Posted May 25th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.google.com
A 13 year old boy and his mother are home today after fleeing from authorities in order to prevent the boy from getting life saving chemo for a highly curable cancer. The family does not believe in conventional medicine, only alternative treatments.
They are now back home after a federal search warrant went out and national search efforts began. While the aurhorities are promising no prosecution, I think Children and Family Services needs to keep a close eye on this family. What mother in her right mind would enable her child to refuse treatment to save his life? It’s neglectful. It’s abusive. It’s stupid.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A sheriff’s office in Minnesota says a 13-year-old cancer patient and his mother who fled the state to avoid chemotherapy have returned.
The Brown County sheriff’s office did not provide any details Monday but said a news conference would be held at the county seat of New Ulm.
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Posted May 21st, 2009 by minortopics | via abcnews.go.com
Parents of a 10-year-old girl were shocked when they found out their daughter had been diagnosed with breast cancer.
“It should be the furthest thing from your mind,” Hannah’s mother Carrie Auslam told reporters from KCAL-TV in Los Angeles. “Ten-year-olds don’t get breast cancer.”
For Hannah, the realization that she would have to deal with a disease normally associated with women many times her age was a difficult one to take.
“I told my mom, I just wanna be a normal kid,” she told reporters. “I want to go back to school, play sports, hang out with my friends. So I started crying.”
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Posted May 21st, 2009 by minortopics | via www.chicagotribune.com
A doctor and his son have claimed to come up with a treatment for autism that produces “dramatic results” but some experts say it’s junk science.
“Lupron is the miracle drug,” Dr. Mark Geier of Maryland said after meeting with an autistic patient in suburban Chicago.
Geier and his son developed the “Lupron protocol” for autism and are marketing it across the country, opening clinics in states from Washington to New Jersey. In the Chicago area, the treatment is available through Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, a family practitioner in Rolling Meadows.
But experts say the idea that Lupron can work miracles for children with autism is not grounded in scientific evidence.
Four of the world’s top pediatric endocrinologists told the Tribune that the Lupron protocol is baseless, supported only by junk science. More than two dozen prominent endocrinologists dismissed the treatment earlier this year in a paper published online by the journal Pediatrics.
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Posted May 12th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.guardian.co.uk
A University of Connecticut psychology professor has presented new research that suggests that stories about children recovering from autism may be true.
She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no longer considered autistic.
Among them was Leo, a boy in Washington, D.C., who once made no eye contact, who echoed words said to him and often spun around in circles — all classic autism symptoms. Now he is an articulate, social third-grader. His mother, Jayne Lytel, says his teachers call Leo a leader.
The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, involves children ages 9 to 18.
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Posted May 3rd, 2009 by minortopics | via www.nydailynews.com
So sad. This little, 4 year old boy will now live a life of skin graphs and pain.
MT wants to know, why the hell a 4 year old was in a hyperbaric chamber to begin with! Hperbaric chambers are usually used for patients who have the “bends” from deep sea diving. All other hyperbaric uses are experimental at best.
A sheriff’s deputy plucked the 4-year-old boy from the burning chamber. He was in critical condition Saturday.
“They brought him out on a stretcher. His skin was blackened,” Nicole Huffman, a dental assistant who works in the same building as the clinic, told the Web site FireFightingNews.com.
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Posted April 29th, 2009 by minortopics | via uk.reuters.com
While there’s still a lot of controversy surrounding giving children drugs to treat ADHD (and even whether or not ADHD exists), a current study shows at least one positive effect.
Children given stimulants to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder symptoms score higher on math and reading tests than children with the condition who do not get drugs, researchers said on Monday.
A study that tracked 594 children diagnosed with ADHD from kindergarten through fifth grade found the 60 percent who were prescribed drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall performed better on standardized tests than peers with ADHD who were not given medication.
But the scores of children treated with drugs for ADHD still lagged children not diagnosed with the condition.
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Posted April 26th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.foxnews.com
This little piggy went to market, this little piggy went to Mexico for spring break, drank too much, took off their shirt and made mama proud and then this little piggy coughed all over their classmates and now they’re worshiping the porcelain God because they were given some God-awful pig/goat/rat/pigeon virus. (Gee thanks!)
The CDC says prelimary results show that several NY schools may have been enflicted with the swine flu.
NEW YORK — Students at a New York City high school could learn as early as Sunday if the flu that sickened them was the same strain of the human swine influenza that has killed people in Mexico.
Preliminary tests of samples taken from sick students’ noses and throats confirmed that at least eight had a non-human strain of influenza type A, indicating probable cases of swine flu, city health officials said. The exact subtypes were still unknown, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was conducting further tests.
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Posted April 14th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.chicagotribune.com
After conducting early tests, health authorities say that friends, coworkers and relatives of the pediatrician infected with tuberculosis appear to not be infected.
Dr. Susan Gerber, chief medical officer at the Chicago Department of Public Health, said the lack of infection was a positive sign that suggests the bacterial disease probably had not spread.
