(UPI) -- A naturally-occurring purine nucleoside improved restoration of motor function in a small study with primates that sustained brain injuries, suggesting the treatment could work for humans with similar impairments.

Inosine, a substance released by cells in response to metabolic stress, allowed rhesus monkeys to regain the same function in their hands that existed before sustaining a brain injury, report researchers at Boston University.

Inosine has been used in clinical trials for multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease, and has been shown to help regenerate nerve fibers in previous research. Echoing earlier studies with rodents, the new study shows inosine helped the brain rewire lost connections between neurons in treated monkeys. CONTINUE

(Jonathon Van Maren ) — So it seems that suicide is now a medical service, and the debate in Canada has come and gone with barely a whisper. With the exception of a few newspaper columnists fretting here or there, the debate seems to have subsided before it really began. Those who oppose euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide now face the dual task of preventing suicide activists from successfully loosening euthanasia restrictions even further, and educating their peers on why legalizing any form of suicide — much less suicide facilitated and perpetrated by medical professionals — is so extraordinarily dangerous.

As I discuss which arguments can be used most effectively against euthanasia with other pro-life activists, one apologetic consistently stands out to me as especially powerful, perhaps because it is rooted in my own experience: The inescapable fact that legalizing physician-assisted suicide relegates those who qualify for such a service to the status of second-class citizen. CONTINUE

(LifeSiteNews) – A Philadelphia woman was put into hospice without medical basis and then while there was purposefully deprived of nutrition in a case underscoring the dangers today for the medically vulnerable.

A hospital utilization committee determined the woman would be transferred from a local hospital to hospice, an attorney in the case told LifeSiteNews, and this was done at a point in time when it was medically impossible to determine the level to which she could recover.

Utilization review (UR), or utilization management (UM), is a healthcare concept intended to reduce unnecessary hospital admissions and to control the length of stay for inpatients for the purpose of managing cost. CONTINUE

(CTV News Winnipeg) – A Winnipeg woman took a group of runners back in time Friday to raise awareness about a cause close to her heart. Three years ago, Mandi Jacobson’s husband David fell from a ladder at work and suffered a severe brain injury. He slipped into a coma and doctors had to perform emergency surgery on his brain.

“They took out the size of a quarter of his brain, because there was so much bleeding and damage. And then he had to learn how to walk, talk, eat, everything again,” she said. After a long recovery, she’s started a full marathon around Winnipeg explaining her husband’s journey – which started on St. Mary’s road, where David fell to the pavement. CONTINUE

(LifeSiteNews) – A mother wept last week as a judge’s decision was read permitting hospital officials to unplug her severely disabled 14-week-old son from his ventilator and move him to a palliative care unit to die. But her son died Saturday while still on life support after his feeding tube became blocked a day before the court’s permission to remove it could be implemented.

The death of the boy, whose name cannot be used, was reported by the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, which supported the parents in their legal battle to sustain their son’s life as long as possible.

Paul Tully, the SPUC’s general secretary, condemned the health policies that led to the court order. “For me, this case demonstrates that the NHS [National Health Service] has sold out to the culture of death. How absurd that the health service puts no limit on the amount it spends killing babies before birth, yet goes to court to ask to withhold genuine health care from a very sick little boy after his birth.” CONTINUE

(everythinglubbock.com) – Thursday marks one year since 10-year-old Luke Siegel's life changed in a golf cart accident in Lubbock. A year later, he and his family have endured a whirlwind journey full of medical and emotional hurdles. The road ahead is far from easy for the Siegel family, but it's lined with promise-- both with Luke's progress and with efforts to bring about change after his accident.

On July 28, 2015, Lubbock Police reported that Luke and his friend were riding in a golf cart in South Lubbock at a high rate of speed, driving in circles around a cul-de-sac. Witnesses said the golf cart tipped over. Luke was taken to University Medical Center for treatment where his family learned that Luke had gone into cardiac arrest and suffered severe brain damage. Luke remained at UMC for several weeks before heading to Cook Children's hospital in Fort Worth for treatment. Doctors told Luke's family members that he would likely not be able to speak or move for the rest of his life. CONTINUE

(MailOnline) – Doctors at one of the country's leading hospitals condemned a veteran to die on a notorious 'death pathway' after they wrongly decided he could not be saved. Great-grandfather Josef Boberek was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital in West London with a chest infection, but died days later after doctors incorrectly told his family that he was at death's door and deliberately withdrew his fluids and normal medication.

