, as Eryn Brown  reports for the LA Times:

At least a dozen people in India are infected with a type of tuberculosis that is resistant to all antibiotics used to treat the disease.

In December, the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published an online report that documented four of the cases. This weekend, news outlets in India reported that there were actually at least 12 people with the drug-resistant lung disease.

Officials fear that what they’ve seen so far is just the beginning, and that many more cases are lurking undetected.

“It’s estimated that on average, a tuberculosis patient infects 10 to 20 contacts in a year, and there’s no reason to suspect that this strain is any less transmissible,” study co-author Zarir Udwadia of the Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre in Mumbai told New Scientist. “Short of quarantining them in hospitals with isolation facilities till they become non-infectious – which is not practical or possible – there is nothing else one can do to prevent transmission.”

Patients with TB must take antibiotics for a long time to cure the disease. Many don’t get the right medications, or don’t take their medications properly, which allows the evolution of drug-resistant strains.

Over time, TB-causing bacteria have become resistant to more and more types of antibiotics — and, now, apparently, all antibiotics…

[continues in the LA Times]

Say “placebo effect” and most people think of the boost they may get from a sugar pill simply because they believe it will work. But more and more research suggests there is more than a fleeting boost to be gained from placebos.

A particular mind-set or belief about one’s body or health may lead to improvements in disease symptoms as well as changes in appetite, brain chemicals and even vision, several recent studies have found, highlighting how fundamentally the mind and body are connected.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a “real” treatment. One study demonstrated a strong placebo effect in subjects who were told they were getting a sugar pill with no active ingredient.

Placebo treatments are sometimes used in some clinical practices. In a 2008 survey of nearly 700 internists and rheumatologists published in the British Medical Journal, about half said they prescribe placebos on a regular basis. The most popular were over-the-counter painkillers and vitamins. Very few physicians said they relied on sugar pills or saline injections. The American Medical Association says a placebo can’t be given simply to soothe a difficult patient, and it can be used only if the patient is informed of and agrees to its use.

Researchers want to know more about how the placebo effect works, and how to increase and decrease it. A more powerful, longer-lasting placebo effect might be helpful in treating health conditions related to weight and metabolism…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

C. difficile colonies on a blood agar plate.

James Gallagher reports in BBC News

Transplanting faecal matter from one person to another — the thought might turn your stomach, but it could be lifesaving.

Some doctors are using the procedure to repopulate the gut with healthy bacteria, which can become unbalanced in some diseases. Dr Alisdair MacConnachie, who thinks he is the only UK doctor to carry out the procedure for Clostridium difficle infection, describes it as a proven treatment. He says it should be used, but only as a treatment of last resort.

The logic is simple. C. difficile infection is caused by antibiotics wiping out swathes of bacteria in the gut. It gives the surviving C. difficile bacteria room to explode in numbers and produce masses of toxins which lead to diarrhoea and can be fatal.

The first-choice solution, more antibiotics, does not always work and some patients develop recurrent infection. The theory is that by adding more bacteria to the bowels, they will compete with C. difficile bacteria and control the infection …

Read More: BBC News

Thanks to a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant, we now know that inhaling lemon and lavender scents doesn’t do a lot for our ability to heal a wound. With $666,000 in federal research money, scientists examined whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. It could not.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine also helped pay scientists to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone’s intestines can help treat pancreatic cancer (a $406,000 grant) and whether massage makes people with advanced cancer feel better ($1.25 million). The coffee enemas did not help. The massage did.

NCCAM also has invested in studies of various forms of energy healing, including one based on the ideas of a self-described “healer, clairvoyant and medicine woman” who says her children inspired her to learn to read auras. The cost for that was $104,000.

More: Chicago Tribune

Economics is at the start of a revolution that is traceable to an unexpected source: medical schools and their research facilities. Neuroscience — the science of how the brain, that physical organ inside one’s head, really works — is beginning to change the way we think about how people make decisions. These findings will inevitably change the way we think about how economies function. In short, we are at the dawn of “neuroeconomics”.

Efforts to link neuroscience to economics have occurred mostly in just the last few years, and the growth of neuroeconomics is still in its early stages. But its nascence follows a pattern: revolutions in science tend to come from completely unexpected places. A field of science can turn barren if no fundamentally new approaches to research are on the horizon. Scholars can become so trapped in their methods — in the language and assumptions of the accepted approach to their discipline — that their research becomes repetitive or trivial.

Then something exciting comes along from someone who was never involved with these methods — some new idea that attracts young scholars and a few iconoclastic old scholars, who are willing to learn a different science and its different research methods. At a certain moment in this process, a scientific revolution is born.

Read more here.

We’ve been loving the Midnight Archive’s series of macabre web shorts (previously: 1, 2). One of their more recent installments is a short documentary on the late Dr. Robert White, a neurosurgeon who successfully transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another …

PHOENIX — Doctors and medical experts are concerned about a new trend taking place on Facebook.

Parents are trading live viruses through the mail in order to infect their children. The Facebook group is called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area.” According to the group’s page, it is geared toward “parents who want their children to obtain natural immunity for the chicken pox.”

