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What if you could tell when your child was really in pain? I’m not talking to fake not going to school or having to do a report or to apologize for not cleaning his room. We’re talking real pain .   As a mother (and even a father) you can probably tell when your child is hurting.   But doctors can’t.   So now, according to a new study, they’ve developed software that can, just from their facial expressions. Sound a little Hunger Gameish?   It isn’t. It's being used not only to help with alleviating it, but also in recovery. Researchers used the software to analyze pain-related facial expressions from video taken of 50 youths, ages five to 18 years old, who had undergone laparoscopic appendectomies at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, according to newswise.com. Based on the analysis, along with clinical data input by the study team, the software provided pain level scores for each participant. Studies have shown that under-treatmen...

So there's Google Glasses and ones you can wear at night that are really sunglasses but that cut out the glare. But how about glasses that allow doctors to see cancer cells? "Viewed through the glasses, cancer cells appear to glow blue under a special light, thanks to a fluorescent marker injected in the tumor that attaches only to cancerous and not to healthy cells. Also, the lighter the shade of blue, the more concentrated the cancer cells are," Medical News Today reports. Surgeons currently have to remove not just cancerous tissue but the tissue surrounding a tumor, as well.   Samples of the tissue are then sent to the lab to be examined under a microscope, and if cancer cells are found, the patient often has to have a second operation to remove more tissue, which is then also sent to the lab. According to one doctor, about 20-25% of breast cancer patients who undergo lumpectomy need to come back for a second operation. British researchers described in 2012 ...

I am that woman. A suspect mammogram led to a biopsy nine years ago, then a lumpectomy, a cancer diagnosis, radiation and hormone therapy. Turned out the cancer was really pre-cancer, ductal carcinoma in-situ (DCIS), which, today, is starting to be treated very differently.  But my cancer – or precancer, as it’s now being called – was high-grade, which means my cells spent a distressing week and a half in the pathology lab where medical professionals carefully and deliberately weighed and studied and pored over them to make absolutely certain mine wasn’t, in the end, a form of invasive cancer. Fortunately, for me, they turned out to be right, but when the disease returned again two years later, even though this time the abnormal cells were low-grade (and most likely never progress to anything that would kill me), it was treated as though it were invasive cancer and I underwent the surgery that all women dread. Imagine my surprise, last year, when doctors came out o...

We've known it for some time.  We're much better at handling pain than men.  But a new study has found that not only do we deal with it better, but women have more chronic pain than men. Writes Judy Foreman at the Wall Street Journal, " Women are 'allowed' to be emotional about their pain, and men often aren't, so perhaps women's pain gets noticed more. There are complicated hormonal factors too. There are research biases at work as well, including the absurd fact that most basic neuroscience work on pain pathways is done not only in rats but in male rats. Go figure." But she also notes that women's pain is more complex and  women and men react so differently to both pain and pain medications.  Recently, when I broke my wrist -- clearly the most painful injury I've ever had! -- I almost passed out when the doctor tried to jam the bone back into place in my wrist. Not once but many times. My husband said he, in that situation, would have ha...

It used to be kept in the dark, people who felt they were born the wrong gender.  No one talked about it and certainly, no one ever who had transgender surgery went on TV to show how it went (think: Chaz Bono). But Germany -- not a country I normally think of as forward-thinking -- has just passed a law that parents do not have to register the sex of babies born with both male and female traits. "The council had argued, among other things, that many people born with both sex characteristics who were operated on as children say they wouldn't have consented to the surgery," yahoonews.com reports. I remember seeing a documentary about twin boys, one of whom had some kind of gender abnormality (can't remember what it was) so the mother had surgery done to turn him into a female and the boy suffered all his life.  It probably wouldn't have been so bad if his twin hadn't been there every day to remind him of what once was, but it was heartbreakingly clear wha...

Big surprise.  Doctors are only now finding out that if they don't use the word "cancer" in a diagnosis, women are far more likely to opt for watchful waiting and medication than surgery. That's because recently medical boards have been talking about taking the word out of a common diagnosis for women with noninvasive breast cancer, or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).  It's the word carcinoma that makes us sit up and freak, and it was the word used when I was diagnosed, so I went through treatment to the max. I wrote about this recently when I first heard about it.  I was diagnosed with stage 0 precancerous breast cancer but I was treated as if I had full-blown invasive cancer.  Nine years ago, that's the way it was done. To be fair, my cancer or abnormal cells or whatever they were, were grade 3, right on the edge of becoming invasive cancer, so decisions were made based  mostly on that. There was no doubt that if I didn't have treatment, in time I w...