Now an official health watchdog report seen by The Mail on Sunday has revealed that the pensioner would have lived and returned to his normal life had he received proper treatment and not been placed on the discredited Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP). CONTINUE

(LifeSiteNews) — Vermont healthcare professionals are suing to be able to abide by the medical profession's ancient creed, "I will do no harm." The state of Vermont is attempting to force healthcare workers to advise patients on doctor-assisted suicide.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont, accuses the Vermont Board of Medical Practice and the Office of Professional Regulation of misapplying the state's assisted suicide law, called "Act 39," to require healthcare workers to counsel patients on suicide as an option of "palliative care." CONTINUE

(The Herald) – A Plymouth student from south east Cornwall is battling to regain her life after waking up paralysed down one side by a mystery illness. Kelly Evans, a Plymouth University student from Tywardreath, was beginning an acting career in New York when she was struck down by an illness that doctors said meant she would never walk again.

Kelly was told it was the end of her career as a dancer as and as an actor, but she is determined to prove that won't be the case. "I said 'that isn't good enough'," she said. "They were so negative. They said I would never dance again, but I said 'I will'. I am an extraordinary person and I will lead an extraordinary life.” CONTINUE

(First Things) – Healthcare is quickly becoming about much more than the provision and reception of medical treatment. To a disturbing degree, healthcare public policy is becoming a means of imposing a secularist, anti–sanctity-of-life ideology on all of society.

Consider the following examples of this accelerating trend:

Erasing pharmacists' conscience rights in Washington: In 2007, Washington state’s Board of Pharmacy—at the prompting of the governor and Planned Parenthood—promulgated a regulation requiring pharmacies to stock and dispense all FDA-approved medications. But because there are so many of these drugs, certain exceptions were made. For instance, a pharmacy may refuse to stock a drug due to low demand. In those cases, the refusing dispenser may refer patients to a pharmacy that does carry the prescribed drug. CONTINUE

(Montreal Gazette) – It has been a decade since Enrico Quilico was involved in a highway collision that nearly took his life. He had been heading into Montreal from Île Perrot early on the evening of May 21 when he was thrown from his motorcycle as he tried to avoid a car in his path and slammed headfirst into the car.

Had he not been taken to the Montreal General Hospital, with its trauma centre, “I would not be so fortunate to still be here,” he said. He sustained a severe traumatic brain injury and spent two weeks in a coma. When doctors stopped the drugs that were keeping him in an induced coma and he did not initially wake up, “they told my parents to start thinking about my quality of life and whether I should be kept on life support, based on the fact that I may have remained in a vegetative state,” said Quilico, now 33. His father is the baritone Gino Quilico; his mother, Kathryn Stevenson, is married to Westmount Mayor Peter Trent. CONTINUE

(LifeNews.com) – Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed suit in federal court Tuesday against officials in the Vermont Board of Medical Practice and the Office of Professional Regulation on behalf of health care professionals who wish to abide by their oath to “do no harm.” The state agencies are construing Vermont’s assisted suicide law as requiring them, regardless of their conscience or oath, to counsel patients on doctor-prescribed death as an option.

According to the agency, only physicians must refer patients to others who will counsel for assisted suicide; however, all of the health care professionals filing suit contend it is unethical for them to counsel for, refer for, or in any other way participate in suicide at the hands of medical personnel.

“The government shouldn’t be telling health care professionals that they must violate their medical ethics in order to practice medicine,” said ADF Senior Counsel Steven H. Aden. “These doctors and other health care workers deeply believe that suffering patients need understanding and sound medical treatment, not encouragement to kill themselves. The state has no authority to order them to act contrary to that sincere and time-honored conviction.” CONTINUE

(Vancouver Sun) - Jamie Crane-Mauzy, a world renowned freestyle skier at the time of her horrific crash on the slopes of Whistler 15 months ago, is back in Vancouver Tuesday to thank medical teams for saving her brain and her life.

The skiing champion says the real heroes are the doctors who decided she was a suitable first patient to receive new brain monitoring technology that helped rescue her neurological functions while she was partly, temporarily paralyzed and in a coma.

The then-22 year old from Utah was airlifted to Vancouver General Hospital in April 2015 after catching a ski edge during an international competition and suffering a traumatic brain injury from the impact of the fall.

