Xiao Wei lost his right hand in an accident, but surgeons couldn't re-attach it right away. His arm needed time to heal. But his hand was in desperate need of a blood supply – so surgeons attached it to arteries in his left ankle. Warning: Graphic hankle imagery below the fold.
Tick bites carry Lyme disease, tularemia, and a host of other scary diseases. They can even, in some instances, turn you into a vegetarian. Sometimes, though, a tick isn't scary because of the diseases it transmits when it bites you, but rather where it bites you. Your penis, for example.
Medical science is finally paying attention to the injury risks of headbanging...only 25 years too late. They did it in the most scientifically rigorous way possible: by studying how many headbanging eighth graders got whiplash after dancing to heavy metal.
It's one of the most common, and most poorly understood, sleep disorders. Sexsomniacs have sex with bedmates in their sleep, or sometimes while sleep walking. Now a new study sheds light on the phenomenon.
A potential therapy for cancer already lurks in our own genes. Chunks of ancient viruses lie embedded in the human genome. Administer just one protein to cancer cells and these built-in viruses go hyperactive, eventually killing the cell.
It's a nightmarish medical scenario: a man spent 23 years paralyzed but conscious while his doctors believed he was in a vegetative state. And his situation might be more common than we'd like to think.
A company called Stryker Biotech was in court last week defending a bone-growth product it sold for years, despite reports that it would "drift" in the body, causing bones to grow in random locations.
Soon, you could be determining your breast cancer risk with a simple needle jab, to collect a small amount of tissue — which doctors would electrify and subject to weird chemicals, before extracting the estrogen for analysis.
A woman, blind for 9 years, can see again after doctors performed a rare surgery where her own tooth was inserted into eye. How does this procedure work?
Researchers report an odd case in the latest issue of Epilepsy & Behavior. Whenever their patient had an epileptic seizure, she thought she'd become male - and that other women near her had turned into men too. What caused it?
Although surgeries that involve nary a slice or a stitch have heretofore been limited to science fiction, doctors in Switzerland announced that they've successfully performed closed-skull brain surgery on 9 patients using only sound waves.
It's medical tourism's bleeding edge: people traveling to countries with no stem cell bans. Last year, a boy went to Russia for stem cell injections in his brain – he got only tumors. Is this the future of medical innovation?
A new study released this week shows that medical imaging scans expose patients to seven times more radiation than they did twenty years ago. Could a scan for cancer actually be giving you cancer?
Sanitation workers in the Illinois town of Urbana-Champaign have been finding human placentas clogging up the drainage system several times in the last month. Placentas are temporary organs women grow while pregnant to nourish fetuses.
We're one step closer to Star Trek's medical tricorder. Doctors say they've successfully used a new laser technology that closes wounds by inspiring torn tissues to grow back together at a rapid clip.
Today CIA officials have admitted that one way they secure loyalty in hard-to-penetrate regions like rural Afghanistan is to bribe people with Viagra. Covert operators have often used trinkets and sex as a way to loosen the tongues of possible informants, but Viagra is a new twist. Not surprisingly it works…
Good news and bad news, pot smokers. Marijuana contains highly-effective antibiotics that could be the key to stopping antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But unfortunately if you smoke the stuff, you become more vulnerable to infection — probably due to smoke damage in your lungs. Nevertheless, your prescription for…
One in every 4 million children suffers from a genetic disorder called progeria that causes them to age prematurely — developing wrinkled skin and baldness before the age of 10, and usually dying of heart disease or stroke by puberty. The disease has always intrigued researchers interested in unlocking the genetic…
The ability to suppress hunger is a holy grail for many obesity researchers — as well as people who want to lose large amounts of weight. And now it looks as if a group of scientists at Johns Hopkins have figured out a non-invasive way to lower appetite by preventing the body from manufacturing the "hunger hormone" …
Ebola is the poster virus for outbreak scares because it spreads extremely fast and kills 90 percent of its victims by causing them to bleed uncontrollably. Featured in science-scare book The Hot Zone and countless cheesy movies, Ebola is considered ripe for development into a bio-weapon. But now it seems that a…
