Changing Lives for the Better

     I had no idea that thirty-five percent of Americans over age 40 suffer from some form of dizziness. Anyone who’s feeling a bit tipsy (without having had a drink!), will want to read our story from Arizona about the infrared goggles that give therapists like Sue Stanfield, PT at Banner Thunderbird Medicine, a close-up view of the eyes of patients suffering from vertigo. Using these, therapists can then perform a procedure called ‘canalith repositioning’ which purportedly has an 80-percent success rate.

     Watch our Medical Headline Videos:

·         Shock therapy, or ECT, has tripled in use since the 1980s for treating severe depression, and Dr. Richard Weiner is quick to explain that ECT is not what you saw in the old movie, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” See our story from Duke University School of Medicine, “Shock Therapy: New Twist on an Old Treatment for Depression!” where Dr. Weiner talks about the benefits of ECT and how the treatment has been found to be effective between 80 and 90-percent of the time for patients who are good candidates.

·         Also from Duke University School of Medicine is our story about a fatal genetic illness that can kill children before their first birthday. Priya S. Kishnani, M.D. explains in “Fighting Pompe Disease” how a once-a-week infusion of a certain enzyme, though not a cure, “…allows children to live, allows them to have dreams, to be able to go to school, to ride a bicycle, to celebrate birthdays.”

·         There’s a new, minimally invasive procedure known as isolated limb infusion, or ILI, which is helping save the lives and limbs of melanoma patients. Take a look at our story from Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, “New Melanoma Treatment: Saving Lives and Limbs,” where Dr. Vadim Gushchin explains how ILI has tripled the survival rate for metastatic melanoma in the limbs.

     This week’s In Depth Doctor’s Interview is with Brian Engdahl, Ph.D. at the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, who talks about what he feels is the first medical or biological marker of a mental disorder. Read the interview to learn about a study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) which has determined there’s a brain pattern or “stamp” that is distinctive to people suffering from PTSD, allowing doctors to now accurately classify the disorder 95 to 100-percent of the time. What he’s found offers great hope to proposing new treatments for our soldiers and others with PTSD.

     In case you missed them, you may want to check our past reports, Premium Content in Archives Drug Predicts Alzheimer's Disease? or Premium Content in Archives “Chinplants”: The New Plastic Surgery Craze. Premium Content in the Archives may be purchased for as little as $9 for 24-hour, unlimited access. If you would like to access Premium Content for the first time click here.

     Finally, there are a couple of new approaches for treating MS that patients report have helped change their lives for the better. Don’t miss our story on how Dr. Bulent Arslan from the University of South Florida uses venoplasty to restore blood flow from the brain in a patient with multiple sclerosis, and how Dr. Farzeen Firoozi at New York’s Arthur Smith Institute for Urology uses Botox to help relieve the incontinence and overactive bladder many MS patients have to deal with.

     By the way, on Thursday, May 17, at noon, my friend Barbara Meyer will be featured on Bolder Giving. She will talk about her family foundation and what she has learned over a lifetime of giving. It’s free to anyone who registers and I promise Barbara has a lot to say.

And there's more where that came from...

 

Marjorie Bekaert Thomas

President, Ivanhoe Broadcast News

“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person they are almost indistinguishable”
-- David Augsburger