Little Heather McNamara is glad to be going home to her big sister and her Pomeranian named Angel but, after more than a month in the hospital, she says she’ll be sleeping with her parents tonight.  The cheerful 7-year-old Long…

It took five months for researchers at England’s Bristol University to grow the 60 million stem cells needed for the breakthrough windpipe transplant recently performed on a Colombian woman in Barcelona, Spain, in order to replace her tuberculosis-ravaged trachea with…

Isabelle Dinoire, Li Guoxing, and an unnamed Frenchman all share the miracle of a smile after their faces were severely damaged by trauma and disease.  Their new smiles are the result of ground-breaking face transplants and, a couple of years…

One of the almost-guaranteed after-effects of surgery that removes all or part of the colon is an inability of the intestines to pass its contents further along the alimentary canal.  This condition, called postoperative ileus, is thought to be a…

Health Grades, Inc., has just released its third annual report on bariatric surgeries performed at surgical facilities across the nation.  It seems top-rated hospitals perform more of this increasingly popular surgery and they do so with 65% fewer complications than…

The US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) issued a press release that describes the financial cost of medical errors related to surgery. It seems that, in addition to these errors costing lives, they also cost about $1.5 billion…

The June 23 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) carries the paradoxical findings of a report on the effects of certain general anesthesia drugs, including how they decrease feelings of pain during surgery but cause…

Every year organ donation gives thousands of Americans a second chance at life. On any given day, 100,000 men, women and children are waiting for life-saving organs. Six thousand people die every year because no organs could be found for…

“I’m glad I had a good anesthesiologist.” Brooke Zepp, a 63-year-old cancer patient from Pompano Beach, Florida, is also glad to have had such an outstanding team of transplant surgeons, too.

After learning that his 25-year-old son had been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Dr. William Krissoff left his orthopedic practice in Nevada and signed up with the Navy Medical Corp Reserves. The 61 year old surgeon is part…

Transplanting the face of a deceased person onto that of a living person might seem like something out of a science-fiction movie, but it’s not. The procedure, which actually does not include the entire face but mainly the nose, lips,…

No more gifts or freebies for Massachusetts doctors from pharmaceutical companies, that is what Senate President Therese Murray is proposing. The ban would make Massachusetts the first state in the country to ban such gifts outright. The ban would prevent…

In the most comprehensive study of its kind ever, doctors studied 4,000 women aged 25 to 84, to determine the extent of a cluster of disorders generally thought to be age related. In order to gather the most widespread data,…

A California doctor is in court fighting for his freedom in a case that involves the life and death of a disabled young man whose organs were to be harvested for transplanting.