On the page, parents post where they live and ask if anyone with a child who has the chicken pox would be willing to send saliva, infected lollipops or clothing through the mail. Parents also use the page to set up play dates with children who currently have chicken pox. Medical experts say the most troubling part of this is parents are taking pathogens from complete strangers and deliberately infecting their children.

More: KPHO CBS 5 News

It was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West. U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline. But exact numbers are hard to come by — just small variations in fertility rates could mean a population of 15 billion by the end of the century.

The United States is facing an epidemic of lethal overdoses from prescription painkillers, which have tripled in the past decade and now account for more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined.

The quantity of painkillers on the market is so high that it would be enough for every American to swallow a standard dose of Vicodin every four hours for one full month, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The unfortunate and in fact shocking news is that we are in the midst of an epidemic of prescription drug overdose in this country. It is an epidemic but it can be stopped,” said CDC chief Thomas Frieden. “Now the burden of dangerous drugs is being created more by a few irresponsible doctors than by drug pushers on street corners.”

The CDC Vital Signs report focused on opioid pain relievers, including oxycodone, methadone and hydrocodone, better known as Vicodin, which have quadrupled in sales to pharmacies, hospitals and doctors’ offices since 1999.

Last year, 12 million Americans reported taking prescription painkillers for recreational uses, not because of a medical condition.

The epidemic is at its height among middle-aged white men, age 35-54, and American Indians or Alaska natives, the CDC said.

Rural and poor areas tend to have the highest prescription drug overdose death rates, and the severity of the problem varies widely from state to state. The drugs are highly addictive and people can build up tolerance quickly.

While many advocates say President Obama’s executive order to reduce a dire shortage of life-saving hospital medications is an essential step, others say the order is not enough to stop price gouging by some pharmaceutical companies.

Essential cancer drugs have arguably taken the hardest hit. Hospitals have reported the worst shortage in nearly a decade of chemotherapy agents like doxorubicin.

The new order instructs the Food and Drug Administration to broaden reporting of potential drug shortages, expedite regulatory reviews that can help prevent shortages, and examine whether potential shortages have led to price gouging. The drug shortage has compromised or delayed care for some patients and may have led to otherwise preventable deaths.

Christopher W. Hansen, president of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, applauded today’s order, saying in a statement that it would “allow government, industry, providers and the public to more systematically analyze and understand the causes of specific drug shortages as they occur, and to develop real-time solutions that are also needed to address the acute problems that cancer patients live with daily.”

More on ABC News

A new breed of genetically modified mosquitoes carries a gene that cripples its own offspring. They could crush native mosquito populations and block the spread of disease. And they are already in the air — though that’s been a secret.

Outside Tapachula, Chiapas, Mexico — 10 miles from Guatemala. To reach the cages, we follow the main highway out of town, driving past soy, cocoa, banana and lustrous dark-green mango plantations thriving in the rich volcanic soil. Past the tiny village of Rio Florido the road degenerates into an undulating dirt tract. We bump along on waves of baked mud until we reach a security checkpoint, guard at the ready. A sign posted on the barbed wire–enclosed compound pictures a mosquito flanked by a man and woman: Estos mosquitos genéticamente modificados requieren un manejo especial, it reads. We play by the rules.

Inside, cashew trees frame a cluster of gauzy mesh cages perched on a platform. The cages hold thousands of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes — the local species, smaller and quieter than the typical buzzing specimens found in the U.S. At 7 a.m., the scene looks ethereal: rays of sunlight filter through layers of mesh creating a glowing, yellow hue. Inside the cages, however, genetically modified mosquitoes are waging a death match against the locals, an attempted genocide-by-mating that has the potential to wipe out dengue fever, one of the world’s most troublesome, aggressive diseases.

More: Scientific American

There is a growing market today of consumers trying to avoid soy in their diet. Many people have developed soy allergies, and a number of people are concerned about the plant estrogen properties of soy protein. Soy protein is linked to the rise in hypothyroidism, early puberty in young girls, and lower testosterone levels in men, among other problems. Much of this research is documented in Dr. Kaayla Daniel’s book The Whole Soy Story.

What most people do not realize, however, is that due to the predominance of soy in animal feeds, soy protein is probably present in your food even if it is not listed as an ingredient anywhere. Very little testing has been done to determine if the soy protein from the animal feed is passed into the end products we consume. Most laboratories do not even have tests available to test for this.

Professor M. Monica Giusti, a poultry biologist of The Ohio State University, is one of the few people who has done research on soy isoflavones appearing in commercial egg yolks. She has designed lab tests to detect soy isoflavones. In 2009 one of her students published a master’s thesis on the transfer of the soy protein into egg yolks and chicken tissue …

More on Health Freedoms

Vietnamese woman Nguyen Thi Phuong now looks like a septugenarian after the rapid aging affliction took hold following an allergic reaction to seafood.

