Canada’s ban on direct-to-consumer drug advertising probably saved Canadians with high cholesterol and their drug plans $150 million in 2006 alone, suggests a new study comparing sales patterns of a controversial cholesterol lowering drug in the United States and Canada.Canadian sales of the drug Ezetrol – the generic name is ezetimibe – were four times [...]

As a former chairman of George W. Bush’s President’s Council on Bioethics, Leon Kass is well acquainted with controversy, and with the treacherous terrain at the nexus of science and politics. The council, tasked with advising the president on such hot-button issues as stem cell research and cloning, has sometimes been dismissed as a vehicle [...]

CRAIG VENTER recently announced that his research institute had synthesized the genome of a bacterium. Upon hearing this, observers across the world anxiously suggested that he was on the verge of “synthesizing life.”
But Venter has not done what most people mean by “synthesizing life.” It is true that he has helped to create a new [...]

Computer power will match the intelligence of human beings within the next 20 years because of the accelerating speed at which technology is advancing, according to a leading scientific “futurologist”.
There will be 32 times more technical progress during the next half century than there was in the entire 20th century, and one of the outcomes [...]

It’s a new way to push for patient safety: Don’t pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.
That has the nation’s hospitals exploring innovative programs to prevent injury and infection: Hand-washing spies. Surgical sponges that sound an alarm [...]

Nonnie Hawkins remembers standing beside her daughter’s hospital bed, steeling herself for a final goodbye.
She turned to physicians at DeKalb Medical Center, who minutes earlier had disconnected a machine that was breathing for 18-year-old Tara Bottoms-Hawkins. Hawkins thought her daughter was in a coma, as she had been for four months. But doctors said the [...]

In a search for what could be the ultimate cure for drug addiction, scientists have developed a vaccine which prevents the body from getting high.The hope is that it can stop people from falling back into a spiral of addiction if they have a relapse.
The most promising results so far have been with cocaine, but [...]

Some pediatricians say last year’s controversy over whether the state should mandate Texas schoolgirls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus has translated into more individuals getting the vaccine.”It’s really kind of an interesting thing — the controversy has really helped us get the word out,” said Chris Turley, vice chair for clinical services at [...]

Watching her tend her ill son, there is no doubting the love Clare Ginns feels for her ten-year-old son Joshua. “Are you comfy?” she asks as she gently props up her boy with pillows on the sofa. “Now, let’s give you your lunch,” she says. She even manages to handle the pumping of liquidised food [...]

For centuries, man has searched for miracle cures to end suffering caused by disease and injury. Many researchers believe nanotechnology applications in medicine may be mankind’s first ‘giant step’ toward this goal. According to Freitas nanomedicine is:

The comprehensive monitoring, control, construction, repair, defense, and improvement of all human biological systems, working from the molecular level, [...]