A pair of critical care physicians who had been recently trained on new autoregulation monitoring technology and procedures developed at the University of Cambridge deemed Crane-Mauzy an ideal first patient for the new procedure. CONTINUE

(LifeSiteNews) — The mother of a teenager who was declared “brain dead” and had to be transferred to a hospital across the country in order to continue receiving medical care told LifeSiteNews in an exclusive video interview that her daughter gives her the strength to continue fighting.

Nailah Winkfield, the mother of Jahi McMath, told LifeSiteNews at the 2016 National Right to Life Convention that despite having received death threats for keeping Jahi alive, God — and Jahi herself — give her the strength to move forward in the legal and medical battles surrounding Jahi’s situation.

In 2013, after routine surgery for sleep apnea and to remove her tonsils, then 13-year-old Jahi went into cardiac arrest. She lost oxygen to her brain and a lot of blood, and doctors at a California children’s hospital subsequently declared her brain dead. Jahi’s family did not want the care keeping her alive withdrawn and had to battle the hospital for their daughter’s life. After Jahi’s “brain death” diagnosis, the hospital refused to give her medical care because in California a “brain death” diagnosis legally classifies a person as deceased. CONTINUE

(NRO) – “Futile care” is ad hoc health care rationing. It permits a doctor to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment that is working, based on the values of the MD that keeping the patient alive is not the “medically appropriate” approach. The term “medically appropriate” in such cases is a misnomer.

The “refuse wanted treatment decision” is really a subjective values judgment of the doctor, as opposed to an objective medical determination. Or to put it another way, the treatment isn’t refused because it doesn’t work, but because it does or will. “Medically ineffective” treatment would seem to be wholly different concept, an objective determination that a requested intervention will not work. CONTINUE

(Fox40.com) – It's what Toran Maronic's parents have been waiting desperately for since Friday -- the sight of their son moving again after a devastating brain injury that landed him in a coma. His father spoke to FOX40 by phone from Toran's bedside at Valley Children's Hospital in Madera.

"They helped him stand up, and then asked him if he could take a step forward with his right foot and he did, stepped back and did the same thing with his left foot. So he's fighting," said Dave Maronic. When their fighter was giving it his all alongside his Bear River High teammates Friday, Toran wasn't suited up like for a normal game.

He was in a no-pads, no-touch, 7-on-7 tournament in Morro Bay when something went terribly wrong as he dove for the football. CONTINUE

(The Corner) – Once the culture of death sinks its venomous teeth into a society, corruption follows upon corruption. The medical sector is among the first to corrode. Witness the Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) that now advises its members to help “anyone” commit suicide by self-starvation. From, “Caring for People Who Choose Not to Eat or Drink so as to Hasten the End of Life” (my emphasis):

Consciously choosing not to eat and drink to hasten the end of life is a choice each and everyone can and may make for themselves. This decision does not require the individual to consult with a physician, a nurse, carer or any other party. The choice to hasten the end of the life is a drastic choice for both patients and those close to them. It is a choice between a life deemed unacceptable by the patient or the patient’s own choice to die.

There was a time when doctors were expected to prevent suicide. Now, they either have to do the deed themselves or apply medical means to make it easier to become dead. CONTINUE

(LifeSiteNews) — The pro-abortion rhetoric of “my body, my choice” paved the way for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, a pro-life leader told LifeSiteNews in an exclusive video interview.

“I think one of the gravest threats we have right now is the threat of assisted suicide and euthanasia in America,” said Arina Grossu, the Director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council (FRC). “This rhetoric of ‘my body, my choice,’ which has been pushed by the pro-abortion lobby for so long, is going to extend to end-of-life issues. And we’re going to see people say, well, I can choose what to do with my body at the end of life. And we need to fight that back.” CONTINUE

(News Medical) – Physicians may be drawing conclusions too soon about survival outcomes of patients who suffered a cardiac arrest outside the hospital.

A study led by Bentley Bobrow, MD, professor at the University of Arizona Colleges of Medicine in Tucson and Phoenix and co-director of the Arizona Emergency Medicine Research Center - Phoenix, and his fellow UA emergency medicine researchers, showed that physicians may need to allow comatose cardiac arrest patients much more time to awaken before making a prognosis. Gary Brauchla knows this from first-hand experience.

