health

Google is unveiling a new personal health records service, Google Health

Ten years ago, a similar product might have saved me some serious heartache. I was ambulanced to an emergency room with chest pains, and the cardiologist on call diagnosed me as having a heart attack. Not quite. If she had been able to access my medical history, she might have seen that my father had had an aortic aneurysm and checked for that. Instead, she put me on blood thinner, causing my aneurysm to bleed all the more and almost bringing my brilliant career, among other things, to an untimely end. Thanks to a surgeon-god named Paul Corso and a St. Jude's valve, I survived.

A recent measles outbreak in San Diego highlights the growing number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children against deadly diseases.

There's some nostalgia among doctors for the good old days when patients did what they were told, and doctors decided what to tell them. But it's hard for the rest of us to mourn this change; in general, patients probably know what they want better than their doctors. Increasingly, however, people are electing to make decisions that affect the whole community, not just themselves -- particularly in the area of childhood vaccinations. As the number of unvaccinated children grows, their right to make decisions about their own child's health is turning into the "right" to bring disease and death to the community. MORE

An Oregon man (recognized as male, anyway, by the law, his friends, and his wife) is pregnant.

More arresting than Thomas Beatie's words, published in The Advocate this month, are the photos of his stubbly face and swollen belly, now in its second trimester. Transexualism is documented and usually accepted, more or less, in many cultures; consider the waria in Indonesia, the mustarjil in Iraq, the mahu in Tahiti, the katoy on Soi Cowboy. But cases like these will challenge even the sensibilities that have gotten used to the occasional mismatch between anatomy and gender. It's one thing for a man to wear a dress, and another for him to wear a maternity dress.

El Cheapo kidneys, get them while they're warm

In the grossest violation of the Hippocratic Oath since Mengele, a gang of surgeons in Gurgaon, India, allegedly rounded up beggars and day-laborers, drugged them, and sliced out their kidneys.  Other poor Indians surrendered their kidneys to the doctors for handfuls of cash. In all, the gang bought or stole as many as 500 organs in a nine-year medical crime-wave -- then installed them, for a price, in the renally-diseased bodies of rich Indians and foreigners. Leaving aside the surgery-at-gunpoint and the forcible anesthesia, two gruesome facts stand out.