“A dream is a wish your heart makes When you’re fast asleep” -Disney’s Cinderella, 1950 During my first year of medical school, on the first Monday of winter break, I slept for 18 hours straight. I woke up...
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“Mitochondria—the powerhouse of the cell.” It’s almost a reflex. Say the word, and a chorus of voices answers back with the same rehearsed phrase, learned sometime between middle school biology and standardized exams. From a molecular forensic science...
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“Sttttep right up! Step right up! Ladiiiiesss and gentlemen! Children of all ages! Prepare to be amazed! For you are about to witness a test of dexterity, a challenge to gravity, a feat SO GRAND, you’ll be holding...
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Sometimes a patient ‘introduces’ themselves before you even see them. From where we were in the hallway of Banner University’s cardiac floor, a resounding tempo stood out amidst the usual noise of a hospital, and the Hospitalist was...
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Scientific discovery is often imagined as a solitary eureka moment—a singular mind or laboratory unlocking nature’s secrets in isolation. But history tells a different story. Some of the most transformative breakthroughs have happened twice, independently, and almost simultaneously....
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In the span of one day, an average adult will take anywhere from 22,000 - 24,000 breaths. And yet how many of those breaths do we actually take notice of? Personally, I only really pay attention when I’m...
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Few innovations in the history of medicine have had as profound and enduring an impact as the electrocardiogram (EKG). As both a diagnostic cornerstone and a window into the heart’s electrical language, the EKG has saved countless lives...
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BREAKING NEWS: “Giancarlo Stanton Sidelined By PRP Injections, Set To Start Season On Injured List: How Yankees Will Adjust”.1 Now, admittedly, I know nothing about baseball, or what this means for the hopes and dreams of New York...
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Prior to starting medical school, I seriously underestimated how often blood is utilized in the hospital. I previously imagined that blood was only needed during massive traumas or in surgeries with complications. However, According to the Association for...
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Week after week, my peers and I witness the countless inequities that people experiencing homelessness at each of our Street Medicine Phoenix service events face every day. Through street outreach, our goal is to meet the unmet health...
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When we hear the words “lung cancer,” our minds immediately ask, “Did/does the patient smoke?” What do you as the physician, or maybe the physician-to-be, do when your patient says, “Lung cancer? Me? How could that be? I’ve...
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The treatment of intervertebral disc herniations vary widely, from conservative to invasive modalities. A common surgical procedure that is performed to manage this pathology is a microdiscectomy, where the extruded disc material is removed. In the lumbar spine...
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Picture this: the sun’s early morning rays shining through the windows, bathing wooden floors in a golden glow. Dust dancing in the air around you, as you sit perched on a mat, legs crossed, hands in lap, and...
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Falls in the elderly population are a serious and substantial public health problem. The medical expenditures attributable to both fatal and nonfatal falls in patients 65 years or older approximated $50 billion in 2015.(1) This problem continues to...
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I’ve always enjoyed a good mystery. As a kid I tore voraciously through mystery novels and have watched all the way through House MD several times. But I’ve got nothing on my grandma, who not only has had...
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Many experts and running enthusiasts have touted outside running as a superior activity when compared to its indoor counterpart, the treadmill; they use a plethora of arguments, all of which generally revolve around what happens in working muscles...
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In the main series Pokémon games, an antidote is a healing item sold at any Poké Mart which cures the poison status condition, inflicted from moves such as Poison Sting or Sludge, abilities like Poison Point, or battle...
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Phoenix is a transplant city, to be sure. Plenty of Californians, Midwesterners, and folks from all over have made their way to our city one way or another and have had to acclimate themselves to the many unique...
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The Vogue Challenge, Zoom Meeting Mishaps, Turn Your DMs Into Quotes, Silhouette Challenge – do any of these sound familiar? There’s a good chance that you may have participated in these, or similar, trends yourself. Statistically speaking, with...
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Wordle, the latest pandemic craze, is a free game that gives users six attempts a day to guess a unique five letter word, with a new word available every day. The clever word game has had a meteoric...
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When the Wright Brothers first achieved motorized flight in 1903, the response to their achievement was lackluster. In fact, when propositioned for contracts regarding aeroplanes, the U.S. government responded to the brothers with a letter of “no interest”....
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Vaccines are among the most important inventions in medical history, having effectively eliminated conditions that caused innumerable deaths. In fact, vaccines are so important that all 50 U.S. states require that children be vaccinated in order to attend...
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What do you remember about Pixar’s famous movie, Up? Is it Doug, the golden retriever? The epic love story that brought tears to the most stoic of eyes? Whatever it is, it probably isn’t Carl’s cane, proudly decorated...
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March 11th, 2020 marked the pivotal day when the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, an announcement that materialized only a few short months after the first reported cases in Wuhan, China. Two days later, the...
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“We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.” – Jerry Seinfeld Although...
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It is well studied at this point that COVID-19 has been disproportionately affecting racial and ethnic minorities. The CDC stated that these differences in risk of infection and hospitalizations may stem from long-standing systemic health and social inequities....
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Within the past decade, player safety has become a priority within the National Football League (NFL). While the obvious reason for this is to avoid unnecessary injuries, there has become an increasing focus on the long-term consequences of...
