It’s not uncommon around the world to see doctors involved in torture. Reviewing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s newly released report, Atul Gawande, Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, points to nearly a dozen individual examples of physicians playing a role in the CIA’s interrogation and treatment of detainees.
Claire McCarthy, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, authored this blog post about the negative impact on children of parents’ mobile device use.
Among the more jarring passages in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects are descriptions of agency employees subjecting uncooperative detainees to “rectal rehydration” and “rectal feeding.” Thomas Burke, associate professor of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
Researchers have been studying RNA viruses—Ebola among them—for several years, and had been working on this diagnostic tool for at least two years before this year’s outbreak. HMS Professor of Microbiology and Immunobiolgy Lee Gehrke’s lab at MIT is creating the tool.
James Hopper, clinical instructor in psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge Health Alliance, co-authored this article about the brain’s fear circuitry when reacting to states of high stress, fear or terror—like combat and sexual assault.
Watching too much television may lower your chances of survival after colon cancer, new research suggests. Andrew Chan, associate professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
Ophthalmologists had been enthusiastically using Genetech’s cancer drug Avastin, which cost about $50 a dose, to treat a common eye disease in the elderly, wet macular degeneration. Then Genentech introduced Lucentis, a nearly equivalent drug that cost $2,000 a dose and was approved specifically to treat the disease. Now, a new federal database shows that many of the doctors who were the top billers for Lucentis were also among the highest-paid consultants for Genentech, earning thousands of dollars to help promote the new drug. Eric Campbell, professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, is quoted.
Research on the human genome is advancing at a tremendous pace, and the cost of genetic testing is falling just as quickly. But those signs of scientific progress also raise complicated ethical issues for doctors, researchers and patients. Robert Green, associate professor of medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
Sushrut Jang, instructor in medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, authored this feature about how doctors at Brigham and Women’s are helping to treat cancer in the Middle East.
