More then one third of U.S. teens say they can get a hold of prescription drugs—to use for getting high—within just a day, according to a study from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. Among kids between the ages of 12 and 17, nearly one in five said they would be able to access
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Osteoarthritis of the knee is a leading cause of disability—and discomfort—in older adults, yet while many people may show signs of the condition, not all experience pain as a result. According to a study published in the September 15 issue of the journal Arthritis and Rheumatology, it appears that, while leg strength doesn’t make
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Medical imaging techniques ranging from CT scans to myocardial perfusion imaging (or imaging of the heart), have become a regular part of medical diagnostics. Yet, according to a study published in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, it isn’t yet clear whether the radiation necessary for these imaging procedures
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It has been well documented in medical literature that when people believe they are receiving treatment, they will actually experience a reduction in symptoms—even if their “treatment” is an inactive placebo. This is particularly true when it comes to pain reduction, or analgesia; patients who believe they are being given powerful
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After a heart attack, the muscles in a patient’s heart are often weakened, increasing the risk for future heart complications, including a second cardiac arrest. Yet a new development from a team of Israeli scientists could change that in the future. In a study of rats, the researchers were able to grow a “bioengineered cardiac patch” by
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In the past, research into the relationship between blood pressure and cognitive impairment has yielded a wide range of results—some studies found that low blood pressure was linked with memory and processing problems, others that high blood pressure was associated with these risks, and others found no correlation at all. In an attempt
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By tracking humans as they wandered in the forest, desert and blindfolded through a giant field, scientists determined that there is some truth to the popular belief—when people are lost, we actually do walk in circles.
It has long been common perception that people tend to meander in orbits when disoriented, and in fact, scientists
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A couple weeks ago I wrote about whether prevention can really cut health-care costs. Given America’s troubling chronic-disease rates, however, a more pertinent question might be this: Can health-care workers actually implement prevention on behalf of their patients? Sure, there’s cancer screening and annual check-ups. But that’s not …
With a single well-timed injection, scientists show they can erase a bad memory from the mind of a rat.
For their remarkable finding, researchers from Brazil and Argentina gave electric shocks to rats and then tested how long the animals remembered and tried to avoid shocks in the future. The researchers showed that rats will quickly …
As the heated debate over health care continues, there has been plenty of talk about how the U.S. system stacks up to that of other countries, and how much American doctors earn compared with M.D.s in other parts of the world. But, how do salaries compare across the spectrum of jobs within the U.S. health care system? TIME turned to the
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If you’re a runner, odds are pretty good that you’ve been injured at some point in the last year or two. Journalist Christopher McDougall has an interesting and no doubt controversial explanation. It’s your shoes, he says. There’s too much of them: too much cushioning, too much arch support, too much stabilization, too much …
Long-time heroin addicts who get supervised doses of the drug seem to stay in addiction treatment longer and have less criminal activity than similar addicts who get conventional methadone treatment. That’s the finding of a randomized controlled trial published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers from two …
A new study from researchers at Beth Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School suggests that tone-deafness may be the result of a missing neural connection. By using a brain imaging technique that allows them to examine the links between the right temporal and frontal lobes, the scientists compared the neural connectivity of 10
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