My guess is BoB and NDT are trolling us. Funny stuff.

This.

For example, Michael J Fox had an ablative procedure (thalamotomy) to treat his parkinson's disease. We don't really do that procedure anymore because deep brain stimulation has gotten better, but this article is extremely light on details and the write up (particularly by the OP) is needlessly sensationalized.

This was not an act of "terrorism". The shooter was caucasian and does not have a foreign sounding name, so, by definition, this cannot be called terrorism. Apparently.

Not quite true.

The disorder in ALS is of the corticospinal tract, not the NMJ, but both points are irrelevant in this case. The researchers are decoding cortical signals and translating them drive a mechanical prosthesis. Theoretically, anyone with an intact motor cortex (spinal cord injured patient, as you point out, but also for ALS) should be able to manipulate one of these things.

Pretty cool stuff, but we're years away from anything clinically useful coming out of this because compared to other medical conditions, the research dollars just aren't there (the number of people with diabetes dwarfs all the SCI and amputees easily). Also, we need to figure out a way to use these non-invasively (i.e. outside the head) to avoid the problems with infection and the ethics of justifying an experimental brain surgery on a human...

first of all, a complete resection of a infiltrative glioma is not possible, because frequently by the time they're diagnosed, they've already crossed the corpus callosum into the contralateral hemisphere (google butterfly glioma. and those are just the cells we can see with MRI. we already know there are micrometastases that are not visible by /any/ currently available clinical imaging modality)

theoretically, you could do a gross total resection (we do these all the time) and irradiate the surrounding parenchyma with white light to reduce the tumor burden due to micrometastases. of course, we could just find a slightly different form of EM radiation (like x-rays) that penetrate better than visible light and activate the nanoparticles that way.

interesting stuff.

As a neurosurgeon, I have been involved in procedures like this (although not with a banjo player). To evaluate the efficacy of the tremor suppression, we frequently ask the patient to sip a glass of water.

The analogy of a surgeon as a glorified human body mechanic has been used on me in the past, too. I will accept the comparison with the following conditions:

Next time you take your car in, tell your mechanic that
1. You only plan on having one car for the rest of your life and
2. When they work on your car, they have to leave the engine running.

This is part of what I do. And it's good. It's very good - and getting better. One of the first things I did was have one of my colleagues work on me. My recommendations:

1) Find a clinic that can perform a "wavefront ablation." These are procedures that are customized to your own eye instead of based on a generic template. The difference lies in that they can correct third and fourth order curve errors, not just sphere and cylinder. The technology is not yet mainstream so you may have to hunt around.

2) Ask the doctor how many procedures he's performed, what % require revision, and what percent result in impaired vision.

3) I personally believe in IntraLASIK. It's an all-laser method of creating the eye flap. Traditional methods use a very sharp blade on a battery powered slider. While good, these devices can skip a bit and actually *create* third order error.

4) For god's sakes, FOLLOW YOUR POST-OP INSTRUCTIONS. Use the eyedrops RELIGIOUSLY, use the eye shield at night. This stuff is micrometer surgery. It doesn't take much to ruin an otherwise optimal result.

Best wishes!
U of Iowa

It is helpful to know whom you are targeting in your job hunt.

As programmers, we laugh our guts out when we see job listings for a C programmer or Perl programmer, etc. because we know that anyone worth his or her salt should be able to pick up a new language quickly. After all, these languages are Turing complete. You can only express a for loop or an if statement in so many ways.

Those of us in the know realize that you want to hire for domain knowledge. I mean, I've been programming in C for 10 years, but if someone asked me to write medical imaging software in C, my language background is useless because I don't understand the problem.

When you hire a permanent employee, it obviously makes sense to hire for attitude and aptitude, since tech skills become obsolete so quickly. However, in defense of these job postings that have hyper-specific, buzz word laden requirements, I should point out that many are from recruting firms (head hunters). Their clients call them and say, "We need an experienced programmer that already knows C++ and can start work THIS WEEK because the project is already late/fubared/etc." Their clients often don't have time for you to inhale the O'Reilly book. They are desperate for someone to fix their problem immediately.