Her sad story began in 2008, when her youthful beauty began to fade over the course of just a few days, leaving her with sagging, wrinkled skin all over her face and body. Until now she has been forced to wear a mask in public to hide her appearance from prying eyes, but now doctors are attempting to establish what caused her sudden and horrifying aging.

Some have argued that the condition is lipodystrophy – a rare syndrome that causes a layer of fatty tissue beneath the surface of the skin to disintegrate while the skin itself continues to grow at a startling pace.

The syndrome with no cure leaves its victims with loose folds of skin all over their bodies, wrinkled faces and the gaunt features of people decades their senior. The condition is extremely rare and out of around seven billion people on the planet, only 2,000 are thought to have lipodystrophy.

Phuong explained she has long been allergic to seafood and that she had suffered a particularly bad reaction in 2008. Phuong said she took some medicine bought at a local pharmacy instead of going to the hospital because her and her husband Tuyen, now 33, were too poor to afford it.

She said: “After one month of taking the drugs, I became less itchy but hives remained on my skin. Then I switched to traditional medicine and all the hives disappeared, together with my itching. However, my skin began to sag and fold.” Phuong then took another kind of traditional medicine to treat her rapid-aging skin problem – but to no avail.

[She does] not remember what the medicine was or which pharmacy they got it from.

Meanwhile, stories about Phuong in the local media have prompted a variety of diagnoses from local doctors. Many of them do not believe that Phuong has lipodystrophy, saying instead that Phuong may be suffering the side effects of too much steroid medication.

UK doctors are being told the antibiotic normally used to treat gonorrhoea is no longer effective because the sexually transmitted disease is now largely resistant to it. The Health Protection Agency says we may be heading to a point when the disease is incurable unless new treatments can be found.

For now, doctors must stop using the usual treatment cefixime and instead use two more powerful antibiotics. One is a pill and the other a jab.

The HPA say the change is necessary because of increasing resistance. Tests on samples taken from patients and grown in the laboratory showed reduced susceptibility to the usual antibiotic cefixime in nearly 20% of cases in 2010, compared with just 10% of cases in 2009.

More on BBC News

David Irving

[disinfo ed.'s note: the following is an excerpt from The Protein Myth: Significantly reducing the Risk of Cancer, Heart Disease, Stoke and Diabetes while Saving the Animals and the Planet courtesy of John Hunt Publishing.]

Current research suggests that death from cardiovascular disease is on the decline. However, the incidence of people who get heart disease remains the same, and risk factors may be increasing.¹ (Cardiovascular disease includes stroke, high blood pressure, heart failure, and other conditions like arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, cardiomyopathy, and peripheral arterial disease.) Discoveries that isolate the cause of heart disease and offer cures like the remarkable breakthroughs made by Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Dr. Dean Ornish should, consequently, excite cardiologists. Yet in spite of the proved effectiveness of these new treatment options, most mainstream cardiologists and cardiovascular treatment facilities have ignored them.

Dr. Esselstyn began a twelve year cardiac disease arrest and reversal trial in 1985. Five years into the study he published his first findings and the complete report seven years later. Dr. Dean Ornish began his first clinical trial in 1986, issued his first report a year later, and then in 1990 published the results of his study in a widely acclaimed book, Dr. Dean Ornish‘s Program for Reversing Heart Disease.²

Both trials showed conclusively that heart disease can be prevented and reversed though a low-fat, plant-based diet.³ Prior to these trials the field of cardiology considered coronary heart disease to be irreversible.

Dr. Ornish’s plan calls for a diet of no meats and no added fats with an emphasis on whole grain foods, vegetables, fruits, and beans. It permits the consumption of egg whites and nonfat dairy products. Ornish combines his diet with exercise, stress management, and group support. With this plan he was able to reverse severe coronary artery disease without statins or other drugs.⁴ Praise for Ornish’s work, however, is often accompanied by negative criticisms on how difficult the plan is to follow or some other comment that casts it in a less than favorable light. The Mayo Clinic Heart Book, for example, offers a generally favorable review, but comments that “many people find that the program…requires substantial lifestyle changes.”⁵

Dr. Esseltsyn’s program, described in his book Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, calls for avoiding oils, meat, fish, fowl and dairy products.⁶ His trial involved 18 patients who in the eight years prior to the trial had experienced 49 coronary events such as “angina, bypass surgery, heart attacks, strokes and angioplasty.” After 12 years on Dr. Esselstyn‘s program, these 18 patients experienced only one coronary event, and that particular patient had dropped out of the program for two years. After he came back and resumed Esselstyn’s plant-based diet he had no further cardiovascular disease occurrences.

The medical establishment does not react to heart disease arrest and reversal programs like those Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish have set up with great enthusiasm. Dr. Campbell, for example, recalls the kind of responses he witnessed from his colleagues steeped in surgical and drug treatment procedures when the evidence began accumulating that nutrition could prevent cardiovascular events from occurring.

I remember when my superiors were only reluctantly accepting the evidence of nutrition being able to prevent heart disease, for example, but vehemently denying its ability to reverse such a disease when already advanced. But the evidence can no longer be ignored.

