Faculty Bibliography

Approved by the FDA in 2005, Byetta effectively treats diabetes by mimicking the effects of incretin. Still, since its approval, close to a million patients have used it. The risk of life-threatening pancreatitis is only 1 in 10,000 patients, a very low number. But recent deaths from pancreatitis in patients that had been taking the drug lead the FDA to consider adding stern black-box warnings to the drug label. These warnings could severely limit the usefulness of a very effective drug

Grey's Anatomy [Television Program] -- Does hypothermia help an injured spinal cord recover? -- The reality * Impending cardiac tamponade can be diagnosed with certainty only by ultrasound, though the Beck's triad would suggest it, according to Dr. Mark Adelman, chief of vascular surgery at Langone Medical Center at New York University. * Trauma to the face can create an upper airway obstruction that warrants an opening in the trachea

Harvey Brenner, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health, projects that an increase of 1 percentage point in the nation's unemployment rate could cause as many as 47,000 more deaths -- including 1,200 more suicides and 26,000 additional heart attacks -- over the ensuing two years. A new study from Utah researchers shows that touch in the form of massage, hugging and kissing decreases stress hormones, increasing the feel-good hormone oxytocin, and lowers blood pressure

Revici's 'guided chemotherapy' was based on a urine analysis followed by a secret formula made of some combination of alcohols, caffeine, zinc, lithium, iron, selenium, magnesium, sulfur and fatty acids. Tumors may look the same from outside, but they can arise from variations in many different genes, making them more or less responsive to drug A, drug B or drug C. For example, a study from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, reported a genetic pattern in liver tissue that correlates with survival and lack of recurrence of liver tumors

'Til Death [Television Program] -- Three recent studies in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, published in PLoS Medicine and the Lancet, showed a dramatic decrease in the heterosexual transmission of HIV among circumcised African men, but it is unclear if this benefit applies to heterosexual men in other countries

Mentalist [Television Program] -- Joshua Greene, assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University, has used functional MRI scans of the brain to assess which areas are involved when moral and ethical dilemmas are considered

Boston Legal [Television Program] -- Can a patient live for years like this? -- The reality 'Alzheimer's disease causes characteristic metabolic patterns of deficits which can be detected by PET scans,' says Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, chief of biological psychiatry at Duke University

Eli Stone [Television Program] -- Cooper wants to begin a clinical trial using medical marijuana as a cure for his son, and he is petitioning the Drug Enforcement Administration to allow him to grow his own marijuana for medical purposes (this is legal in California but not under federal law)

Despite a recall by the FDA, contaminated heparin has apparently remained on the shelves and crash carts. The FDA claims that this chemical has been linked to severe allergic reaction and at least 81 deaths in 11 countries since last year. But the real story here is about the verbal thrashing that heparin, a life-saving treatment for blood clots, strokes and heart attacks, has unfairly taken in the news. Yes, 81 deaths is a lot, until you consider the thousands who are saved by heparin treatment every day

Mad Men [Television Program] -- The reality: 'Many hypertension experts in the early 1960s were still saying that elevated blood pressure wasn't bad for you and that reducing it could cause damage to important organs such as strokes and heart attacks,' says Dr. Suzanne Oparil, director of the vascular biology and hypertension program at the University of Alabama School of Medicine