Q: How do physicians rationalize drug abuse?
A: They’ve worked with these drugs, so they may feel they have some control. They understand the potency, but they don’t necessarily understand how strongly the drugs will affect them. They don’t have someone standing by, the way a patient under anesthesia does.
Yes. No. Maybe.
Hormone therapy after menopause may prevent heart attacks and cancer—or cause them. New research could show who benefits.
The Other Stem Cells
Once considered mere substitutes for embryonic cells, re-engineered adult cells are making breakthroughs of their own.
Catching a Chill
Ordinarily resistant to economic ills, health care this time is suffering too. Poor and uninsured patients are most at risk.
The Transplant Trick
An experimental protocol fools the immune system into accepting a new organ without debilitating drugs. Could it become routine?
Shock Value
Art and message merged in twentieth-century posters, raising the alarm about contagions from TB to AIDS.
A Mighty Worm
C. elegans, a 959-celled Nobel magnet, helped explain cell suicide and launch genomics, and could now revolutionize drug development.
The Rare Few
Of every 300 people infected with HIV, one doesn't get AIDS. Understanding this uncanny protection might help science imitate nature.
GOOGLING MAY IMPROVE brain function, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found. In a study in which 24 healthy adults ages 55 to 76 performed Internet searches, those familiar with the Web showed increased brain activity in areas that control decision-making and complex reasoning, areas not stimulated when the subjects engaged in reading tasks. The brain activity registered two times higher in Web-savvy adults than in those with little Internet experience, suggesting that surfing the Net is a worthwhile exercise for aging minds. The study is to appear in a spring issue of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
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