When life gets incredibly busy and stressful, most of us think “I sure could use a vacation.” But if you’re anything like me, your next thought is probably, “I’m way too busy to take a vacation.” Last year, a nonprofit advocacy organization called Project: Time Off released a study that …

Diabetes, often referred to by doctors as diabetes mellitus, describes a group of metabolic diseases in which the person has high blood glucose (blood sugar), either because insulin production is inadequate, or because the body’s cells do not respond properly to insulin, or both. Patients with high blood sugar will …

Introduction to heart transplant The idea of replacing a bad organ with a good one has been documented in ancient mythology. The first real organ transplants were probably skin grafts that may have been done in India as early as the second century B.C. The first heart transplant in any …

The life of a man in Sweden was cut short during a surgical procedure to lengthen and widen his penis size. The healthy 30-year-old man, without any pre-existing medical conditions, is the first to die from penis enlargement surgery, a procedure that so far has been simple and safe. Now, in the case …

  There are a variety of ominous processes that cause low back pain, particularly in older patients (> 50). These problems carry significant morbidity and mortality and mandate a focused and rapid evaluation (including lab and imaging studies) different from what is required for the relatively benign processes described above. …

  What Is a Hair Transplant? It’s a type of surgery that moves hair you already have to fill an area with thin or no hair. Doctors have been doing these transplants in the U.S. since the 1950s, but techniques have changed a lot in recent years. You usually have …

Aortic Valve Replacement Sugery

Duke University Medical Center invents a new small animal model to study the pathogenesis of hypertrophic and burn scars. This is the first immune-competent rodent model ever introduced in the field. Led by Mohamed Ibrahim, MD, the senior research fellow in the division of plastic and reconstructive surgery of Duke …

A vasectomy is a surgical procedure performed on adult males in which the vasa deferentia (tubes that carry sperm from the testicles to the seminal vesicles) are cut, tied, cauterized (burned or seared), or otherwise interrupted. The semen no longer contains sperm after the tubes are cut, so conception cannot …