Doc Pomus, pictured here in the 1980s, was an obscure, yet prolific songwriter who died in 1991. A.K.A. Doc Pomus is a documentary about his life.
Courtesy of the artist
Doc Pomus, pictured here in the 1980s, was an obscure, yet prolific songwriter who died in 1991. A.K.A. Doc Pomus is a documentary about his life.
Courtesy of the artist
His name would spin around and around on the vinyl, the writer of a thousand songs: Doc Pomus. As the man behind smash records including Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas," Ray Charles' "Lonely Avenue" and The Drifters' "This Magic Moment," he shaped the early sound of rock 'n' roll.
Pomus died in 1991. His story — one of intriguing reinvention and determination — is told in the new documentary A.K.A. Doc Pomus, which was co-directed by Peter Miller.
Born Jerome Felder, Pomus was a Brooklyn native. At the age of 6, he was diagnosed with polio and lost the use of his legs. Facing a difficult life of disability, Pomus was inspired to lead a life of music.
"When he heard Big Joe Turner's song on the radio, called 'Piney Brown Blues,' it just absolutely transformed him," Miller says in an interview with NPR's Melissa Block. "He realized that the blues is what had the greatest meaning for him, and he turned himself into a blues singer. This handicapped, white Jewish kid found himself singing in African-American blues clubs."
Felder became Doc Pomus in part to keep his new escapades a secret from his mother. In a vintage clip featured in the film, he explains that "Doc" was a nod to blues singer Doctor Clayton, while "Pomus" simply seemed to roll nicely off the tongue.
After recording dozens of blues sides, Doc Pomus created a potential hit called "Heartlessly." The track was picked up by pioneering rock 'n' roll DJ Alan Freed. But as things were starting to heat up for the record, Pomus hit a wall.
"The record company that acquired this recording discovered that Doc was a 30-something-year-old, disabled Jewish guy on crutches," Miller says. "And I think their hopes for him becoming a pop star dimmed, and they didn't release the record. So I think at some point along the way, Doc realized that he had to pursue other ways of getting his music out there."
Pomus turned to writing, kicking off a career as one of the most prolific songsmiths of the 20th century. Miller spoke with Melissa Block about what came next: Pomus' years as a Brill Building hit-maker, his struggles in the age of Bob Dylan and The Beatles (who found success writing their own songs) and his rebirth late in life as a mentor to younger artists. Hear more of their conversation at the audio link.
Ryan Reynolds celebrated his birthday this week with a little unveiling ceremony at the Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Hollywood, CA. As you can see in the photo below, Ryan proudly posed next to his wax doppelgänger which will go on display at the museum next week. Altho I’d argue that it is nearly impossible for Madame Tussaud’s to recreate true hotness like that possessed by Ryan Reynolds, I have to admit that this new wax statue of him is pretty damn good. Check out the photo below and see if you can tell the difference between the real and the fake Ryan Reynolds.
After three months of voting from thousands of fans, the results are in and Ryan Reynolds is the next celebrity immortalized in wax at Madame Tussauds Hollywood. In a first for the legendary attraction, fans were given the opportunity to weigh in via Facebook as to what figure they would like to see. In a close race between well-known stars Ryan Gosling, Anne Hathaway, Ryan Reynolds, Jennifer Hudson and Sofia Vergara, Reynolds came out on top due to a tremendous outpouring of support from his fans. Perfectly timed with Reynolds’ birthday today, the figure is being unveiled to the public. “Thank you to everyone at Madame Tussauds Hollywood for their hard work and talent,” said Reynolds after seeing the completed figure. “This is undoubtedly the largest and most spectacular birthday candle I’ve ever received.” Madame Tussauds Hollywood offers its visitors a truly unique opportunity to interact with lifelike wax figures of Hollywood’s most notable celebrities and iconic movie figures. Through the Facebook Choice contest, fans from around the world had the opportunity to engage with Madame Tussauds Hollywood and provide feedback on the celebrities showcased in the attraction in a whole new way…through social media. “We always take visitor suggestions into account when deciding what figures to add to Madame Tussauds Hollywood each year, but by engaging with our fans through social media we are able to get direct feedback,” said Colin Thomas, general manager of Madame Tussauds Hollywood. “Any of the celebrities we were considering would have been a great addition to the attraction. Ryan has an incredible fan base though and they weren’t going to give up until he won!” After three months, Reynolds was named the winner. Through the contest, self-proclaimed No. 1-fan Melissa Ortega from Dalton, GA, won a trip to Los Angeles to celebrate the official figure launch. “I am a huge Ryan Reynolds fan and have seen all of his movies,” said Ortega. “When I saw the Madame Tussauds contest to help select the next wax figure, I knew I had to jump into action to be sure Ryan won. I can’t wait to see it in person!” Although each process has variations, figure making at Tussauds Studios has not changed fundamentally since Madame Tussauds was founded more than 200 years ago. Utilizing approximately 330 pounds of clay, a team of 20 skilled artists took more than 200 different measurements and spent months shaping the Reynolds figure to look just right. The figure of People Magazine’s former sexiest man alive will be on display starting October 29, and joins the ranks of Hollywood icons such as Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber and Rihanna in the attraction.
