Patricia Bath became the first African American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention. Dr. Patricia Bath, an ophthalmologist from New York, but living in Los Angeles when she received her patent, became the first African American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention. Patricia Bath's patent (no. 4,744,360), a method for removing cataract lenses, transformed eye surgery, using a laser device making the procedure more accurate.
Patricia Bath’s passionate dedication to the treatment and prevention of blindness led her to develop the Cataract Laserphaco Probe. The probe, patented in 1988, is designed to use the power of a laser to quickly and painlessly vaporize cataracts from patients’ eyes, replacing the more common method of using a grinding, drill-like device to remove the afflictions. With another invention, Bath was able to restore sight to people who had been blind for over 30 years. Patricia Bath also holds patents for her invention in Japan, Canada, and Europe.

Patricia Bath graduated from the Howard University School of Medicine in 1968 and completed specialty training in ophthalmology and corneal transplant at both New York University and Columbia University. In 1974, Bath became the first African-American woman surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center and the first woman to be on the faculty of the UCLA Jules Stein Eye Institute. In 1983 Dr. Bath was the first woman to chair an opthalmology residency program in the United States. She is the founder and first president of the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. Patricia Bath was elected to Hunter College Hall of Fame in 1988 and elected as Howard University Pioneer in Academic Medicine in 1993.
Questions and Answers:What was my biggest obstacle?Sexism, racism, and relative poverty were the obstacles which I faced as a young girl growing up in Harlem. There were no women physicians I knew of and surgery was a male-dominated profession; no high schools existed in Harlem, a predominantly black community; additionally, blacks were excluded from numerous medical schools and medical societies; and, my family did not possess the funds to send me to medical school. [Dr. Bath says her mother scrubbed floors so she could go to medical school.]Despite official university policies extolling equality and condemning discrimination, Bath experienced both sexism and racism during her tenure at both UCLA and Drew. Determined that her research not be obstructed by the "glass ceilings," she took her research abroad to Europe, where her research was accepted on its merits at the Laser Medical Center of Berlin, West Germany, the Rothschild Eye Institute of Paris, France, and the Loughborough (England) Institute of Technology. At those institutions she excelled in research and laser science, the fruits of which are evidenced by her patents for laser eye surgery.How do I make a difference?I am most proud of my invention of a new technique and concept for cataract surgery, known as laserphaco, which is defined by my publications as well as patents.Who was my mentor?Newspaper accounts of the humanitarian work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer (who treated lepers in Africa) and my personal relationship with my family physician, Dr. Cecil Marquez, inspired me with the ambition to become a physician. Both my parents shared my admiration for these two role models and encouraged me to pursue my ambition.Sources: (interview) http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_26.htmlhttp://www.blackinventor.com/pages/patriciabath.html