Those in science or medicine who shut their minds to such an idea are being more than stubborn; they are being irresponsible.⁷

Dr. Esselstyn practiced at the Cleveland Clinic, called by some the “best medical center for cardiac care” in the country, if not the world. Patients fly there from all across the globe for advanced heart disease treatment. It was during Dr. Esselstyn’s work there that he conducted the trial described above.⁸

Besides winning an Olympic gold medal in rowing and a Bronze Star for military service in Vietnam, Esselstyn was President of the Staff at the Cleveland Clinic, member of the Board of Governors, chairman of the Breast Cancer Task Force, and head of the Section of Thyroid and Parathyroid Surgery. He was also the president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, author of over 100 professional scientific articles, and he was included on a list of the best doctors in America in 1994 – 1995.⁹

After he had completed his trial with the eighteen coronary patients and after his retirement in the year 2000, Esselstyn proposed to the Cleveland Clinic that he set up an arrest and reversal dietary cardiac program like the one he had done, as an option to be offered to every patient in the clinic suffering from heart disease.¹⁰ The program cost little and presented no risk for patients. The Clinic rehired him as a consultant in 2009 to direct the Cardiovascular Disease Prevention and Reversal Program at the Cleveland Wellness Institute.

Many people at the Clinic were excited about Dr. Esselstyn’s work. Staff members and trustees of the Clinic who had developed coronary disease themselves were approaching him for treatment.¹¹

Esselstyn notes that work is presently being done with “stem cells to try to make new blood vessels grow.”¹² He asks if it would not just be easier to prevent the disease in the first place.¹³

Campbell concurs. “We, the public, turn to doctors and hospitals in times of great need,” he says. “For them to provide care that is knowingly less than optimal, that doesn’t protect our health, doesn’t heal our disease and costs us tens of thousands of dollars is morally inexcusable.”¹⁴

It is worthwhile noting that in contrast to heart disease arrest and reversal programs, in 1996 a team of surgical specialists from the Cleveland Clinic flew to Brazil to investigate a new

operation that an unknown surgeon, Dr. Randas Batista, had developed to treat heart failure by strengthening the heart muscle. It involved removing a wedge-shaped piece of tissue from the left ventricle, the main chamber of the heart. Batista had 400 patients under his care and claimed the operation was hugely successful.¹⁵

After consulting with Dr. Batista, the surgical team returned to the Cleveland Clinic and tried out this procedure for themselves on 62 patients, all of whom gave their consent. But the operation turned out to be a dismal failure. Within three years more than a third of the patients had died, and only a quarter were free of heart disease.¹⁶

When surgery was involved, the Cleveland Clinic flew a team of experts to Brazil which subsequently operated on 62 patients in an experimental procedure that was highly dangerous, involved intense pain, cost enormous fees, failed to provide perceived benefits for three-quarters of those operated on, and ultimately proved fatal for more than a third of the participants.

The bias favoring surgery and drugs over treatment by means of nutrition could hardly be more apparent. If the patients who were operated on unsuccessfully with the Brazilian procedure could go back and do it over again — especially those who died — can any rational person doubt that they would choose heart disease arrest and reversal treatment over the one offered by the Cleveland Clinic, the best cardiovascular clinic in the world? Cutting open patients’ chests and splicing in new blood vessels to bypass clogged arteries costs $13 billion a year. One half of all bypass procedures clog up again within 10 years. One third of all angioplasty procedures clog again within four to six  months. In contrast, the patients who participated in Dr. Esselstyn‘s program were still disease free two decades after they had finished the program, and never experienced one  spasm of pain.¹⁷

It costs considerably less per year, obviously, to undertake a low-fat, plant-based diet as the sole treatment for cardiovascular disease. But while that is great for the bank accounts of patients, it is also a part of the problem. Medical facilities are not anxious to forego their cut of that $13 billion a year heart bypass industry which open heart surgery provides.

Cutting open someone’s chest, it goes without saying, is a surgically complicated, serious, and painful procedure. As Dr. David Eddy, a professor of health policy at Duke University noted, “a coronary artery bypass may change the life expectancy of a 60 year-old man with triple vessel disease, but it will also change his joy of life for several weeks after the operation, the degree and severity of chest pain, his ability to walk and make love, his relationship with his son, the physical appearance of his chest and his pocketbook. Pain, disability, anxiety, family relations, and any number of other outcomes are all important consequences of a procedure.”¹⁸

Patients should not have to endure this kind of sufferingwithout at least being informed that other possibilities exist.

As for Dr. Esselstyn, his goal remains untarnished. He has glimpsed the possibilities and he forges ahead as do all pioneers when faced with mainstream status quo rejection.