Looks good, no? I once ran into Ryan at the Alcove in Los Feliz, which was a nice surprise, but now any one of us can run into him at the Madame Tussaud’s on Hollywood Blvd. I have a sneaking suspicion that the wax version of Ryan won’t protest quite so much as the real thing if someone wanted to grab his ass … er, I’m assuming.
Arcade Fire on Saturday night in Bushwick. Win Butler on the left, Richard Reed Parry on the right.
Courtesy of Sachyn Mital
Arcade Fire on Saturday night in Bushwick. Win Butler on the left, Richard Reed Parry on the right.
Courtesy of Sachyn Mital
Saturday's hottest ticket in New York City was to see a band nobody's heard of. The Reflektors burned through a fan-only presale, and tickets hit the secondary market at prices high as $5,000 — a hefty sum to see any band, much less a band yet to release its first album, in Bushwick's warehousiest corridors. That's like half a year's rent for that neighborhood. But the hype was real. Based only on the "Is-this-really-happening?" disbelief stretching the faces of all the superfans and industry types in the audience, you'd think they were about to see a band that would never play a skuzzy converted depot in east Brooklyn: U2 or Bruce Springsteen, or, I don't know, Arcade Fire.
The thing about the musicians on stage was that they looked a lot like Arcade Fire. Despite his Jack White-like red shirt and white tie, the bassist's flaming red hair drew Richard Reed Parry comparisons. And they sounded like Arcade Fire, too. They even covered "Sprawl II." And that's because — (no) surprise! — The Reflektors was Arcade Fire. That cat was never really in the bag. After a little tongue-in-cheek stage banter ("We started three years ago. We were nervous to play New York because we heard you're standoffish!"), a gold-suited Win Butler and his band ran through a set of mostly unheard tracks from their upcoming album Reflektor, masquerading as a brand new band riding the promotional cycle for its first album.
But the group that played at 299 Meserole this weekend, no matter what you called them, was clearly neither a set of wide-eyed naïfs dropping their first 12", nor the band that made sneaking out of your parents house feel like toppling the Berlin Wall. The musicians were belied by more than their popularity; never mind that most in attendance — who embraced the show's "formal" dress code with thrifted tuxes, reflective masks or fratty banana suits — only got access to buying these tickets after pre-ordering Reflektor. They're also darker, and maybe a more disillusioned, too. "We're so excited to play CMJ," Butler called out sarcastically. "Thank you so much to all the industry types who offered to sign our band!"
But the plucky effrontery that has underpinned all Arcade Fire's work to date is crumbling. The band has told stories about struggling under somebody's thumb since its 2003 debut album Funeral. Songs like "Wake Up" and "Crown of Love" captured an anthemic emotional power, half hope and half rebellion, unmatched by the group's successors and copycats. The songs bloomed around refrains that felt bigger than any stadium they eventually filled. But this is less so on Reflektor. The new songs Arcade Fire played Saturday were full of new (mostly rhythmic) ideas coming to the fore and many old (mostly romantic) identifiers fading away.
Some saw that change coming when Arcade Fire announced that James Murphy, the David Bowie-obsessed former face of LCD Soundsystem and head of disco-punk label DFA, was announced as Reflektor's producer. He introduced the band at the show. Others heard it in the album's dynamic, Bowie-featuring first single, which abandoned that operatic Springsteenian populism for pop reflective of the transformations undertaken by their arena-sized predecessors the Talking Heads and U2 (there's that similarity again).
