Wednesday, March 29, 2017

World's Most Obese Man Underwent Sugery To Lose Weight




Mexican 32-year-old Juan Pedro Franco answers questions during a press conference in Guadalajara, Mexico on March 28, 2017. Franco was the most obese man in the world, but four months ago he underwent a treatment and managed to lose 170 kg. On a second stage he will undergo a surgery that will allow him to walk again.(AFP)


Doctors in Mexico have set a date for the world’s heaviest man to undergo gastric bypass surgery, the media reported on Wednesday.
Patient Juan Pedro Franco, who once weighed more than half a ton at 595 kilos, has been on a three-month diet to prepare for the operation on May 9, Xinhua news agency reported.
The native of Aguascalientes in Mexico has to shed about 175 kilos at a special weight-loss clinic so as to make himself a suitable candidate for the operation.
“He has lost nearly 30% of his initial weight, so he is ready to undergo (the) bariatric surgery,” his doctor, Jose Antonio Castaneda Cruz, told the media.
Juan Pedro Franco talks with his doctor Antonio Castaned during a press conference in Guadalajara, Mexico on March 28, 2017. (AFP)
Franco, 32, first made headlines in November when he was admitted to the clinic after making the trip via a specially-adapted van to the western city of Guadalajara, Jalisco.
At the time, Castaneda said Franco’s obesity and related conditions, including diabetes, had made the operation impossible.
Franco contacted the clinic after coming across one of their online ads. Before that, he had spent the past six years lying in bed due to his massive weight.
Juan Pedro Franco talks with his doctor Antonio Castaned during a press conference in Guadalajara, Mexico on March 28, 2017. (AFP)
Despite his weight loss, it cannot be guaranteed that complications will not appear. Franco’s doctor is optimistic, saying they were “on the right path”.
The initial gastric bypass aims to reduce his current weight by 50%, after which a second operation will be needed, said Castaneda.
Franco noted there were other people trapped in their homes like him. “Some have passed away perhaps from sadness, or because they don’t dare (to) ask for help.”
He urged those suffering from obesity “to raise their voice and ask for help since it is possible”.

Source: Hindustan Times 

Friday, March 10, 2017

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Mohammad, a Doctor Expected to be First Muslim Governor in America



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Dr. Abdul El-Sayed believes he's living the American Dream.
Born to two Egyptian immigrants in the Detroit metro area in Michigan, the 32-year-old has done it all. El-Sayed became a doctor, educator and civil servant all before the age of 32. Now, he has set his eyes on yet another milestone: to become the governor of Michigan.
"I'm not running to be the first Muslim governor," El-Sayed said in a phone interview. "I'm running because I believe I will be the best governor for the state of Michigan — whether or not I'm Muslim."
El-Sayed could be both the youngest person to be elected governor since Bill Clinton won Arkansas in 1978 at the age of 32, and the first Muslim in the United States to do so. But despite his accomplishments and dedication to transforming Detroit's health department, El-Sayed has to face another challenge: overcoming the rising levels of anti-Muslim sentiment in the current social and political climate.
"My faith is really important to me, as it is for many Americans and Michiganders," El-Sayed said. "But I think we should be asking ourselves rather than how one prays, or what they pray to, we should ask ourselves what [one] prays for and what one hopes for."

While El-Sayed said his Islamic values are at the center of his work as a civil servant, he wants people to know his number one priority is to serve the people of Michigan.

"My focus is, has always been, and will always be people," El-Sayed said during his campaign announcement speech on Saturday.  "My work has always been about building and leading the kinds of institutions that create opportunities for real people by breaking down the barriers that they face in their lives to being able to have the opportunity we want for my children. That work has never been more important than it is today."

But some residents in the state may not be ready to see a Muslim governor. In the last several years, Michigan has been a hotbed of Islamophobia. Dearborn, a predominantly Arab-American city in the Detroit metro area, has been a frequent target of anti-Muslim activists, conspiracy theories and fake news. But El-Sayed doesn't want Michigan residents to be distracted by anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence — and he wants people to know that the principles of Islam are what guide his service.

"I am running because of the values my Islam teaches me — which includes beliefs in equity, the fundamental rights of all people, a belief that we will judge ourselves as a people based on how we treat the most vulnerable," El-Sayed said. "A belief in being good to others fundamentally, a belief in respect and dignity to one's neighbors and one's friends and one's family."


