Underground Journal of Initiation

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease." - Voltaire

A former member of the Grady hospital board has accused the Emory School of Medicine of cherry-picking Grady patients to benefit its own hospitals. Bill Loughrey said Emory has systematically steered paying patients from Grady to Emory-owned hospitals, leaving Grady in fragile financial shape as it serves the poor and uninsured. Would anybody be surprised to discover these charges were true? Link

NEW YORK -- In "total-body photography," patients typically strip nude and stand on a platform while a photographer snaps two dozen pictures covering every inch of their skin. Bill Slue pioneered the procedure at New York University Medical Center, hoping it could save lives by letting doctors monitor unusual moles in people who might develop skin cancer. Mr. Slue, a native of Jamaica who never graduated from college, was appointed to the medical-school faculty at NYU and celebrated as an innovator in dermatology. NYU is now struggling to distance itself from the photographer, while contending that his technique is still valid. The hospital fired Mr. Slue in January 2004, accusing him of taking extra photographs of female patients for his personal enjoyment. He denies that. The accusation followed an NYU investigation in which an attractive undercover operative visited Mr. Slue's studio posing as a patient. A 63-year-old former Jehovah's Witnesses minister, Mr. Slue s...

CHICAGO - Drug-resistant staph infections have spread to the urban poor, rising almost seven-fold in recent years in some Chicago neighborhoods, a new study finds. Researchers said the crowded living conditions of public housing and jails may speed up the person-to-person spread of infection. The superbugs, first seen mainly in hospitals and nursing homes, have turned up recently among athletes, prisoners and people who get illegal tattoos. Called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, these staph germs can cause skin infections that in rare cases have led to pneumonia, bloodstream infections and a painful, flesh-destroying condition. MRSA is hard to treat because the bacteria have developed resistance to the penicillin drug family.

ROME, May 14 (Reuters) - Scientists in Italy say they have identified a potential weapon against malaria living inside the blood-sucking mosquitoes that spread the disease -- their internal bacteria.

On April 2nd 2007, at the University Hospital of Strasbourg, Professor Jacques Marescaux and his team successfully performed the first no scar surgery. This first human incisionless operation was carried out using a flexible endoscope for transvaginal removal of the gallbladder (cholecystectomy) in a 30-year-old woman with symptomatic gallstones. This world first, called "operation Anubis", was presented last week-end in Las Vegas at the Society for the Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgery (SAGES) to an enthusiastic audience.