I have an ambitious goal: to annihilate heart disease — to abolish it once and for all. Your arteries at the age of ninety ought to work as efficiently as they did when you were nine….We have shown that [this] number one killer in Western civilization can be abolished, through consumption of a plant-based diet. But we can do much more. If the public adopted this approach to preventing disease, if, by the millions, Americans abandoned their toxic diets and learned a truly healthy approach to eating, we could largely limit all those diseases of nutritional extravagance — strokes, hypertension, obesity, osteoporosis,and adult-onset diabetes. Meanwhile, we would see a marked reduction in cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, rectum, uterus, and ovaries. Medicine could relinquish its primary focus on pills and procedures. Prevention, not desperate intervention, would become the order of the day.¹⁹

Most medical facilities ignore the work of Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish in favor of more traditional approaches. At the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Dr. John Young, director of comparative medicine and chairman of Americans for Medical Progress, a pro-animal testing organization, and his staff work on research projects that include vivisecting pigs in the study of cardiovascular disease. He makes the same pitch all animal researchers make when they want public sympathy and support: the research is exciting; we’re right on the verge of a cure; it’s just around the corner.

In an interview on PBS early in 2009, Young showed off a magnificent, lean and muscular, black-and-cream-colored pig confined in a small holding pen and said: “The cardiovascular system of a pig is almost identical to that of a human being, okay? The coronary arteries, the heart muscle — virtually identical, so pigs are a favorite model for cardiovascular disease.”²⁰

It seems a terrible waste that Dr. Young and the staff of the Los Angeles Cedars-Sinai Medical Center work on experimental heart disease operations that take away the lives of beautiful pigs, like the one Dr. Young displayed, when the exemplary trials completed by Dr. Esseltsyn and Dr. Ornish have scientifically demonstrated that heart disease can be prevented, arrested, and reversed through diet. Undoubtedly, to Dr. Young and others involved in heart surgery, like those at the Cleveland Clinic who participated in the Brazil experiment, heart disease arrest and reversal treatment, no matter how successful, does not meet their standards. We should take a closer look, then, at why, from the standpoint of logic, heart disease arrest and reversal therapy is far superior to drug and surgical procedures.

For a person standing with his/her arm extended into a furnace, the best way to prevent that person’s arm from being burned to a crisp is to have him/her remove it from the furnace. Healing can then begin. That is essentially what the Esselstyn/Ornish treatment does. Since animal protein is the underlying cause of heart disease (and stroke) because it puts saturated fat and cholesterol into the digestive system leading to atherosclerosis and high blood pressure, the best way to halt the progression of the disease and to begin reversing its effects is to stop the cause, which is the consumption of animal protein. It should be apparent that neither Dr. Young nor any researcher at the Cleveland Clinic is likely to surpass this simple method of saving someone from “burning their arm to a crisp.” Remove their arm and the burning stops. Reduce the cholesterol count to 150 mg/dL or below and the heart disease stops. Then start the healing, which includes complete rest from the original cause.

Apparently, though, this is not a satisfactory method for Dr. Young and mainstream medical practitioners more attracted to complexity. In general they seem intent on finding some way in which a person can remain with his/her arm in the oven without burning it, or, in the case of heart disease, can continue consuming animal protein with the accompanying high cholesterol it produces. To many people, that is a farfetched dream that after decades of failure no longer deserves public tax funding, nor should innocent animals be forced to sacrifice their lives to try to achieve a goal that is essentially unethical. It is unethical because 1) it is just plain egotistical arrogance to insist that human beings should be able to put poisons (animal protein) into their bodies and get away with it just because they have a craving for the poisons, and 2) a treatment has now been developed by Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish to treat heart disease so that research to find other treatments that scientists like Dr. Young continue to work on are not necessary, especially when they involve operating on and killing innocent animals.

In comparing his method of cardiovascular treatment to conventional medicine, Dr. Esselstyn described it this way. “All the interventional procedures carry considerable risk of morbidity, including new heart attacks, strokes, infections, and for some, an inevitable loss of cognition… And the benefits of intervention erode with the passage of time; eventually, you have to have another angioplasty, another bypass procedure, another stent… Mine carries none.”²¹

Heart disease has been the number one killer in America for 100 years. Every day nearly 3,000 Americans will have heart attacks and 2400 will die of heart disease.²²,²³ It costs 30 billion dollars a year for heart disease for drugs to control cholesterol, blood pressure and other risk factors. Patients pay $46,000 for bypass operations in which one out of every 50 patients will die of complications. Angioplasty is a simpler procedure but also expensive, and one in about every sixteen angioplasty patients will experience “abrupt vessel closure“ which can lead to death, heart attack, or an emergency bypass.²⁴ Angioplasty patients cannot feel very secure walking around knowing that at any second they may become one of those 1 in 16 who experience “abrupt vessel closure.” Similarly, it cannot be very reassuring for bypass patients lying on the operating table just before going under knowing that they could be among those 1 in 50 who willdie of complications from the operation.

All of this can be prevented. But champions of animal esearch and surgery and drugs would rather continue in the direction of painful open heart surgery in needless bypass operations causing patients unwarranted suffering. According to long-term studies, bypass patients do not even have fewerheart attacks than those who do not have surgery.²⁵

The clinical trials conducted by Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish have proved incontrovertibly that cardiovascular disease can be arrested and reversed through nutrition. Ornish has even widened his research to include prostate cancer and has shown that prostate tumors can also be arrested and reduced through a nutrition program.²⁶ But even though the success of Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Ornish has by now been widely reported, few hospitals and medical centers have made an effort to include nutrition arrest and reversal treatments in their cardiac programs. The Ornish program has, fortunately, been picked up by a few hospitals and with great enthusiasm in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, including Stamford Hospital in Connecticut, which is affiliated with the New York Presbyterian Health System, a teaching affiliate of no less than the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, one of the top medical schools in the country.