You're going in the hospital.  You've covered all the bases -- your insurance will cover, you stopped paper delivery, and you have someone to bring you home after your procedure is done.  But you're scared to death once you put on the gown.  How do you make sure no one screws up? U.S. News & Review, which just released its rankings of the so-called best hospitals in the country,got  the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a leading patients rights organization, to give some tips : Use the Internet, though that comes with a caveat.  Only use resources that come from a highly reputable, reliable source like  http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus  or  http://www.mayoclinic.com/health-information  (webmd.com is fine but don't use it for your primary source of info). Research, research, research -- look for outcome stats for the procedure you're having for your doctor and hospital, and complication rates Have a list of questions: How long ...

I had to read this news story twice to be sure it wasn't a joke.  But it's the truth.  There's been some concern that nitrous oxide -- or what the dentist gives you to put you out, laughing gas -- might be responsible for causing heart attacks during surgery or soon afterward. Well, sometimes they combine it with anesthesia during surgery, too, because by itself, the drug isn't strong enough to keep patients unconscious.  And previous studies had found that patients with certain genetic abnormalities had a much higher risk of heart attack during or after surgery. But the good news is, there now doesn't seem to be a connection, according to newswise.com Participants in the study reported at newswise.com received nitrous oxide anesthesia during heart surgery and were divided into two groups -- those who received a vitamin and folic acid to prevent homocystine levels from rising, and those who did not. Homocystines are an amino acid found in the blood suspecte...

Is it for you?  If you've just been diagnosed with breast cancer, are you going to opt for the "guaranteed" cure?  I say guaranteed because nothing, with cancer, is. But would you take the route Jolie did?  With an 87% chance of getting the disease, she made, I believe, the right decision.  More and more women are opting for this more drastic approach, even though researchers have found that lumpectomy is often just as effective. More women, also, are choosing to have both breasts removed, even if only one is cancerous.  I took this route.  At the time, I had a 5-year-old and I wanted to do anything I could to be around him.  Looking back, would I have made the same choice, after complications with reconstruction due to lumpectomy and radiation, the first time around? Probably, yes.  Cancer strikes such deep fear in all of us.  Even though two out of three people now survive cancer, I don't know anyone who doesn't immediately think abou...

Recently I learned that I did not have breast cancer – after going through radiation and a bilateral mastectomy, as if I did.  What I had was stage 0 cancer, or ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS).  Which, I just found out, means abnormal cells in the milk duct that have not spread.  Not cancer. So for eight years I have been telling people I am a breast cancer survivor – erroneously, as it turns out.  I’m a victim – survivor? – of the scary conscientiousness – or the over-prescribing of treatment  – that women are being subjected to. Call it fear of malpractice (what if it turns into cancer?), or what we’re now learning, that DCIS becomes invasive cancer 25 to 50% of the time, if not treated, but more and more women are undergoing drastic medical treatment even before they have the illness.  Am I sorry?  No way.  At the time I was diagnosed, I had a three-year-old.  When it was found again in my breast, he was five.  I wanted to live....

If you're a man, you might want to take a stiff shot before reading this. But men in Africa are being forced to do much more. That's because some of the new devices being used for circumcision -- heavily promoted to staunch HIV and AIDS -- may be doing more harm than good.  And having people who are not doctors perform the procedure -- another reason these new devices were brought into use -- is adding to the complications risk, even though it is saving the country money.  In the U.S. and other countries, most circumcisions are done at birth. But in Africa, where this is not the custom, it's grown men who are now choosing to have this most painful of surgeries. According to Dave Mayers at smartplanet.com, circumcision can reduce the threat of spreading HIV, or being infected by it, by 60%.  That's why men are even considering it in this country where almost 24 million people live with the virus that causes AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region...

I've been writing about healthcare technology for a while and one of the areas I've focused on is how robotic surgery is changing the face of medicine.  Well, maybe not so much. The big pluses were supposed to be that it was non-invasive, required only a single incision, people healed faster, there was less blood loss, and its outcomes were supposed to justify the cost (sometimes twice "open surgery"). Only, a major study just recently found that outcomes are no better with this type of surgery, and can sometimes even kill you, according to a story in today's NYT by Roni Caryn Rabin. This kind of surgery is typically used for prostatectomies and hysterectomies (my own OB-GYN performs them this way).  How it works is that the surgeon sits at a console  in the operating room connected to a camera that provides a high-definition picture of the surgical site, then moves the robotic arms to mimic what his own hands would be doing, based on the camera image. Sou...

Hope you're not planning on having surgery any time soon.  A new report finds that over 4,000 "never happens" errors occur every year, from removing the wrong limb, to leaving sponges and surgical instruments inside patients. http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2012/December/20/doctor-issues.aspx