Posted in Nuts and Bolts on December 22nd, 2007 No Comments »
Celiac disease. 30 years ago–when we called it “nontropical sprue”– we thought it was relatively rare. Now, it is believed that as many as 1 in 100 Americans suffers from this condition. This may reflect improvement in our diagnostic techniques, but some scientists think there is an actual increase in the number of cases– possibly due to our […]
Posted in Nuts and Bolts on December 17th, 2007 7 Comments »
They’re called cytokines (cyto, meaning cell, and kine, meaning movement or pertaining to motion), those molecular messengers that our immune cells use to communicate with each other. Think of cytokines as messages in bottles, cast from cellular ships into a sea of plasma, to be plucked up by other ships as they pass by. There […]
Posted in Medical Politics on December 11th, 2007 No Comments »
It all started with a rock…a big one. This thing was an obelisk, a sarcophagus, a monolith. Thinking back, it may have really started with that gymnastics injury in 1970, when I crashed full tilt into the side of a vaulting horse. It took about three months to get over that one. I doubt that […]