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I’m sure we all had the same reaction when we first heard of a coronavirus outbreak in China this winter. The virus with the shortest video in Sketchy Micro? I’m sure that won’t be a big problem. Well,...
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Egg lovers may have some unsettling news coming their way. A recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) points to higher consumption of eggs and dietary cholesterol as an increased risk of cardiovascular...
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As mind-numbing as organizing and sifting through publicly available data sounds, it can actually be pretty fun. At least, it has been for me since I started this mini-project. My goal is to share through images just a...
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Are machines going to take over medicine? This might be a question you have heard or asked yourself, especially after watching movies demonstrating somewhat unsettling, yet realistic portrayals, of artificial intelligence (AI). Films such as Ex Machina, Her,...
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We all know the saying: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. This adage has been around in some form since 1860. In fact, the original saying was “eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll...
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Remarkably, Marijuana is legal in the United States, even with its classification as a Schedule I drug. With two-thirds of states passing legislation to allow either medical or recreational marijuana use, the national trend is undeniably towards legalization[1]....
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Musculoskeletal traumatic injuries are some of the leading causes of morbidity and disability worldwide. There is an increasing prevalence of post-traumatic and degenerative pathologies correlated to the subsequent surgical interventions. This is in no means an indictment of...
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Medical advances can come from the most unlikely places. Nowhere is this more apparent than trends in diabetes management. Since 2005 the FDA has approved exenatide, a synthetic form of a natural peptide occurring in the saliva of...
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According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 800 women die every day due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Based on a census taken in 2015, it was estimated that 303,000 women worldwide died during...
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Psychological illnesses have serious clinical manifestations that can be debilitating. It has been known for a while now that endogenous derangements in the dopaminergic and serotonergic system contribute to the phenotypic manifestation of psychological illness, hence selective serotonin...
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In continual efforts to improve diagnostic and screening methods, a new emerging tool that is quickly gaining momentum is the “specialized breathalyzer.” An instrument once utilized exclusively by law enforcement officers for the measurement of blood alcohol levels,...
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A few years ago, the concept of nanoscience would have seemed so fictional that Steven Spielberg would have done an outstanding job curating it into a movie. Today, nanotechnology is making its way into clinical practice and soon...
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Every year, more than one million knee replacement surgeries are done in the United States, and approximately one to two percent of these procedures are followed by infections. These infections are linked to the formation of biofilm–a microbial-derived...
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“I can feel just about every finger—it’s a really weird sensation,” Mr. Copeland said a month after surgery. Mr. Copeland’s regained ability to feel again occurred after he was connected to the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) developed by...
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In October 2015, the blowout of a wellhead connected to a vast underground storage system for natural gas near the Porter Ranch community in northeastern Los Angeles led to the evacuation of approximately 1700 homes and two schools....
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When I was little, my concept of robots was deeply-rooted in what I saw on TV; large hunks of metal roaming the streets, leaving behind mayhem with every step. Over the years, however, my concept evolved. Now, I...
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The history of immunotherapy in tumor suppression dates back to the early 1900s when the pioneer of the field, Paul Ehrlich, in his study of antibody side chains suggested that molecules that react with tumors could play a...
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Most people have heard the saying, “It’s not brain surgery.” Well, in this case, it is. David Oliva, president of the Mexican Talent Network Abroad chapter in Belgium has designed a tool to increase efficiency and improve precision...
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In 2008, IBM developed its now iconic supercomputer Watson to play Jeopardy! against the show’s most successful duo, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Boasting 15 terabytes of RAM, 2880 processor cores, and the ability to process more than...
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CRISPR_overview CRISPR/Cas9 was recently named the scientific breakthrough of 2015 by the journal Science [1]. Said to be a revolutionary gene-editing technique, CRISPR/Cas9 has risen to fame on national media over the last several months. But the reality...
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Mosquitoes carry a bad name. They carry malaria, chikungunya, typhoid, and dengue, and who knows what else . . . as we found out recently with Zika. This Zika virus just didn’t present itself one day, waking up...
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Did you know that, in ancient times, doctors would routinely drill holes in the skulls of patients who were behaving abnormally in order to ward off evil spirits? Or that in the 19th Century, a series of “soothing...
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The modern smartphone comes with unlimited possibilities for the creative mind. With no more than a few clicks, taps, and pinches of the fingers, anyone can find out practically anything anywhere in the world. But what if we...
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An alarming, frightening, and ultimately lethal mystery first uncovered by Dr. John Freke in April of 1736 may very well be on its way to a resolution—thanks to the help of determined physicians and 21st-century medical technology. After...
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From smartphones to thermostats, watches to vehicles, the modern world is increasingly connected to the Internet—the so-called Internet of Things [1]. What is now becoming clear—painfully so for users of Ashley Madison, a popular dating website—is that anything...
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Fifteen years after its creation, the da Vinci Surgical System is as futuristic, innovative, and revolutionary as ever before. Designed by the United States Army and Stanford University, the initial idea was for an armored robot to roll...
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Welcome to our very first edition of This Month in Science (TMIS). Each month, we will feature recently published research with interviews of our Phoenix faculty for their opinions and explanations. This month, we interviewed Dr. Mark Haussler,...
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In the United States today, there are an estimated 30 million people living with some type of disability. While some assistive living devices, like wheelchairs and walkers, have a large market presence, traditional manufacturing methods have prevented devices...
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