Miraculous recoveries from brain trauma are always good news, but they may not be as miraculous as they first seem. However, the Daily Mail’s account of a boy who recovered fully after four specialists declared that he was brain dead makes one question if doctors really understand brain death.

Steven Thorpe was 17 when he was involved in a serious car accident in 2008 which left another passenger dead. He had serious injuries to his arm, face and head and was declared “brain dead”.  ‘The doctors were telling my parents that they wanted to take me off the life support,” Steven told the newspaper. “The words they used to my parents were “You need to start thinking about organ donations”.’

Fortunately his parents sensed that their son was still there. ‘I think if my dad had agreed with them then I would have been off the life support machine in seconds,’ says Steven sardonically.… click here to read whole article and make comments

A sophisticated new microscope allows fertility doctors to monitor fertilised eggs in utero for up to five days - and proponents claim it has boosted pregnancy rates by 50%. It allows doctors to see any abnormal changes and thereby discard defective embryos so that only the best quality ones will be transferred into the womb. Doctors say the microscope has led to 1 in 2 couples having a successful pregnancy. At present, clinicians have to remove the growing embryos from their incubators, which can only be done once each day. This may lead to crucial problems and abnormal developmental changes being overlooked, thereby jeopardising chances of successful pregnancy.

Care, the UK's largest private provider of fertility services, installed the "Embryoscope" at its Manchester clinic. To date, over 1,500 embryos from 200 patients have been screened using the device, and it has increased pregnancy rates. Embryoscope monitoring is currently priced at £750 per… click here to read whole article and make comments

A pregnant woman from Detroit who was declared dead gave birth to twins this week after being kept alive for a month with a respirator. Christine Bolden had an aneurysm on March 1 and was pronounced brain dead five days later. However, she was kept on life support in order to save her unborn twins. The boys, Nicholas and Alexander, were born on April 5 after just 25 weeks' pregnancy. Medical staff turned off her life support shortly thereafter. The children are premature and are being kept in isolation. They weigh less than 2 pounds and are less than 6 inches long.

Gestation after brain death has happened before, a fact which has led some experts to question whether “brain dead” people are truly dead. In 2007, 34-year-old Stacy Rojas of Texas gave birth to a healthy baby girl after falling into a coma following a brain aneurysm. Her life support machine was… click here to read whole article and make comments

The work of Nazi doctors is a well-documented lesson in medical ethics. There was even a separate trial for them at Nuremberg and seven were hanged. But what about the nurses who assisted them? Their role has been airbrushed from history, says an Australian academic. Professor Linda Shields, of Curtin University, expressed her concerns in Nursing Review three weeks ago. “There has been a great deal of scholarship on the role of doctors and what they did in Nazi-occupied Europe, what has been neglected or overlooked is the role of nurses,” Shields said. “And yet most of the killings that we are looking at occurred in hospitals where nurses made up the bulk of the workforce. Nurses were very much involved in the killings and the camp experiments,” she said.

Survivor testimonies and available documents state that nurses actively and voluntarily participated in Nazi euthanasia programs, killing over 10,000 people, many of… click here to read whole article and make comments

Fertility drugs could more than double the risk of offspring developing childhood leukaemia, academics cautioned this week. Each year, tens of thousands of women in Britain undergo fertility treatment, which usually demands they take drugs to stimulate their ovaries to produce more eggs. Over 13,000 babies per year are born through assisted fertility technology. While no convincing evidence has hitherto emerged that fertility treatment leads to cancer, French researchers told a conference in London they believe ovarian stimulation drugs are associated with 2 kinds of childhood leukaemia.

Dr Jéremié Rudant, of the Centre for Research in Epidemiology and Population Health, in Villejuif, France, who led the research, said: "Previous studies have suggested a link between infertility treatments and acute childhood leukaemia, but there haven’t been many studies, most of them have been small, and they focused either on IVF or hormonal treatment. Our study was much larger and it’s the first… click here to read whole article and make comments

People with intellectual disabilities, all children and people with dementia should be able to request euthanasia, the Belgian Liberal Humanist Association (HVV) has declared. Its president, Jacinta De Roeck, a former senator who helped to draft the current law, says: “We can not accept that a certain group of people should be completely excluded from self-determination over life and death.”

This is an especially touchy topic in Belgium because of  the euthanasia of mentally handicapped people in neighbouring Germany under the Nazis. However, Ms De Roeck insists that the issue has to be considered. “Even someone with mental retardation, who is found to be mature enough by the team should be able to ask for euthanasia.”

The HVV is also lobbying for children of any age to have the right to ask for euthanasia.  The HVV website states that “children who are in a hopeless situation have a high degree of maturity, especially compared… click here to read whole article and make comments

A group of Hawaii doctors is offering to write prescriptions for terminally ill patients in order to test whether physician-assisted suicide is permitted under state law, American Medical News reports. Unlike Oregon and Washington, the 2 US states in which writing such a prescription is expressly allowed and regulated, Hawaii has no law which permits physician-assisted suicide. Furthermore, Hawaii Attorney General David M. Louie issued an opinion in December 2011 saying that doctors who write prescriptions with the intention of causing death could be charged with manslaughter.

However, the legal situation is ambiguous enough for Dr Robert Nathanson to try to provoke a legal showdown. In January, he co-founded the Physician Advisory Council for Aid in Dying, which now has 5 physician members. In February, he wrote a prescription for a lethal dose of the sedative secobarbitol to help a terminally ill patient hasten his death, although the man died before using… click here to read whole article and make comments

The Texas Medical Board approved controversial regulations last Friday which are claimed to guarantee safe clinical use of stem cells and other “investigational agents”. Critics say the regulations are too permissive and open the door to dubious future treatments. Even stem cell scientists – who usually criticise attempts to use stem cells in clinics without clinical evidence – are confused as to whether the regulations aim to rein in rogue clinicians or open the door to increased use.

The regulations require those who seek to provide stem cells to patients to get approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA considers most stem cell treatments to be inside its jurisdiction and requires they be clinically verified, or approved by an institutional review board (IRB).

Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minneapolis, told New Scientist: “They seem to have taken experimental research and swept it into the… click here to read whole article and make comments

Uzbekistan has a policy of secretly sterilising women, according to the BBC. According to women interviewed in neighbouring Kazakhstan, Uzbek authorities have run a program over the last 2 years to sterilise women across the nation, often without their knowledge. Apparently the government wants to control Uzbekistan’s growing population – official figures place it at 28 million.

“Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised,” says a gynaecologist from Tashkent, the Uzbek capital. "There is a quota. My quota is four women a month,” she says.

The push for sterilisation is strongest in rural Uzbekistan, where some gynaecologists are expected to sterilise eight women per week. One woman says she faced months of strange pains and severe bleeding after she gave birth to her son. She then had an ultrasound check… click here to read whole article and make comments

Two recent studies have shown that the incidence of birth defects and long-term circulatory problems is much higher among children conceived with IVF.

A group from Nanjing Medical University in China did a meta-analysis of all studies of children conceived through IVF and ICSI and found that they are at “significantly increased risk for birth defects”. The research, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, indicated that these children had a 37% higher risk of a birth defect across a range of body systems.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, major birth defects occur in about 3 out of every 100 babies born in the US. This data indicates that the corresponding figure for IVF babies is 4 in every 100.

However, the reasons for this are far from clear. There are three main theories: people who have trouble conceiving also tend to have babies with birth defects. The IVF… click here to read whole article and make comments