Time Magazine's Medical Invention of the Year 2000

Thursday, November 30, 2000A Winning CombinationBY LEON JAROFF
The idea came out of left field. Electrical engineer Ronald Nutt and physicist David Townsend, working at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, had just taken the cover off their newly developed metabolic-imaging machine and were admiring its innards when an oncology surgeon happened by. "You have a lot of space between those detectors," he offered. "You ought to try to put something in there that would be useful."
At the time, eight years ago, PET (positron emission tomography) machines, which can reveal subtle metabolic processes such as tumor growth, and CT (computerized tomography) scanners, which show precise anatomical details, were already in widespread medical use. But doctors, especially cancer surgeons, were often frustrated in their attempts to match the two different scans to determine, for example, the precise location of a tumor in relation to an organ or to the spinal column. There seemed to be no better way than simply "eyeballing" the two separate images.
That is, until Nutt and Townsend had their epiphany in the Alps. Last October the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the marketing of a combination PET/CT machine, the first medical-imaging device that simultaneously and clearly reveals both anatomical details and metabolic processes within the body. By early next year the new scanners will be installed at Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Indiana University, the University of Iowa and other medical facilities.
Others had attempted, with little success, to match the two different images by using computer algorithms as a way to unify data from CT and PET scans made at different times and in different settings. "The problem is that the body is kind of a flimsy structure," says Nutt, co-founder of CTI, the Knoxville, Tenn., imaging company that is gearing up to produce the new scanning combine. "If you lay it on the bed one time for a CT scan and another time for a PET scan, just a small difference in body position will result in all of the organs shifting about a bit, so it's very difficult to do that matching."
After refining their combined PET and CT concept for three years, Nutt and Townsend, who had transferred from the University of Geneva to the University of Pittsburgh, received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute in 1995 that enabled them to complete a prototype machine. Installed at the University of Pittsburgh medical center in 1998, it has been used successfully to scan some 200 patients.
In many of these cases, says Dr. Carolyn Cidis Meltzer, who with Townsend is a co-director of the University of Pittsburgh pet facility, the use of the PET/CT machine has resulted in decisions to modify or change treatment. In one case a standard CT scan had detected a tumor on the left side of a patient's neck but none elsewhere. "When CTs are read and you look for a spread of tumor to the lymph nodes," Meltzer explains, "all you're able to look at is the size of the lymph node."
If a CT shows that a lymph node is less than one centimeter in size, it is considered to be normal. But on the PET/CT, Meltzer says, "we saw a very small lymph node in the right side of the neck that we thought was involved with the tumor." A biopsy that otherwise would not have been performed confirmed her suspicion.
The Pittsburgh machine has also made a difference in the diagnosis and treatment of cervical and ovarian cancers. Blood tests of some women who had already been successfully treated for these malignancies began to show markers suggesting that tumors were recurring. CT scans showed nothing amiss, but PET/CT surveys revealed the precise locations of small new tumors in the pelvic area that surgeons were able to remove before they metastasized.
Despite the limitations of a standard CT, it does a superb job of picturing the internal anatomy of the body. "The CT shines a fan beam of X rays though the human body," Nutt explains, "and makes a series of slices. Almost what you'd see if you took a knife and cut a person in two." Literally slices of life.
These slices are made possible by the CT's detectors, which gauge the attenuation of the X-ray beam as it passes through the body. The attenuation, in turn, is a measure of the mass that the X rays encounter in their passage.
And that measurement is translated into precise images of the body's internal structure by an algorithm programmed into the CT computer. The newest machines, called spiral CTs, take many slices in rapid succession and can now image the entire torso in seconds, a procedure that once took as long as an hour.
The PET scan operates on an entirely different principle. In one application, a solution of sugar, its molecules tagged with a radioactive chemical isotope (usually fluorine 18) is injected into a patient's veins. Like any sugar, it migrates to metabolically active vital organs and tumors, if any, which use it for energy.
As the radioactive fluorine isotope, now concentrated in the organs and tumors, decays, it gives off positrons, the antimatter counterpart of electrons. And when an ejected positron collides with an electron, which occurs almost simultaneously, both particles are annihilated, their mass instantly converted into gamma rays, which the pet machine detects and turns into an image.
If there is a metabolically active tumor in the region being scanned, says Meltzer, "you can see an area where there has been sugar uptake. But it looks like a blob and it's difficult, especially in some parts of the body, to tell exactly where it is." Dr. Steven Larson, director of the PET program at Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering, has his own description of the blob: "It's a little like lighting a match in the blackness of a vast cavern. We detect the match, but the location is imprecise."
In designing the PET/CT to remedy this imprecision, says Townsend, one of the problems that he and Nutt faced was the engineering of the scanner tunnel into which the patient is rolled. "You don't want a very long tunnel that's frightening to patients," he explains. To further minimize the claustrophobic effects, they increased the diameter of the PET/CT tunnel to 28 in., making it far more spacious than the familiar typical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tunnels. "For the patient, it's very comfortable and convenient," says Townsend. "They arrive, they have a single scan, and then we have all the information."
A far greater problem came in writing the code to run PET/CT's computer. "We needed and finally created software to control two different imaging systems from one computer console," says Townsend, "something that hadn't ever been done before."
Now, given the go-ahead by the FDA, CTI will soon be producing an advanced version of the Pittsburgh prototype. Larson, who has ordered a machine for Sloan-Kettering's pet center, predicts that the PET/CT will "improve clinical management of patients and cut the overall time of their imaging in half, from about one hour for a whole body survey to about a half hour."
Even apart, PET and CT scanners are triumphs of technology, devices that have saved countless lives, prolonged others, and often made many exploratory operations unnecessary. Yet each has limitations that can lead to uncertainties in diagnosis. By successfully combining the two technologies, Ronald Nutt and David Townsend have eliminated those uncertainties and provided medicine with a powerful new diagnostic tool.

Is Panic A Pharmaceutical Invention?

A paper by Giovanni A. Fava and associates of the University of Bologna published in the April issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics summarizes the evidence which supports the seriousness of agoraphobia as an invalidating disease. At the same time it questions the excessive emphasis on panic which has been attributed in the past decade and the role of pharmaceutical industry in this attribution.In studying the phenomenology of panic attacks, Argyle and Roth noticed that truly spontaneous attacks, not preceded by anxiety-provoking cognitions, were uncommon. Patients meeting positive criteria for panic disorder suffered from the whole range of anxiety disorders, and a unique relationship with agoraphobia was not seen. Indeed, other diagnoses (particularly social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder) frequently predated the onset of panic. This was true also for agoraphobia. If we conceptualize the onset of panic disorder as a stage of development of anxiety disorders (whether agoraphobia or social phobia or generalized anxiety disorder) and hypochondriasis, instead of a specific disease, we may increase our diagnostic sharpness and substitute undifferentiated treatment, which may leave substantial areas of non-response, with stage-guided therapeutic tools. The staging method that Fava and colleagues applied to agoraphobia in their paper may also be appropriate for generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia and may yield a better longitudinal understanding than the cross-sectional definition of DSM.Maj has recently raised concerns about differentiating true mental disorder and homeostatic reactions to adverse life situations. The rise in the popularity of the diagnosis of panic disorder in the past 2 decades was largely due to marketing strategies (e.g., alprazolam); research was frequently biased by conflict of interest and may qualify for disease mongering.PSYCHOTHERAPY AND

PSYCHOSOMATICShttp://www.karger.com/PPS

Medical invention wins 'New Inventors' award

A central Queensland invention has won the People's Choice Award on the ABC New Inventorsprogram.
Nurse Glen Riverstone developed a device to remove the tops of glass ampoules which contain medicines.
It was voted the favourite invention of viewers.
Mr Riverstone says the device reduces the risks of medical staff cutting their hands, and he developed the idea while working in the Rockhampton Hospital.
"Any sharps injury in a hands-on industry, especially medical care, is a huge problem for both the staff ... and your patients and you've also got the concern of wasted resources with the medication or drug if [you] cut yourself on it," he said.

hello !

Hi ,

first of all I sould say that paymans medical inventions is just a joke :D and i will try to colect news about medical inventions from all around the world.

see you !