El-Sayed has dedicated much of his life to the public. Under Mike Duggan's mayorship of Detroit, El-Sayed was appointed executive director of the city's Department of Health and Wellness Promotion in September 2015 when he was 30 years old — the youngest health commissioner in all major U.S. cities. In early February, El-Sayed resigned from his position at the Department of Health to announce his bid for governor.
Throughout his term, El-Sayed has dedicated much of his work to children and families. In Detroit city schools, El-Sayed worked to provide free eyeglasses for children and tested lead contamination in the schools' water supply in the immediate aftermath of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis. He worked to combat unplanned pregnancies and reduce the infant mortality rate in the city. He also charged the way forward in poison reduction and successfully made the city promise to reduce emissions from the Marathon Petroleum's refinery in southwest Detroit.

El-Sayed came from humble beginnings. His parents, now divorced, immigrated to the United States from Egypt hoping to find a better life for themselves. He grew up under the care of his father Mohammad and his stepmother Jacqueline, both engineering professors, in the Detroit metro area. El-Sayed's mother Dr. Fatten Elkomy is a nurse practitioner in Missouri.
He was raised in Michigan's public schools where he was the captain of his high school football, wrestling and lacrosse teams. He later on went to play lacrosse for the University of Michigan and graduated with high distinction in 2007. El-Sayed was then provided with a dean's scholarship for his medical degree at the University of Michigan and went to Peru for a medical mission trip where he found a student organization to establish a local clinic to provide free medical care.

Abdul El-Sayed with his family and friends after his graduation ceremony at Columbia University.
Then in 2009, El-Sayed was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship and received his doctoral degree in public health from Oxford University. El-Sayed earned his medical degree from Columbia University where he became an assistant professor at the university's Mailman School of Public Health.
El-Sayed said his own upbringing and accomplishment has made him appreciate the idea of America and the fact he had the ability to live the American Dream. 


"This idea of America is so much bigger than anyone," El-Sayed said. "I know what it looks like to live in a country that doesn't respect fundamental civil rights or pluralism, equity or care for the most vulnerable. I only have to think of my cousins who don't have what I have, because they weren't lucky enough to be born in the country I was born in. It's why America is an idea I fight for."


Correction: March 3, 2017
Due to an editing error, a previous version of this article mischaracterized how Abdul El-Sayed, 32, would rank among state governors in terms of age. If elected, El-Sayed would be the youngest person elected governor since 32-year-old Bill Clinton won the Arkansas gubernatorial race in 1978.



Find Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on Facebook

Source: MIC 



Monday, March 6, 2017

Liver transplant surgical pioneer Dr. Thomas Starzl dies at 90

GENE J. PUSKAR/APDr. Thomas E. Starzl is seen here in 1989 as he oversees a liver transplant operation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pittsburgh.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
PITTSBURGH — Dr. Thomas Starzl, who pioneered liver transplant surgery in the 1960s and was a leading researcher into anti-rejection drugs, has died. He was 90.
The University of Pittsburgh, speaking on behalf of Starzl’s family, said the renowned doctor died Saturday at his home in Pittsburgh.
Starzl performed the world’s first liver transplant in 1963 and the world’s first successful liver transplant in 1967, and pioneered kidney transplantation from cadavers. He later perfected the process by using identical twins and, eventually, other blood relatives as donors.
Since Starzl’s first successful liver transplant, thousands of lives have been saved by similar operations.
“We regard him as the father of transplantation,” said Dr. Abhinav Humar, clinical director of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute. “His legacy in transplantation is hard to put into words — it’s really immense.”

Starzl joined the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1981 as professor of surgery, where his studies on the anti-rejection drug cyclosporin transformed transplantation from an experimental procedure into one that gave patients a hope they could survive an otherwise fatal organ failure.
It was Starzl’s development of cyclosporin in combination with steroids that offered a solution to organ rejection.
Until 1991, Starzl served as chief of transplant services at UPMC, then was named director of the University of Pittsburgh Transplantation Institute, where he continued research on a process he called chimerism, based on a 1992 paper he wrote on the theory that new organs and old bodies “learn” to co-exist without immunosupression drugs.
The institute was renamed in Starzl’s honor in 1996, and he continued as its director.
In his 1992 autobiography, “The Puzzle People: Memoirs of a Transplant Surgeon,” Starzl said he actually hated performing surgery and was sickened with fear each time he prepared for an operation.
“I was striving for liberation my whole life,” he said in an interview.
Starzl’s career-long interest in research began with a liver operation he assisted on while a resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. After the surgery to redirect blood flow around the liver, he noticed the patient’s sugar diabetes also had improved.
Thinking he had found the cause of diabetes to be in the liver rather than the pancreas, he designed experiments in 1956 with dogs to prove his discovery. He was wrong, but had started on the path that would lead to the first human liver transplants at the University of Colorado in Denver seven years later.