That change got its first full public display in Bushwick. Take "We Exist," for one. Four years ago an Arcade Fire song with titles that way might've sounded like "Born to Run," but when that "Hang On To Your Love"/"Your Cover's Blown" bassline crept out beneath the venue's Murphy-esque disco balls and reflective hanging polygons, it left no ambiguities about the type of music Arcade Fire is now interested in making. Fans of the group should have been safe assuming they'd get the standard fare of marching violinists yowling to the rafters, but instead were blindsided by Sade. With strings marginalized and two miscellaneous percussionists in tow, this group looked and sounded more like Stop Making Sense than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
This departure is not a totally clean break from their last work, 2010's Grammy-winning, Twitter-enragingThe Suburbs. There were of course the type of joyful moments Arcade Fire is known for (see the swelling "Supersymmetry"), and brand new sounds, like the Princely backup vocals of "It's Never Over (Orpheus)" and the murky rave-up "Here Comes the Night Time." But taking the stage in the throes of a transformation didn't always work in Arcade Fire's favor. The band sometimes sounded uninspired performing new songs they'd written in their old style (like the underwhelming "Joan of Arc") or those that didn't do Butler's heady aspiration to sound like "a mash up of Studio 54 and Hatian voodoo" real justice (the chopped reggaeton of "Flashbulb Eyes"). Some old favorites even looked limp in their new duds (like the beloved "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)"), while others ("Haiti") sound suddenly prophetic of where the band has touched down.
Gone is the jubilation of the Arcade Fire of days past. The crowd occasionally felt awkward inside the band's new big beat, and responded to Butler's post-encore announcement that there would be no more Reflektors, or Arcade Fire, tonight but rather a DJ set from James Murphy for those who wanted to "dance all night," with more than a smattering of boos. But the band itself is dancing toward something that'll lead it outside the sounds their old crowd formed around. Seeing that live was alone worth the price of admission.
Coyote more likely to make a meal out of moose than we thought: Study
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
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Contact: Jenny Ryan jenny.ryan@nrcresearchpress.com Canadian Science Publishing (NRC Research Press)
This news release is available in French.
It has long been believed that coyotes were incapable of taking down an adult moose, but researchers have recently discovered that eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids (canids) have preyed on adult moose in central Ontario. Their findings were published today in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Researchers Dr. John Benson, a PhD student in the Environmental and Life Sciences Graduate Program at Trent University when he conducted the research, and Dr. Brent Patterson, a research scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in Peterborough, documented instances where packs of eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids (canids) were found to have killed moose. Their study involved live capture of eastern coyotes and eastern coyote eastern wolf hybrids to deploy Global Positioning System (GPS) radio-collars and take blood samples for DNA analysis. The GPS collars delivered highly accurate locations of the study animals (via satellites or cell towers) so the researchers were able to visit these locations during winter to investigate their activities and document predation patterns. The DNA analysis allowed them to determine whether the animals were coyotes, wolves, or coyote wolf hybrids.
In the study, four canid packs ranging in size from two to five animals were found to have killed moose. The researchers obtained two accurate ages from moose that were killed by coyotes and/or hybrids: One was very old (20 years) and one was young (20 months). It is believed that younger and older adult moose are probably more vulnerable due to inexperience and deteriorating body condition, respectively.
"Coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids probably prey on moose opportunistically and only when circumstances are favorable. For instance, when snow is deep and a hard crust forms on top this impedes the ability of moose to travel and gives the lighter coyotes and hybrids an advantage because they can travel on top of the snow," explained Dr. Benson. "Additionally, we noticed that some of the moose killed by coyotes and hybrids were on steep slopes that may have slowed the moose and created unstable footing. We also found that some of the moose were killed in areas where medium-sized trees were moderately dense, which may have prevented moose from swinging around quickly to fend off predators attacking from the rear or side."
"Killing of adult moose by eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids appears to be relatively rare and probably does not pose a threat to moose populations in central Ontario. However, from the perspective of a pack of coyotes or hybrids, killing even a single moose during a winter is very beneficial and goes a long way towards helping them meet their energetic demands. For instance, a pack of two eastern coyotes spent some or all of 18 days feeding on a moose that they killed."
The authors do not believe the viability of moose populations in central Ontario is negatively affected by this predation, as recent studies have shown that populations in WMU49 and nearby Algonquin Provincial Park are increasing and that both adult and calf moose survival is relatively high.