If more hospitals were to start using cardiovascular arrest and reversal programs it would be possible to begin reducing expensive surgical, radiological, and chemotherapeutic treatments for cardiovascular disease. However, this is just not a priority for heart surgeons and animal researchers who are content with the high salaries and peer prestige they receive for their work. They also get enormous grants in public funding plus quid pro quo employment security for bringing in huge sums of money for the facilities that employ them through patient fees and federally funded tax grants, of which their employers get from 50% to 75%. A further obstacle to the success of arrest and reversal therapy for heart disease are the drug and medical corporations responsible for producing the expensive drugs and equipment for surgical procedures and pre- and postoperative care. Continuing the status quo can only benefit these companies.

Simply put, the healthcare establishment does not want to seriously consider the preponderance of evidence that shows beyond all sustainable doubt that heart disease can be arrested and reversed through nutritional procedures.

Today we are privileged to live in a world of technological advance. Modern science is a marvel to behold. Scientists have developed complex prosthetic body substitutes that respond to electrical activity in the muscles through computer sensors.²⁷ They are working on ways in which our own bodies might regenerate blood vessels. Research is being conducted for avoiding the risk of defects in childbirth. Exploration has begun on how to clone cells to create organs and even body parts.

In the field of cancer research, scientists are now trying to develop drugs to choke off the blood supply to tumors, thereby killing them. They are investigating many compounds including green tea and thalidomide, the drug responsible for the horrendous birth defects in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They also see promise in a drug derived from the bark of the African bush willow tree that Zulu witch doctors have used for centuries as a medicine and to apply as a poison to the tips of their arrows.²⁸ Yet when it comes to recognizing that heart disease could be almost totally eliminated through nutrition so that it is nearly nonexistent as a threat to human life, scientists and surgeons married to surgery and drugs plug their ears and do not want to hear one word.

Footnotes

1. American Heart Association, “Cardiovascular disease death rates decline, but risk factors still exact heavy toll,”

(12/1/2007), http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml? identifier=3052670 2. Esselstyn, pp. 89 – 91.

2. Dean Ornish, M.D., Eat More, Weigh Less, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994).

3. Ibid., see Chapter 5.

4. Gersh, p. 190.

5. Ibid.

6. Campbell, p. 126

7. Ibid., p. 23.

8 . Ibid., pp. 125, 323.

9. Ibid., pp. 338 – 341.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., pp. 339, 340.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Richard Horton, Health Wars: On the Global Front Lines of Modern Medicine, (New York: The New York Review of Books , 2003), p. 436.

16. Ibid.

17. Esselstyn, p. 55.

18. Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think, (New York: First Mariner Books, 2007), p. 155.

19. Esselstyn, pp. 11, 108.

20. PBS interview of Dr. John Young, “Animal Testing Ethics,” Religious & Ethics Newsweekly, (August 15, 2008), Episode no. 1150, contains interview transcription and video, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1150/cover.html

21. Esselstyn, p. 4.

22. American Heart Association, “AHA Statistical Update, Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics – 2009 Update,” p. e22, http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/reprint/CIRCULATIONAHA.108.191261

23. Campbell, pp. 111 – 123.

24. Ibid., p. 124.

25. Ibid.

26. Annieappleseed Project, “Dean Ornish, Nutrition and Prostate Cancer,” from Dr. Gregor Newsletter, (Fall 2005),

http://www.annieappleseedproject.org/deanornutpro.html See also Washington Post, Rob Stein, “Study Shows Diet,

Exercise, and Reduced Stress Slow Prostate Cancer,” (August 11, 2005), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/

content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081001882.html

27. Robert Winston and Lori Oliwenstein, Superhuman, (New

York: Dorling Kindersly, 2000).

28. Ibid., p. 165.

David Irving is a vegan and an animal rights activist. His writings on various animal rights issues have appeared on Cyrano’s Journal, Thomas Paine’s Corner, All-Creatures.org, Press Action, Radical Noesis, Dandelion Salad, The Animals Voice, and other blogs and journals.

An accomplished musician, he is a composer and has played French horn with ensembles like the Marlboro and Cabrillo music festivals and the San Francisco Ballet and the San Francisco Opera. He was a member of the 7th Army Symphony, the Graz Opera and Philharmonic Orchestra (Austria), and the Oakland Symphony. David attended the New England Conservatory of Music, the Vienna Academy of Music, and graduated Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University from which he also earned an M.A. in music composition. His compositions are performed in the United States and Europe.

