Enlarge / Ralph de la Torre, founder and chief executive officer of Steward Health Care System LLC, speaks during a summit in New York on Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016. (credit: Getty | )

A Senate committee on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to hold the wealthy CEO of a failed hospital chain in civil and criminal contempt for rejecting a rare subpoena from the lawmakers.

In July, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) subpoenaed Steward Health Care CEO Ralph de la Torre to testify before the lawmakers on the deterioration and eventual bankruptcy of the system, which included more than 30 hospitals across eight states. The resulting dire conditions in the hospitals, described as providing "third-world medicine," allegedly led to the deaths of at least 15 patients and imperiled more than 2,000 others.

The committee, chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), highlighted that amid the system's collapse, de la Torre was paid at least $250 million, bought a $40 million yacht, and owned a $15 million luxury fishing boat. Meanwhile, Steward executives jetted around on two private jets collectively worth $95 million.

Enlarge / Herpes simplex virus, (HSV). Image taken with transmission electron microscopy. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

As the US Surgeon General recently highlighted, parenting is stressful. From navigating social media to facing a youth mental health crisis, challenges abound. But, for one father in Spain, even the simple, loving, everyday act of giving your child a peck on the cheek has turned to nightmare fuel.

According to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the man's 9-year-old daughter developed a fever along with a crusty, blistering lesion on her left cheek. Doctors initially diagnosed the blotch as impetigo, a bacterial infection on the skin's surface layers that is fairly common in children. It's often caused by Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus bacteria and is generally easily treated with antibiotics.

Enlarge / For now, "you should see a doctor" remains good advice.

ChatGPT was able to pass some of the United States Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) tests in a study done in 2022. This year, a team of Canadian medical professionals checked to see if it’s any good at actual doctoring. And it’s not.

ChatGPT vs. Medscape

“Our source for medical questions was the Medscape questions bank,” said Amrit Kirpalani, a medical educator at the Western University in Ontario, Canada, who led the new research into ChatGPT’s performance as a diagnostic tool. The USMLE contained mostly multiple-choice test questions; Medscape has full medical cases based on real-world patients, complete with physical examination findings, laboratory test results, and so on.

The idea behind it is to make those cases challenging for medical practitioners due to complications like multiple comorbidities, where two or more diseases are present at the same time, and various diagnostic dilemmas that make the correct answers less obvious. Kirpalani’s team turned 150 of those Medscape cases into prompts that ChatGPT could understand and process.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In 1972, Janet Rowley sat at her dining room table and cut tiny chromosomes from photographs she had taken in her laboratory. One by one, she snipped out the small figures her children teasingly called paper dolls. She then carefully laid them out in 23 matching pairs—and warned her kids not to sneeze.

The physician-scientist had just mastered a new chromosome-staining technique in a year-long sabbatical at Oxford. But it was in the dining room of her Chicago home where she made the discovery that would dramatically alter the course of cancer research.

Enlarge / Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy. (credit: Universal Pictures)

Ryan Gosling plays a Hollywood stuntman in the new action comedy The Fall Guy, a loose adaptation of the popular 1980s TV series of the same name starring Lee Majors. Gosling even did a few of his own stunts, although professional stunt performers handled the most dangerous sequences. It's their job to assume the risk so the stars don't get injured but that can translate into a high rate of head injuries in particular. According to a study published in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology, a significant fraction of stunt performers never report such injuries, largely because it's a competitive industry, and they are afraid of losing work. The impacts can lead to more serious cognitive issues later in life.

“Many stunt performers are afraid to report their injuries, especially head trauma, in fear they will be put on a do-not-hire list or looked at as a liability,” said co-author Jeffrey Russell of Ohio University. “The more injuries or trauma, the harder it may be to find work. But that should not be how it is; production companies and their unions should be ensuring stunt performers are taken care of and not reprimanded for any injuries sustained on the job.”

The work builds on Russell's prior research, published last year, looking at the prevalence of head trauma and concussion in stunt performers and how well such injuries are managed. The prevalence of such injuries means that stunt performers are at high risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)—a degenerative brain disease associated with a history of repetitive head impacts that is a cause of much concern in collision sports like football and ice hockey—over the course of their careers.

Enlarge (credit: DrAfter123)

The development of gene editing tools, which enable the specific targeting and correction of mutations, hold the promise of allowing us to correct those mutations that cause genetic diseases. However, the technology has been around for a while now—two researchers were critical to its development in 2020—and there have been only a few cases where gene editing has been used to target diseases.

One of the reasons for that is the challenge of targeting specific cells in a living organism. Many genetic diseases affect only a specific cell type, such as red blood cells in sickle-cell anemia, or specific tissue. Ideally, to limit potential side effects, we'd like to ensure that enough of the editing takes place in the affected tissue to have an impact, while minimizing editing elsewhere to limit side effects. But our ability to do so has been limited. Plus, a lot of the cells affected by genetic diseases are mature and have stopped dividing. So, we either need to repeat the gene editing treatments indefinitely or find a way to target the stem cell population that produces the mature cells.

On Thursday, a US-based research team said that they've done gene editing experiments that targeted a high-profile genetic disease: cystic fibrosis. Their technique largely targets the tissue most affected by the disease (the lung), and occurs in the stem cell populations that produce mature lung cells, ensuring that the effect is stable.

Enlarge (credit: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós, 2024.)

The 4,000-year-old skull and mandible of an Egyptian man show signs of cancerous lesions and tool marks, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. Those marks could be signs that someone tried to operate on the man shortly before his death or performed the ancient Egyptian equivalent of an autopsy to learn more about the cancer after death.

“This finding is unique evidence of how ancient Egyptian medicine would have tried to deal with or explore cancer more than 4,000 years ago,” said co-author Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela. “This is an extraordinary new perspective in our understanding of the history of medicine.”

Archaeologists have found evidence of various examples of primitive surgery dating back several thousand years. For instance, in 2022, archaeologists excavated a 5,300-year-old skull of an elderly woman (about 65 years old) from a Spanish tomb. They determined that seven cut marks near the left ear canal were strong evidence of a primitive surgical procedure to treat a middle ear infection. The team also identified a flint blade that may have been used as a cauterizing tool. By the 17th century, this was a fairly common procedure to treat acute ear infections, and skulls showing evidence of a mastoidectomy have been found in Croatia (11th century), Italy (18th and 19th centuries), and Copenhagen (19th or early 20th century).