The quest to reinvent anesthesia

Before 1846, surgery was a crude and brutal undertaking, typically performed on conscious patients lashed to their beds. Then a Boston dentist publicly demonstrated that the highly flammable chemical diethyl ether—commonly called ether—could render a patient unconscious and insensitive to pain. Overnight, surgery became a major player in modern medicine.
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Evolutionary model for antibiotic resistance reveals dose timing critical to care

Cleveland Clinic researchers are working to improve the way we use evolutionary modeling to understand drug resistance. The study, published in Science Advances, uses a new type of evolutionary model called a “fitness seascape” to incorporate a patient’s dosage schedule into models that predict whether an infection will develop antibiotic resistance, and has found that inconsistent timing and missing early doses can lead to treatment failure.
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New approach reverses opioid overdoses more safely, rat study shows

Opioid overdoses are a major public health issue in the U.S., killing tens of thousands of people every year. The medicine naloxone, which is available as an over-the-counter nasal spray or given by injection, has saved countless lives by rapidly reversing opioid overdoses. But in blocking opioid receptors in the brain, naloxone causes severe withdrawal symptoms, including pain, vomiting and agitation.
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