He has lived in Boston, Vienna and Graz (Austria), San Francisco, and New York City. He presently makes his home in the upper Catskill Mountain region of New York where he attends to and is attended by his three cats, Lewie-Lew, Goldie Boy, and Loonie. David has a twin brother, Darrel, who is a classical guitarist and an editor and author of several books. They were born in Kankakee, Illinois and grew up in Bluffton, Indiana.

Photo: 51fifty (CC)

Via the Inquisitr:

In 1979 the U.S. Government began tracking drug-related deaths and for the first time those deaths have surpassed the number of traffic fatalities on an annual basis. The most recent statistics which were taken in 2009 shows that 37,485 people died in traffic related accidents while 36,284 people died from drug related activities in a one year period.

Surprisingly the main culprit of those deaths were not street illegal drugs but rather prescription options including Xanax, OxyContin and the main culprit Vicodin which killed more people than cocaine and heroin combined.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times a Santa Barbara sheriff said: “The problem is right here under our noses in our medicine cabinets.”

The study also revealed that traffic related fatalities have actually fallen by a third since the 1970s even as the number of drivers using American roadways continues to increase, while drug related deaths have doubled in the last decade. Deaths among the 50-year-old to 69-year-old crowd have been even worse, tripling during the same time period.

More on Inquisitr

Japanese researchers have developed a chemical agent that turns biological tissue transparent, allowing for vivid imaging of neurons and blood vessels deep inside mouse brains.

The aqueous reagent — referred to as Scale — offers a way of analyzing complex organs and networks in tissue samples, without having to dissect them into smaller pieces. Developed by Atsushi Miyawaki and his team at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Scale performs better than other clearing reagents because it doesn’t affect the shape or proportions of the sample. It also manages to avoid decreasing the strength of signals emitted by genetically-encoded fluorescent proteins in the tissue, which are frequently used by researchers as markers to flag up specific cells.

This means that neuroscientists can visualise fluorescently-labelled brain samples at a depth of several millimetres (as opposed to just one millimetre) and see neural networks at sub-cellular resolution. The team has used the agent to examine the neurons in a mouse brain and have been able to see the inner workings of the cerebral cortex, hippocampus and white matter. They have then been able to create 3D reconstructions of the neural networks, as you can see here.

[Continues at Wired]

Photo: Richard Ling (CC)

What happened to remembering to apply sunscreen? The Bangkok Post reports:

The research team hope within the next two years to test a compound based on one which shields coral against harmful ultraviolet rays.

“We already knew that coral and some algae can protect themselves from the harsh UV rays in tropical climates by producing their own sunscreens but, until now, we didn?t know how,” said Dr Paul Long, head of the team.

“What we have found is that the algae living within the coral makes a compound that we think is transported to the coral, which then modifies it into a sunscreen for the benefit of both the coral and the algae.

“Not only does this protect them both from UV damage, but we have seen that fish that feed on the coral also benefit from this sunscreen protection, so it is clearly passed up the food chain,” the King’s team leader added.

[Continues at Bangkok Post]

U.S. government researchers must have known they were violating ethical standards by deliberately infecting Guatemalan prison inmates and mental patients with syphilis for an experiment in the 1940s, according to a U.S. presidential commission.

The U.S.-funded research in Guatemala did not treat participants as human beings, failing to even inform them they were taking part in research, as was the case for a similar study in the United States, the commission said on Monday.

The United States apologized last year for the experiment, which was meant to test the drug penicillin, after it was uncovered decades later by a college professor.

President Barack Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues investigated the syphilis experiment and discussed its key findings in Washington on Monday. A final report is due in December.

[Continues at Reuters]

After analyzing over 1,000 research papers, a report issued by the IOM (Institute of Medicine) found no evidence linking vaccines to autism or type 1 diabetes risk, and very few other health problems caused or clearly linked to vaccines. According to a committee of experts who reviewed the scientific studies, convincing evidence was found of 14 health outcomes associated with vaccines, including fainting, brain inflammation and seizures, however, their occurrences were found to be very rare.

Some less clear data linking certain vaccines to four other effects, including temporary joint pain and allergic reactions were also found. Regarding other suggested adverse effects, the experts said there was inadequate data.

The IOM says that this review will help the HHS administer the VICP (Vaccine Injury Compensation Program), which depends on science-based evidence when deciding on vaccine-related side effects. The HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) asked the IOM for a comprehensive review on eight vaccines covered by VICP.

The HHS says the findings of the review are helpful for VICP staff, special masters that rule on vaccine cases, those filing claims, and others.

MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine – some people may have seizures caused by fever. In virtually all cases, the effect was temporary and without long-term consequences. Very rarely, those with severe immune deficiencies may develop a form of brain inflammation. Some women and children may experience short-term pain.

Varicella (chickenpox) vaccine – in rare cases some people may have brain swelling, pneumonia, meningitis, shingles, and hepatitis, and also chickenpox if the patient has a weakened immune system.

Anaphylaxis – this is an allergic reaction. Anaphylaxis can occur shortly after receiving the MMR, Varicella, influenza, hepatitis B, meningococcal, and the tetanus-containing vaccines (all injections). The HPV vaccine may trigger anaphylaxis in some patients.

