“Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” Sandra Park, an ACLU staff attorney said. “Myriad did not invent the BRCA genes and should not control them. Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued.”

“The 14-year-old allegedly lay on the floor for several minutes and then — at least according to police — helped his mom with her Web search.”

“The deans say that getting students out the door more quickly will accomplish several goals. By speeding up production of physicians, they say, it could eventually dampen a looming doctor shortage, although the number of doctors would not increase unless the schools enrolled more students in the future. The three-year program would also curtail student debt, which now averages $150,000 by graduation, and by doing so, persuade more students to go into shortage areas like pediatrics and internal medicine, rather than more lucrative specialties like dermatology. The idea was supported by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to President Obama, and a colleague, Victor R. Fuchs. In an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March, they said there was “substantial waste” in the nation’s medical education. “Years of training have been added without evidence that they enhance clinical skills or the quality of care,” they wrote. They suggested that the 14 years of college, medical school, residency and fellowship that it now takes to train a subspecialty physician could be reduced by 30 percent, to 10 years.”

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A man thought to be in a permanent vegetative state for the past 12 years has communicated that he is not in any pain using only his brain, causing his neurologist to say the medical textbooks need to be rewritten. Thirty-nine-year-old Canadian Scott Routley had been completely unresponsive following a car accident and, despite his parents insisting he communicated with them by lifting his thumb or moving his eyes, neurologists said routine physical assessments demonstrated he had a total lack of awareness. However, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique developed in 2010 by the University of Cambridge’s Medical Research Council, the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge and the University of Liege, a team of neuroscientists was able to ask Routley a series of questions with yes or no answers, and receive reliable and accurate responses.

“Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind,” said Adrian Owen, who co-authored the original study and led a team investigating Routley’s case at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario. “We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is.”

Patients in a vegetative state appear “awake” and exhibit involuntary reflexes such as opening their eyes, but unlike coma patients their non-communicativeness is down to severe brain damage. Owen’s research proves this does not necessarily mean they do not have the ability to understand.

“… although journalists, many of them really are mission-driven, they’re not the only people who have driven them into their professions. Physicians, many of them, are mission-driven. What happens in their case is that technology allows nurses to provide more and more high quality care. The instinct of the physicians is to look down their noses at the nurses, and say, “They’re not as good as we are.” And they feel like their mission is compromised by handing off care to “less quality” care providers. And teachers feel the same way. So it’s not unique, but I think in each case, the reaction of the leaders in the industry is to justify the need why they shouldn’t change, and everybody else is wrong. And you keep changing the definition of quality to justify why you don’t need to be worried. I think that that’s probably what’s going on.”