The day after his son's twins were born in 2012, Brauchla, 68, went into cardiac arrest as he slept in his home in Pearce, Ariz. Brauchla's wife, Kathie, a former surgical technician, immediately called 911 and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Fifteen minutes later, paramedics took over administering CPR and shocked his heart with a defibrillator, restoring his heart rhythm. CONTINUE

(NRO) – Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Unless one operates a Catholic nursing home in Belgium, apparently. Even though euthanasia clearly infringes on the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church, a Catholic nursing home was ordered to pay civil damages in Belgium for refusing to participate in an euthanasia killing. CONTINUE

(NRO) – Imagine you are at work, going about your day. The phone rings. You pick up and it is a mortuary informing you they have your mother’s body.

“What do you mean you have my mother’s body!” you exclaim in utter shock. “She was just euthanized today,” they mildly answer. “What should we do with the body?”

That is exactly what happened in 2012 to Belgian chemist Tom Mortier, who spoke (via Skype) yesterday at the very well-attended East Coast Conference Against Assisted Suicide. A self-described secular humanist, he described his agony at the euthanasia killing of his depressed mother, Godelieva De Troyer, by an oncologist. His continuing pain was vivid in every word he spoke. CONTINUE

(NewMax) – Most Americans believe euthanasia should be made legal, and that a doctor should be allowed to end his patient's life by painless means should that person request it, a new Gallup poll finds.
The numbers of people in favor of the practice has climbed steadily from the 1940s and 1950s, when most people thought it should be illegal:

• 69 percent now favor the practice;
• 36 percent favored it in 1950;
• 1973 marked the first time Gallup found Americans favored the measure;
• 1990, 65 percent approved;
• 51 percent say they would consider ending their lives if faced with terminal illness;
• About half of Americans say doctor-assisted suicide is morally acceptable

Over the past 25 years, Americans have remained solidly in favor of euthanasia, with between 64-75 percent favoring the practice. CONTINUE

(Wesley J. Smith / First Things) - There’s an old joke that goes something like this: “What do you call the student who graduates dead last in his class at medical school?”

“Doctor.”

I bring up that old saw because of a recent story out of California, where assisted suicide has just been legalized. Lonny Shavelson, a Berkeley emergency-room doctor who hasn’t practiced medicine for two years—and a long-time advocate of assisted suicide, as author of A Chosen Death—made headlines with the announcement that he is opening a death-doctor practice. For a $200 consultation fee, and $1800 more if he is retained, Shavelson will evaluate and certify people who come to him—I refuse to call them his “patients”—as eligible for death, prescribe the lethal drugs, fill out the required bureaucratic forms, and presumably attend their deaths.

Think about this for a moment: Would anyone in their right mind trust an ER doctor to properly palliate the pain of terminal cancer or treat lethal congestive heart failure? Of course not! The ability to provide excellent care for terminally ill patients requires medical specialization and ongoing professional education in the particular disease. That is why no ER physician worth his salt would assume responsibility for the medical care of terminally ill patients outside of a temporary emergency-room or crisis context. CONTINUE

(LifeSiteNews) -- The Hemlock Society, now known as "Compassion and Choices," is praising the American Medical Association (AMA) for a resolution agreeing to study the question of assisted suicide, despite the AMA's long-standing opposition to the practice.

The AMA's House of Delegates voted to move the euthanasia resolution forward to the AMA Board of Trustees. The Trustees are expected to move the idea forward to the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, which will reevaluate the current AMA policy prohibiting doctors from killing patients.

“The AMA’s decision to study a possible change in position on doctor-prescribed suicide is very concerning for the future of the integrity of the medical profession,” said Dr. Jeff White, a member of the Louisiana State Medical Society and physician ally of Louisiana Right to Life. “For millennia, the medical profession has been in unison that physicians prescribing death for their patients is antithetical to the mission of healing integral to the role of a physician.’ CONTINUE

(thisislocallondon.co.uk) – Stem cells from his brother’s spine could be used to rewire a five-year-old’s brain and overcome a debilitating condition that prevents him walking or talking.

Jay Shetty may soon be able to hug his parents and play with his brother, movements currently restricted by his spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy. The youngster, of Holly Tree Close, Wimbledon, has been enrolled in a unique study at Duke University in the United States that hopes to help rewire his brain and repair damaged cells which will allow him new muscular movements, including walking and talking.

The study uses a cord blood stem cell transplant from stem cells of his one-year-old brother, Kairav Shetty and is the only such study in the world. CONTINUE