The report also explained that vaccines in general can cause some individuals to faint, while others may develop inflammation of the shoulder. Some evidence points towards four other adverse events with some vaccines, however, the evidence is not compelling, the authors explained…

[continues at Medical News Today]

So that’s how they justified it … Matt McGrath reports for BBC News:

Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins are critical for our modern immune systems, researchers report in Science journal.

Mating with Neanderthals and another ancient group called Denisovans introduced genes that help us cope with viruses to this day, they conclude.

Previous research had indicated that prehistoric interbreeding led to up to 4% of the modern human genome.

The new work identifies stretches of DNA derived from our distant relatives.

In the human immune system, the HLA (human leucocyte antigen) family of genes plays an important role in defending against foreign invaders such as viruses.

The authors say that the origins of some HLA class 1 genes are proof that our ancient relatives interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans for a period.

At least one variety of HLA gene occurs frequently in present day populations from West Asia, but is rare in Africans.

The researchers say that is because after ancient humans left Africa some 65,000 years ago, they started breeding with their more primitive relations in Europe, while those who stayed in Africa did not…

[continues at BBC News]

We’ve all heard that the overuse of antibiotics is making them less effective and fueling the rise of dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. But did you know it may also be fueling the rise of obesity, diabetes, allergies and asthma?

So says Dr. Martin Blaser, microbiologist and infectious disease specialist at New York University Langone Medical Center who studies the myriad bacteria that live on and in our bodies. He explains his theory in a commentary published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

In recent years, scientists have developed a growing appreciation for the “microbiome,” the collection of mostly useful bacteria that help us digest food, metabolize key nutrients and ward off invading pathogens. Investigators have cataloged thousands of these organisms through the National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, begun in 2008.

Blaser is interested in why so many bacteria have colonized the human body for so long – the simple fact that they have strongly suggests that they serve some useful purpose. But these bacteria have come under attack in the last 80 or so years thanks to the development of antibiotics. The drugs certainly deserve some of the credit for extending the U.S. lifespan, Blaser notes – a baby born today can expect to live 78 years, 15 years longer than a baby born in 1940. But in many respects, an antibiotic targets a particular disease the way a nuclear bomb targets a criminal, causing much collateral damage to things you’d rather not destroy…

[continues in the Los Angeles Times]

Photo: SlimVirgin (CC)

AsiaOne reports:

The Chinese media has reported on an extraordinary account of a mother bear saving her cub from a life of torture by strangling it and then killing itself. The bears were kept in a farm located in a remote area in the North-West of China. The bears on the farm had their gall bladders milked daily for ‘bear bile,’ which is used as a remedy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

It was reported that the bears are kept in tiny cages known as ‘crush cages’, as the bears have no room to manoeuvre and are literally crushed. The bile is harvested by making a permanent hole or fistula in the bears’ abdomen and gall bladder.

As the hole is never closed, the animals are suspect to various infections and diseases including tumours, cancers and death from peritonitis. The bears are fitted with an iron vest, as they often try to kill themselves by hitting their stomach as they are unable to bear the pain.A person who was on the farm in place of a friend witnessed the procedures and told Reminbao.com that they were inhumane.

The witness also claimed that a mother bear broke out its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

Read more here.

DRACO images (MIT) - click to enlarge

This is so sci-fi it has to be too good to be true – doesn’t it? MIT News reports that researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Lab have developed technology that may someday cure the common cold, influenza and many other viral ailments:

Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.

Now, in a development that could transform how viral infections are treated, a team of researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the infection.

In a paper published July 27 in the journal PLoS One, the researchers tested their drug against 15 viruses, and found it was effective against all of them — including rhinoviruses that cause the common cold, H1N1 influenza, a stomach virus, a polio virus, dengue fever and several other types of hemorrhagic fever.

The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory’s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology.

Because the technology is so broad-spectrum, it could potentially also be used to combat outbreaks of new viruses, such as the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak, Rider says…

[continues at MIT News]

Photo: Dr. Carl June / Penn Medicine

Eryn Brown reports for the LA Times that in early results from a clinical trial, genetically engineered T cells eradicate leukemia cells and thrive. Two of three patients studied have been cancer-free for more than a year:

In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients’ T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia.

Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said.

Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.

“This is a huge accomplishment — huge,” said Dr. Lee M. Nadler, dean for clinical and translational research at Harvard Medical School, who discovered the molecule on cancer cells that the Pennsylvania team’s engineered T cells target.

Findings of the trial were reported Wednesday in two journals.

To build the cancer-attacking cells, the researchers modified a virus to carry instructions for making a molecule that binds with leukemia cells and directs T cells to kill them. Then they drew blood from three patients who suffered from chronic lymphocytic leukemia and infected their T cells with the virus.

When they infused the blood back into the patients, the engineered T cells successfully eradicated cancer cells, multiplied to more than 1,000 times in number and survived for months. They even produced dormant “memory” T cells that might spring back to life if the cancer was to return.

On average, the team calculated, each engineered T cell eradicated at least 1,000 cancer cells…

[continues in the LA Times]