Browse "Health & Medicine"

 Medical research ranges from fundamental research to clinical and applied technology.

Like hundreds of other hospitals across the country, The Pas Health Complex - a 60-bed facility attached to a 62-bed nursing home - has had its budget slashed and its staff reduced. It is operating on 20 per cent less money, or $1.4 million, than it did three years ago.

With mounting concern, Dr. Joel Carter studied the situation in the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre emergency ward. In one resuscitation bed, an elderly heart patient lay dying, the family gathered around her.

About a third of the world's estimated 400 000 species of higher or vascular plants have probably been used for medicinal purposes by indigenous societies, generally in a raw or minimally processed form.

Medicine bundles (also called “sacred bundles”), wrapped collections of spiritually significant items, were the focus of most Indigenous spiritual rituals in the Plains region (see Plains Indigenous Peoples in Canada). A bundle might be a few feathers wrapped in skin or a multitude of objects such as animal skins, roots, or stone pipes inside a rawhide bag.

The term medicine wheel is not an Aboriginal term, but was initially used around the turn of the century by Americans of European ancestry in reference to the Bighorn Medicine Wheel located near Sheridan, Wyoming. Later archaeological research on the Plains Aboriginal people identified other features characterized by a variety of stone circle, cairn and spoke configurations. Because of general similarities to the Bighorn Wheel, the term medicine wheel was extended to describe them as well.

That frustration is fuelled not only by melatonin's proven ability to counter insomnia and jet lag, but also by an array of experts touting it as a wonder drug that can extend life and help to combat a wide variety of illnesses, including AIDS, cancer and epilepsy.

In the early years of the mental-health movement, mental health was often defined as the absence of symptoms of mental illness. Since that time, attempts have been made to relate mental health to a concept of psychological well-being and to certain capacities of individuals, eg, the capacity to perceive reality "objectively," to be flexible in meeting new situations and to understand another's point of view. However, no clear line divides the mentally healthy from the mentally unhealthy, and in addition, the definition of mental health is relative and is dependent on cultural context. The characteristics of a mentally healthy person in one milieu may seem very different from those of a mentally healthy person in another.

It was a humble setting for an epochal scientific breakthrough - a nondescript two-storey building tucked away on the sprawling University of Hawaii campus overlooking Honolulu's Waikiki district.

Microbiology is the science that studies micro-organisms and viruses.

Everybody agrees it was a dirty job. When Canadian Peacekeepers arrived in Croatia in 1993, many had to work near abandoned industrial sites destroyed during the war that had torn apart the old Yugoslavia. Some got covered in reddish grit while filling sandbags.

Like most industrial activities, mining involves risk. However, contemporary mining in Canada is much safer than it once was.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is the most common neurological disease in Canada. Canadians have one of the highest rates of MS in the world with a prevalence of about one case for every 500-1000 people.

Muscular Dystrophy Canada (MDC) was founded in 1954 by a group of parents who had children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Now a national voluntary health organization with offices across Canada, MDC is dedicated to fighting over 40 different neuromuscular disorders.

Music therapy. As defined by the Canadian Association for Music Therapy, music therapy is 'the skilful use of music to aid the physical, psychological and emotional integration of the individual, and in the treatment of an illness or disability.

Neuroscience is the study of the structure and function of the nervous system.

Like thousands of other victims of kidney failure, David Brooks knows what a mixed blessing dialysis can be.

Given the excitement of a family vacation in California, four-year-old Ashford Slowley's fatigue and loss of appetite did not seem unusual. "The kids were playing hard," says his mother, Tina Slowley. "They don't eat much when they're in the hot sun.

At the age of 14, Robert Teskey was diagnosed with type 1 DIABETES (better known as juvenile diabetes), a condition which normally comes with an automatic life sentence of insulin therapy.