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An appendicitis operation is the most common emergency abdominal surgery performed in the U.S. But the cost of the procedure is anything but common or standardized.

Two Los Angeles-area outpatient clinics affiliated with the 1-800 GET-THIN marketing company have temporarily stopped Lap-Band weight-loss surgeries while they conduct a review of the procedure.

By Arron Frood of Nature magazine Has a cheap and effective treatment for chronic pain been lying under clinicians' noses for decades? Researchers have found that a very high dose of an opiate drug that uses the same painkilling pathways as morphine can reset the nerve signals associated with continuous pain--at least in rats. If confirmed in humans, the procedure could reduce or eliminate the months or years that millions of patients spend on pain-managing prescription drugs

Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled study of this procedure shows that these responses can be maintained in the long term. [More]

20-hour procedure involved team of 45, girls expected to make full recovery

Metrologists are measurement artists who are very precise – in the case of the Boltzmann constant up to the sixth decimal place. Whoever is able to determine it very exactly will cause a small revolution in the field of worldwide temperature measurement: The temperature unit will then no longer be based - as hitherto - on a chemico-physical material property, i.e. the triple point of water, but on an unchangeable fundamental constant.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A team of physicists comprised of members from IBM Research in Switzerland and the University of Liverpool in the U.K. have figured out a way to improve on results obtained using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) that allows for the orbitals of single molecules to be mapped. They have published a paper on Physical Review Letters describing their procedure.

Connecticut woman looks "fantastic" after 20-hour procedure at Brigham and Women's Hospital

The African nation of Rwanda recently set a goal of circumcising an estimated two million adult men by the end of 2012 to fight the spread of HIV, and is investigating a new nonsurgical device that is said to allow practitioners to perform the procedure in less than four minutes--without anesthesia. The patent pending PrePex device includes an elastic mechanism that fits around an inner ring, trapping the penis foreskin--the loose fold of skin that covers its glans--which cuts its blood supply

Much of what happens to you in the hospital in the name of diagnosing and healing is invasive. Depending on what ails you, a doctor may need to ream out an artery to get more blood to your heart, or flood your body with a poison to kill cancerous cells, or saw through the bones of your leg to replace a crumbling hip or a worn-out knee

You can steam your face, steam the wrinkles out of your clothes — and, thanks to a trendy spa treatment, you can now steam your privates.