Category: Health

Pro-Life Wisconsin launched the second part of its True to Life media campaign Monday by running anti-late-term abortion television ads throughout Madison.

Machines monitoring an elderly man’s vital signs emit steady beeps while a surgeon uses one arm to grasp a dissector and deftly peel layers of tissue from the patient’s cancerous bladder. Another arm snips at the base of the fleshy organ with a steel claw while a third manipulates a tiny camera that sends gorgeous images of glistening innards onto video screens all around the darkened room.

….The eerily precise and silent surgeon hovering over the Madison patient last month in a UW Hospital operating room was a robot named da Vinci, after Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th century Italian genius who made sketches and then a wooden model of the world’s first human robot. Modern-day da Vincis have revolutionized the surgical world in the past few years, achieving a level of precision and visibility that once would have been unimaginable.

….The eerily precise and silent surgeon hovering over the Madison patient last month in a UW Hospital operating room was a robot named da Vinci, after Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th century Italian genius who made sketches and then a wooden model of the world’s first human robot.

For more than three decades, the YWCA Madison has bestowed annual honors to show its appreciation to women whose community service, leadership and dedication to the lives of others reflect the organization’s historic mission and values.

This year the group will present its 35th annual Women of Distinction Awards to Iris Christenson, Brenda Brown, Mary Lang Sollinger, Sharon Chamberlain and Jeanette Schreier.

Jon Blais and Jeff Kaufman are two men who refused to fade away and die quietly.

Blais inspired an army of athletes by finishing the 2005 Ironman Hawaii in a heroic effort, the only athlete diagnosed with ALS to complete the grueling endurance race.

Kaufman has survived with the fatal disease for 20 years, breathing with a ventilator and utilizing his still-sharp mind to coordinate a gala that generates more than $250,000 annually to support research being done at the Waisman Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As her husband lay dying at UW Hospital, Ruthann Lewis was given a form.

Sign it, hospital staff said, or her husband, Dan Martin, wouldnâ??t get a liver transplant. The form said Lewis would have to pay for the procedure if the coupleâ??s insurance didnâ??t cover it.

MADISON (WKOW) — The Supply Chain Performance Excellence Collaborative of the University HealthSystem Consortium, or UHC, named the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics one of five “top performers” for efficiency in managing supply, pharmacy, cardiology, and surgical expenses.

The collaborative began in 2007 to help academic medical centers improve their financial performance.

If you become a patient at UW Hospital or any other UW Health organization, you should feel confident that decisions made on your case are in your interest, untainted by any financial relationships a doctor or other health professional might have with the medical industry.

For that reason, UW Health organizations should adopt the stricter conflict-of-interest policy recommended by a committee of UW doctors and health professionals.

Nearly 80 percent of hospitals in the state have standardized the colors of patient wristbands, but Meriter Hospital is the only one in Madison to have joined them.

Hospitals in Madison, meanwhile, continue to use different colors for warning labels on bags of medications.

Some said they believe University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter crash last May that killed all three onboard could have been prevented if the chopper had been equipped federally-recommended safety gear.

And some former Med Flight workers pointed to lax federal regulation and Med Flight’s management as reasons why the safety gear wasn’t on the Med Flight helicopter when it crashed.

The fatal crash of a University of Wisconsin Hospital Med Flight helicopter last May rocked the medical community and the families of the three victims, but some said they believe the tragedy could have been avoided.

A WISC-TV investigation into the Med Flight crash that killed three people found not just sorrow but also anger and frustration because the $4 to $5 million helicopter did not have $100,000 worth of safety equipment.

Noted: In a much smaller study at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, seven patients with acute myeloid leukemia were scanned at various times during a week of aggressive chemotherapy. Normally, doctors wait a month after chemo is stopped to see if it worked. But the FLT PET scans offered an answer as soon as a day after treatment started.

“It’s always hard to get too excited about a study that just involves seven people,” said Dr. Mark Juckett, one of the authors. But “in these few patients, it looked like we could predict those who were going to respond well to chemotherapy and those who weren’t.”

8th Annual Bowlin’ For Colons raises money for colon cancer research at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.

More than a thousand bowlers hit the lanes this weekend for the eighth annual Bowlin’ for Colons benefit.

Participants at Ten Pin Alley in Fitchburg bowled to raise awareness and funds for colon cancer research at the UW Carbone Cancer Center.

Sunday marks the beginning of Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month.

It also would’ve been Roger Szemraj’s 57th birthday.

But he recently lost his life to colon cancer.

“Come on Dad you got to help me get a strike.”

You normally wouldn’t find Sara Szemraj-Dongarra bowling on her father’s birthday.

It was all part of the UW Carbone Cancer Center’s 8th Annual ” Bowlin’ for Colons” fundraiser at Ten Pin Alley in Fitchburg.

The University of Wisconsin enjoys a sterling reputation for policing the ethics of its medical school faculty and staff.

“They’re one of our stars,” said Susan C. Chimonas of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University, which ranks institutions on the quality of their programs to avoid and disclose ethical conflicts of interest, like taking money from companies while treating patients with their products.

Some university officials were thus unpleasantly surprised by recent newspaper articles that detailed how Thomas A. Zdeblick, a renowned spine surgeon who is chairman of the university’s department of orthopedics, collected $19.4 million between 2003 and 2007 from Medtronic, a medical-device supplier that sells spinal implants developed by Dr. Zdeblick.

Doctors would have to disclose the total amounts they get paid by drug companies or makers of medical devices and stop giving talks sponsored by industry under recommendations before the University of Wisconsin-Madisonâ??s physician group.

The recommendations, released Thursday, come as national attention to potential conflicts of interest among doctors has grown in recent years.

Giving patients genetic tests to gauge their dose of a widely used blood thinner could reduce the drugâ??s sometimes deadly side effects, a new study involving University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers suggests.

The drug, warfarin, was discovered at the university in 1948 and is named after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF.

When Lily Giroux tries to go off her medications, her eyes roll and she slumps over for seconds at a time.

Grace Penwell shakes uncontrollably for about two minutes at least once a week, despite drugs and surgery.

Lily, 13, and Grace, 10, have epilepsy, a brain disorder marked by seizures.

Their parents, frustrated with the limits of treatments for the disease, are banking on an experimental approach at UW-Madison: a drug that mimics the low-sugar diets some people with epilepsy have tried since Biblical times.

….As long as second-trimester abortions remain legal and as long as no state money is being used to perform them at the Madison Surgery Center, the decision by the center’s board to offer those abortions appears to be legal and appropriate.

MADISON, Wis., Feb. 12 — Irradiation could improve the safety of the food supply and limit infectious disease outbreaks such as the ongoing rash of salmonella infections, a researcher said.