###
This research was a collaborative project between the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Trent University and was conducted in Wildlife Management Unit 49 (WMU49) in central Ontario -- the area between Huntsville, ON and Parry Sound, ON.
The article "Moose predation by eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids" by John F. Benson and Brent R. Patterson is published today in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Direct link to article: http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjz-2013-0160
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Coyote more likely to make a meal out of moose than we thought: Study
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
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]
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Contact: Jenny Ryan jenny.ryan@nrcresearchpress.com Canadian Science Publishing (NRC Research Press)
This news release is available in French.
It has long been believed that coyotes were incapable of taking down an adult moose, but researchers have recently discovered that eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids (canids) have preyed on adult moose in central Ontario. Their findings were published today in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Researchers Dr. John Benson, a PhD student in the Environmental and Life Sciences Graduate Program at Trent University when he conducted the research, and Dr. Brent Patterson, a research scientist with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources in Peterborough, documented instances where packs of eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids (canids) were found to have killed moose. Their study involved live capture of eastern coyotes and eastern coyote eastern wolf hybrids to deploy Global Positioning System (GPS) radio-collars and take blood samples for DNA analysis. The GPS collars delivered highly accurate locations of the study animals (via satellites or cell towers) so the researchers were able to visit these locations during winter to investigate their activities and document predation patterns. The DNA analysis allowed them to determine whether the animals were coyotes, wolves, or coyote wolf hybrids.
In the study, four canid packs ranging in size from two to five animals were found to have killed moose. The researchers obtained two accurate ages from moose that were killed by coyotes and/or hybrids: One was very old (20 years) and one was young (20 months). It is believed that younger and older adult moose are probably more vulnerable due to inexperience and deteriorating body condition, respectively.
"Coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids probably prey on moose opportunistically and only when circumstances are favorable. For instance, when snow is deep and a hard crust forms on top this impedes the ability of moose to travel and gives the lighter coyotes and hybrids an advantage because they can travel on top of the snow," explained Dr. Benson. "Additionally, we noticed that some of the moose killed by coyotes and hybrids were on steep slopes that may have slowed the moose and created unstable footing. We also found that some of the moose were killed in areas where medium-sized trees were moderately dense, which may have prevented moose from swinging around quickly to fend off predators attacking from the rear or side."
"Killing of adult moose by eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids appears to be relatively rare and probably does not pose a threat to moose populations in central Ontario. However, from the perspective of a pack of coyotes or hybrids, killing even a single moose during a winter is very beneficial and goes a long way towards helping them meet their energetic demands. For instance, a pack of two eastern coyotes spent some or all of 18 days feeding on a moose that they killed."
The authors do not believe the viability of moose populations in central Ontario is negatively affected by this predation, as recent studies have shown that populations in WMU49 and nearby Algonquin Provincial Park are increasing and that both adult and calf moose survival is relatively high.
###
This research was a collaborative project between the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Trent University and was conducted in Wildlife Management Unit 49 (WMU49) in central Ontario -- the area between Huntsville, ON and Parry Sound, ON.
The article "Moose predation by eastern coyotes and coyote wolf hybrids" by John F. Benson and Brent R. Patterson is published today in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Direct link to article: http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjz-2013-0160
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Neurotoxin effectively relieves bone cancer pain in dogs, Penn researchers find
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
23-Oct-2013
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Contact: Katherine Unger Baillie kbaillie@upenn.edu 215-898-9194 University of Pennsylvania
By the time bone cancer is diagnosed in a pet dog, it is often too late to save the animal's life. Instead, the goal of treatment is to keep the dog as comfortable and free of pain as possible for as long as possible.
A study out this week in the journal Anesthesiology by University of Pennsylvania veterinarians Dorothy Cimino Brown and Kimberly Agnello has identified a new way of accomplishing this goal. Their trial, conducted in 70 pet dogs with bone cancer, demonstrated that a single spinal injection of a neurotoxin provided more relief from pain than the pain-relieving drugs that are typically used.
Because of the similarities between bone cancer in dogs and the disease in humans, these findings suggest that a similar approach could provide effective pain relief in human bone cancer patients, Brown said.
"Dogs are a really good model for testing these kinds of drugs, so showing that it worked in dogs provides strong evidence that it could be safe and effective in people too," she said. "This study is the direct predecessor to a human clinical trial."
