The potential cancer risk that younger adults face from exposure to CT scans pales in comparison to the actual threat posed by health conditions driving the use of the imaging technology, a new study indicates. Susanna Lee, HMS assistant professor of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, led the study.
Watching too much television and exercising too little might be at least partly to blame for a possible decline in the sperm counts of American men, a Harvard School of Public Health study suggests. Jorge Chavarro, HMS assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH, is the senior researcher. Alice Domar, HMS assistant clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is also quoted.
Many cancer patients have found that poetry helps them cope with their feelings and experiences. Rafael Campo, HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, says he uses poetry in his practice, offering therapy groups and including poems with the medical forms and educational materials he gives his patients.
In a new analysis from the National Institutes of Health, men who took calcium tablets were more likely to die of heart disease over more than a decade than those who didn’t get extra calcium in supplement form. Howard Sesso, HMS associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is quoted.
In the less than two decades since the 1994 genocide that killed nearly a million Rwandans and displaced another two million, the country has become a spectacular public health success story and could provide a model for the rest of Africa, according to a new analysis by American health experts. Paul E. Farmer, the Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS, is the lead author.
In 2010, Dr. Jonathan R. Welch’s mother died after a medical error that he watched unfold and felt powerless to do anything about. Now an HMS instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Welch recently wrote an essay in the journal Health Affairs about the care she received and medical errors more generally.
The placebo effect, in which patients perceive an effect from a fake drug, is even stronger than once believed. Host Laura Sullivan talks to Ted Kaptchuk, HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, about his research on how sham treatments affect the way we feel.
As genomic medicine quickly evolves, a powerful computer packed with software has arrived to interpret sequences privately within the walls of a lab, in contrast to systems that use the Internet and distant servers. George Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics and co-founder
of Knome, the company that made the machine, is quoted.
WBUR’s Visionaries series profiles Anne Goldfeld, HMS professor of medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, who fights for human rights around the world, treats seriously ill patients in Cambodia and Ethiopia, and conducts research to help eradicate AIDS and tuberculosis.