Some people who were tested will have to undergo follow-up screening to be on the safe side, because infection with TB bacteria can take up to 10 weeks to be detected following exposure.
Three area hospitals are identifying and contacting hundreds of patients and employees who may have been exposed to TB from the pediatric resident. The resident most recently worked at Children’s Memorial Hospital from Nov. 20 to April 3, where she had contact with at least 122 children and more than 300 workers.
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Posted April 12th, 2009 by minortopics
Okay, so here’s the real question: If a pediatrician is going around with TB and quite possibly spreading it to newborns and children, how good of a doctor can she be if she failed to recognize her own symptoms?!?! Wouldn’t TB symptoms be Medical School 101? (Shouldn’t she have her license taken away just for that??)
A Northwestern University doctor-in-training potentially exposed hundreds of patients, including infants, at three Chicago-area hospitals to tuberculosis in what is being called an unusual case of a medical-care provider putting patients’ health at risk.
The 26-year-old female pediatric resident was diagnosed Tuesday with TB at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago after experiencing symptoms consistent with the infectious disease, hospitals and the Chicago Department of Public Health said. Symptoms of “active” TB include coughing, night sweats, fever, chills and weight loss.
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Posted March 10th, 2009 by minortopics | via health.blogs.foxnews.com
We say of course not, that’s ridiculous, but Dr. Manny Alvarez on the Fox News health blog thinks otherwise. Dr. Alvarez is under the impression that if not tightly regulated, women will go out and get pregnant on purpose and turn their abortions into a profit center:
With the world entrenched in a global economic downturn, the business of science can easily take over, sometimes outweighing the medical implications. Already, years of research ― especially with umbilical cord stem cells ― have led to significant discoveries that, although seem very impressive in the laboratory, have failed to make their practical application in clinical medicine.
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Posted February 23rd, 2009 by minortopics | via www.foxnews.com
The deaths of 6 children in three different states from influenza makes many parents reconsider the importance of the flu vaccine.
“The flu shot takes about three weeks to work and, with this being a late flu season, three weeks isn’t bad,” said Dr. Marc Siegel, a FOX News contributor and author of the book, “Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic.”
“It looks like the flu season will go until late March, early April this year,” he continued. “Anybody with asthma or a weakened immune system, as well as pregnant women and the very young and very old should be vaccinated.”
Hunter Pope, a seventh-grader at Boston Latin Academy who died over the weekend from the flu, was not vaccinated because he lost his permission slip, according to his mother.
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Posted February 12th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.foxnews.com
A U.S. court has ruled that vaccines were not the cause of autism.
“It was abundantly clear that petitioners’ theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive,” the court concluded in one of a trio of cases ruled on Thursday.
The ruling, which was anxiously awaited by health authorities, was a blow to families who have filed more than 5,000 claims for compensation through the government’s Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The claims are reviewed by special masters serving on the U.S. Court of Claims.
To win, the families’ attorneys had to show that it was more likely than not that the autism symptoms in the children were directly related to a combination of the measles-mumps-rubella shots and other shots that at the time carried a mercury-containing preservative called thimerosal.
But the court concluded that “the weight of scientific research and authority” was “simply more persuasive on nearly every point in contention.”
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Posted January 26th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.google.com
Take that, Jenny McCarthy.
A new study from Italy adds to a mountain of evidence that a mercury-based preservative once used in many vaccines doesn’t hurt children, offering more reassurance to parents.
In the early 1990s, thousands of healthy Italian babies in a study of whooping cough vaccines got two different amounts of the preservative thimerosal (pronounced thih-MEHR’-uh-sawl) from all their routine shots.
Ten years later, 1,403 of those children took a battery of brain function tests. Researchers found small differences in only two of 24 measurements and those “might be attributable to chance,” they wrote in the February issue of the journal Pediatrics, which was released Monday.
Only one case of autism was found, and that was in the group that got the lower level of thimerosal.
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Posted January 16th, 2009 by minortopics | via news.bostonherald.com
Jeremy Fraser, who has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and whose mother was charged with not getting him treatment, has only two months to live.
The boy’s father, Eric Fraser, told The Salem News on Thursday that 9-year-old Jeremy had been getting better, but his cancer has returned.
Jeremy was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2006.
Doctors later discovered the boy’s mother, Kristen LaBrie had missed numerous doctor’s appointments and failed to fill some of Jeremy’s prescriptions. LaBrie had custody of her son at the time.
LaBrie was arraigned in June and pleaded not guilty.
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Posted January 16th, 2009 by minortopics | via www.azcentral.com
The headline on the original story is “Conjoined twins separated by doctors”, to which we could only reply, well, we certainly hope so. Minor Topics recommends you only consult a doctor for your conjoined twin separating needs.
A team of more than 20 doctors and nurses at Phoenix Children’s Hospital worked for more than 12 hours to take the boys, who had been conjoined from their chests to their pelvises, and give them two separate bodies. The boys were stable throughout the operation, but challenges remained.
Surgery continued late Thursday, as separate teams worked on the long process of reconstruction to close each boy’s body.
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