The research focused on a neurotoxin called substance-p saporin, or SAP. Previous work had suggested that SAP could selectively destroy neurons that carry pain signals to the brain, but the compound hadn't been tested in a pet dog population. Brown and Agnello wanted to determine if SAP, which had been subject to toxicology tests in the past, would offer relief from the pain that comes when cancer affects the bone in client-owned dogs.
Bone cancer tends to afflict middle-age and older large-breed dogs. The first sign an owner may notice in their pet is a limp or change in gait. If the pain appears to persist, a veterinarian may perform an orthopedic exam and take an X-ray.
"At the point at which you identify a cancerous lesion on an X-ray, there's already known to be metastatic disease," said Brown.
Treatment at this stage is unlikely to save a dog's life.
"We don't talk about curing them, we just talk about increasing their longevity while maintaining a good quality of life," Brown said.
The most aggressive treatment for this type of cancer involves amputating the affected leg and administering chemotherapy. But surgery and regular visits to the veterinarian's office for chemotherapy is a large financial, logistical, and emotional commitment for a pet owner. For some, it's too much, and they favor a different approach.
"There are a lot of owners who will say, 'I know my dog is terminal so I'm just going to try to keep him as comfortable as I can for as long as I can,'" Brown noted.
It is from this group of owners that Brown and Agnello drew their 70 research subjects, who were divided evenly into two groups. Dogs in one group received standard pain-relieving medications while dogs in the other group each received a single injection of SAP into the fluid around their spinal cords. The owners were "blinded" and did not know which group their pet belonged too, as all the dogs stayed the night in the hospital and had the fur around their necks clipped, as though they received a spinal delivery of the neurotoxin.
To evaluate the pain-relieving effectiveness of these interventions, the researchers asked owners to complete questionnaires about their pets' comfort level. Dogs also wore monitors to track their level of activity, and were in some cases videotaped. In addition, owners brought their dogs back to the vet two weeks after the procedure (or pseudo-procedure) and then once a month for rest of their pets' lives.
The ultimate measure of the treatment's effectiveness, however, was when the owner asked to be "unblinded," and learn whether or not they had received SAP or only traditional pain relieving drugs. For those owners whose pets had not previously gotten the SAP injection, they were offered the treatment at that point.
"Basically we just kept following these dogs until the owners said, 'My dog's comfort level is not what it was before,'" Brown said.
By this gauge, SAP's ability to reduce pain was clear, the researchers found. While 74 percent of dogs in the control group had owners request to be unblinded within six weeks of the procedure, only 24 percent of dogs that received SAP had their owners request unblinding within that time frame. When taken as a whole, dogs treated with the standard-of-care pain relievers required unblinding significantly earlier than dogs that received the SAP injection.
Researchers noted only one major side effect: Some of the dogs with tumors in one of their front legs, who had thus received SAP injections higher in the spine, had wobbly, uncoordinated gaits. Lowering the dose of SAP injected corrected the problem.
Though receiving a SAP injection does require anesthesia, it offers an alternative treatment approach for pet owners who want a middle ground between simple pain-relieving drugs and the more aggressive approach of amputation plus chemotherapy, the researchers said.
"I could see this in wide application in veterinary medicine," Brown said. "For us this is a whole new realm of possibility of treatment."
If found to be effective in humans, spinal injections of SAP would offer an alternative to more extreme measures some cancer patients take, such as surgically severing nerves to alleviate pain, an intervention that can trigger serious side effects.
"People have talked about these neurotoxins as being a molecular neurosurgery," Brown said. "When patients get to the point where medical management isn't working anymore, this might be something for them to consider."
###
The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Neurotoxin effectively relieves bone cancer pain in dogs, Penn researchers find
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
23-Oct-2013
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]
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Contact: Katherine Unger Baillie kbaillie@upenn.edu 215-898-9194 University of Pennsylvania
By the time bone cancer is diagnosed in a pet dog, it is often too late to save the animal's life. Instead, the goal of treatment is to keep the dog as comfortable and free of pain as possible for as long as possible.
A study out this week in the journal Anesthesiology by University of Pennsylvania veterinarians Dorothy Cimino Brown and Kimberly Agnello has identified a new way of accomplishing this goal. Their trial, conducted in 70 pet dogs with bone cancer, demonstrated that a single spinal injection of a neurotoxin provided more relief from pain than the pain-relieving drugs that are typically used.