In the early 1990s, livers from baboons were transplanted into humans, an operation made possible by Starzl’s research into alternatives to scarce human livers. While work continues on such animal-to-human transplants, most researchers now focus on pigs rather than primates and use genetic engineering to try to knock out some proteins most involved in causing acute rejection, Humar said.
Starzl’s other accomplishments included inventing a way to route the blood supply around the liver during surgery to make possible the marathon hours required to complete operations involving that complex organ.
He also showed that “soldier cells” from the transplanted organ become “missionary cells” that travel throughout the new body and find new homes, apparently helping the body accept the foreign organ.
Starzl helped develop with Dr. John Fung, his protege at UPMC and successor as director of transplant surgery, the use of the experimental anti-rejection drug FK506, which paved the way to more complicated transplants of multiple organs, including the difficult small intestine. FK506 was discovered in a soil sample by Japanese researchers.
In September 1990, at age 65, Starzl put away his scalpel for good, soon after the death of a famous young patient: a 14-year-old girl from White Settlement, Texas, named Stormie Jones. Starzl also underwent a heart bypass operation in 1990 and suffered lingering vision problems from a laser accident five years earlier.
Stormie lived six years after a combination heart-liver transplant at age 8 but needed a second liver in 1990 and died within nine months. Her death affected Starzl greatly.
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“It is true that transplant surgeons saved patients, but the patients rescued us in turn and gave meaning to what we did, or tried to,” he once wrote.
Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald called Starzl “a true Pittsburgh icon and hero,” whose research had worldwide impact and had proven an economic boon to the region as well.
“The number of lives which were, and continue to be transformed, by Dr. Starzl’s groundbreaking work are immeasurable,” he said.
Starzl was born March 11, 1926, in LeMars, Iowa. His mother was a nurse and his father was a science fiction writer and the publisher of the local newspaper. Starzl’s uncle, the late Frank Starzel, was general manager of the Associated Press from 1948 to 1962.

Starzl is survived by his wife of 36 years, Joy Starzl, his son, Timothy, and a grandchild.


Source: STAT News

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Inside the Story: Twin daughters of Somalian refugees on the road to becoming doctors

Inside the Story: Twin daughters of Somalian refugees on the road to becoming doctors

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(KUTV) Seventeen-year-old twin sisters are at the front line of speaking out for refugees.
They are daughters of Somalian refugees and are Muslim.
Asma and Anisa Dahir are also making strides in the medical field--they both have dreams of becoming pediatric surgeons so they can one day return to Somalia to help.
"It's so sad to see that children -- newborns to five or 10 years old -- they have so many complications physically and mentally," said Anisa.
The twins are studying at the Jordan Academy for Technology and Careers, or JATC, in West Jordan.
"We need to embrace our children and grow our youth," said Asma. "The youth are the new leaders."
Back in the early '90s, the girl's parents fled the war-torn country of Somalia and ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya.
Their mother came to America first, by herself, while pregnant with the twins. She worked several jobs to try and keep food on the table.
Asma said that her parents' experiences "made my siblings and I say, 'Oh, we need to get an education so we could escape poverty.'"
That is why the Dahirs are taking their education so seriously and want to be doctors.
"It motivated me to make a change in the world to go back to Somalia, or other refugee camps, and help them," said Anisa.
But these girls want not just to make a difference in the medical field. They also want to make a difference out on the street, making their voices heard in the refugee community.
At just 17, the sisters have joined in several major protests in Salt Lake for refugee rights.
"As a Muslim, female, black refugee, I feel obligated to speak for my rights," said Anisa. "I feel like it's crucial to let your voices be heard."
The twins say people need to be educated about refugees.
"I've been treated really bad," Asma said. "People are afraid of the unknown and I feel if we speak up, share our voices, people will not have to ignorance that they have today."
"I've been called a terrorist. I've had my hijab ripped off. I've been bullied. I've been harassed so many different ways because of my identity," Anisa explained. "It takes a mental and physical toll on me and it's sad because Utah is my home. I was born and raised here. I don't know anything else besides Utah and to see that I am not safe in my own home, in my own back yard, it's just horrifying."
The best way the twins know how to fight the battle is through education, so that one day other refugees can look to them for leadership.
"We can create a solid foundation where we can share our narratives and our stories and I feel like that is crucial," said Asma.
The sisters are not alone in their dreams of a better education. All their siblings are also hoping to go into the medical field.
They also hope to one day create a nonprofit organization to help kids from third world countries.

BY DAN RASCON



Source: KUTV