As a rule, it's not a good idea to pick up a gun, take over the emergency room of a hospital and threaten to kill your family's cardiac surgeon. But that's what Denzel Washington's character does in the film John Q. when his son is denied the heart transplant he needs to survive. And if box-office reaction is any indication, plenty of frustrated health-care consumers have at least fantasized about doing the same thing: John Q., released in late February, ...

The search for a cancer vaccine has largely been a painstaking, systematic chore of isolating some agent that might produce cancer-killing antibodies in human patients. Last week Swedish Immunologist Dr. Bertil Bjorklund announced that he was taking a shortcut. Rather than waiting for time-consuming analysis, he will inoculate humans with a complex substance that has produced favorable cancer antibody responses using rabbits and horses. Over a seven-month period. Bjorklund vaccine will be injected into 100 Swedish volunteers between 60 and ...

Melinda Amedee was scheduled to have a tumor removed from her kidney at a New Orleans hospital on August 30. She lives far enough away from the city to have missed serious damage from Hurricane Katrina. But when the 17th Street Canal levee broke the day before, she knew she wouldn't be having an operation at the Ochsner Cancer Institute anytime soon. With a 25-year history of kidney problems, Amedee, 39, was worried about the delay, and ...

Legless women excited Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch to pity. In 1860 he gave $5,000 to the Massachusetts General Hospital for the purchase of wooden legs. Meticulous, he specified: "I should desire that female patients should be preferred to males." For 69 years the hospital has been obeying his instructions, but the need has been dwindling. Rare is it now that amputations must be made. Hence the hospital recently asked a Massachusetts probate court, and last week was granted, permission to ...

To their victims they seemed pretty normal at first, even admirable. Reinaldo Silvestre, a charming Miami con man with no medical training, is alleged to have operated on his plastic-surgery patients by shoving implants into their chests with a spatula; several were permanently mutilated. A drifter named Luis Garavito confessed in October to kidnapping, torturing and killing 140 children over five years in Colombia. Dylan Klebold went to the prom before shooting up Columbine High in April. Predators with ...

Not all of Dr. Richard Mayeux's elderly patients have Alzheimer's disease; not all will even go on to develop it. Most of them are still leading full, healthy lives, interacting with their families and contributing to their communities. But Mayeux, an Alzheimer's researcher and physician at Columbia University, asks them all anyway: Will they help him in his war against the disease? It's been a long and disappointing campaign so far. Alzheimer's disease — the degenerative brain ...

MENTAL HEALTH Pot and Schizophrenia: A Dangerous Mix A mind is a terrible thing to scramble. Doctors studying schizophrenia have long warned that one of the worst things someone at risk for the disease can do is smoke marijuana, as research suggests that it can hasten the onset of the disorder. Skeptics, however, point out that because males are more likely than females both to smoke pot and to develop schizophrenia early, the apparent causal link is merely coincidence. A ...

We all know that exercise is good for you. Staying physically active helps keep your heart healthy and your muscles strong, and in cancer patients it has even been shown to ward off relapse. Now a series of independently conducted studies on the effects of exercise in healthy older adults, published on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms that logging time at the gym not only helps maintain good health but may even prevent the ...

In recent weeks, opponents of Barack Obama's health-care-reform plans have criticized Britain's National Health Service in an effort to counter the President's proposals for greater government involvement in health care. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa suggested that his Democratic colleague Edward Kennedy would have been left to die in Britain because doctors would have refused the 77-year-old treatment for his brain tumor, and former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote in an article that ...

It has long been the final destination for terminally ill patients who want to end their lives, offering what many consider to be a dignified way out of their suffering.It featured scenes of a worried Roach pleading with his fighter to move their training camp from Baguio as another typhoon was forecast to land. "I was concerned for the safety of the sparring partners, Manny's crew, Manny and myself and very concerned the typhoon was going to come quicker than ...