Health

Scientists have begun experimenting with the therapeutic effects of LSD drugs again, years after the government declared a “war on drugs” and dissuaded the medical community from studying them. Researchers have found that despite the prevalent misconception that LSD is “dangerous” they have had success at healing various ailments with the hallucinogen. Washingtonpost.com reports: They helped alcoholics drink less; terminal patients eased more gently into death. And it’s not just the infirm who are helped by the drugs. Psychedelics can make the healthy healthier, too.

In a global first, gene therapy that could prove life-saving for children has been recommended for approval in Europe. The pioneering technology to fix faulty genes has been developed by Italian scientists and GlaxoSmithKline FOX News reports: The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday it had endorsed the therapy, called Strimvelis, for a tiny number of children with ADA Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (ADA-SCID) for whom no matching bone marrow donor is available.

A former UK Government medical officer has accused authorities of orchestrating one of the greatest scandals in medical history in deliberately covering up the fact that the MMR vaccine causes autism.  Dr Peter Fletcher, former Chief Scientific Officer at the Department of Health, says the UK government have behaved with “utterly inexplicable complacency” in ignoring thousands of documents that prove the dangers of the MMR vaccine on children. “The refusal by governments to evaluate the risks properly will make this one of the greatest scandals in medical history,” Fletcher says.

A recent study published in the journal Cancer Causes and Control has revealed that Amish people have virtually no cancer within their population, and are considered the most healthy people in America.  Researchers from Ohio State University originally launched a study on the Amish population to see whether rates of cancer would be higher due to their lack of conventional medical care. What they found, however, shocked them.