Because of the similarities between bone cancer in dogs and the disease in humans, these findings suggest that a similar approach could provide effective pain relief in human bone cancer patients, Brown said.
"Dogs are a really good model for testing these kinds of drugs, so showing that it worked in dogs provides strong evidence that it could be safe and effective in people too," she said. "This study is the direct predecessor to a human clinical trial."
The research focused on a neurotoxin called substance-p saporin, or SAP. Previous work had suggested that SAP could selectively destroy neurons that carry pain signals to the brain, but the compound hadn't been tested in a pet dog population. Brown and Agnello wanted to determine if SAP, which had been subject to toxicology tests in the past, would offer relief from the pain that comes when cancer affects the bone in client-owned dogs.
Bone cancer tends to afflict middle-age and older large-breed dogs. The first sign an owner may notice in their pet is a limp or change in gait. If the pain appears to persist, a veterinarian may perform an orthopedic exam and take an X-ray.
"At the point at which you identify a cancerous lesion on an X-ray, there's already known to be metastatic disease," said Brown.
Treatment at this stage is unlikely to save a dog's life.
"We don't talk about curing them, we just talk about increasing their longevity while maintaining a good quality of life," Brown said.
The most aggressive treatment for this type of cancer involves amputating the affected leg and administering chemotherapy. But surgery and regular visits to the veterinarian's office for chemotherapy is a large financial, logistical, and emotional commitment for a pet owner. For some, it's too much, and they favor a different approach.
"There are a lot of owners who will say, 'I know my dog is terminal so I'm just going to try to keep him as comfortable as I can for as long as I can,'" Brown noted.
It is from this group of owners that Brown and Agnello drew their 70 research subjects, who were divided evenly into two groups. Dogs in one group received standard pain-relieving medications while dogs in the other group each received a single injection of SAP into the fluid around their spinal cords. The owners were "blinded" and did not know which group their pet belonged too, as all the dogs stayed the night in the hospital and had the fur around their necks clipped, as though they received a spinal delivery of the neurotoxin.
To evaluate the pain-relieving effectiveness of these interventions, the researchers asked owners to complete questionnaires about their pets' comfort level. Dogs also wore monitors to track their level of activity, and were in some cases videotaped. In addition, owners brought their dogs back to the vet two weeks after the procedure (or pseudo-procedure) and then once a month for rest of their pets' lives.
The ultimate measure of the treatment's effectiveness, however, was when the owner asked to be "unblinded," and learn whether or not they had received SAP or only traditional pain relieving drugs. For those owners whose pets had not previously gotten the SAP injection, they were offered the treatment at that point.
"Basically we just kept following these dogs until the owners said, 'My dog's comfort level is not what it was before,'" Brown said.
By this gauge, SAP's ability to reduce pain was clear, the researchers found. While 74 percent of dogs in the control group had owners request to be unblinded within six weeks of the procedure, only 24 percent of dogs that received SAP had their owners request unblinding within that time frame. When taken as a whole, dogs treated with the standard-of-care pain relievers required unblinding significantly earlier than dogs that received the SAP injection.
Researchers noted only one major side effect: Some of the dogs with tumors in one of their front legs, who had thus received SAP injections higher in the spine, had wobbly, uncoordinated gaits. Lowering the dose of SAP injected corrected the problem.
Though receiving a SAP injection does require anesthesia, it offers an alternative treatment approach for pet owners who want a middle ground between simple pain-relieving drugs and the more aggressive approach of amputation plus chemotherapy, the researchers said.
"I could see this in wide application in veterinary medicine," Brown said. "For us this is a whole new realm of possibility of treatment."
If found to be effective in humans, spinal injections of SAP would offer an alternative to more extreme measures some cancer patients take, such as surgically severing nerves to alleviate pain, an intervention that can trigger serious side effects.
"People have talked about these neurotoxins as being a molecular neurosurgery," Brown said. "When patients get to the point where medical management isn't working anymore, this might be something for them to consider."
###
The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Glitches in the HealthCare.gov website, shown here, are making the White House and its allies very nervous.
Uncredited/AP
President Obama radiated confidence when he took to the Rose Garden earlier this week to convince Americans that the flaws in the Affordable Care Act website would be fixed.
It's understandable that the president himself might be upbeat about the prospects of resolving the problems currently plaguing the technology behind the law.
But for anyone not named Obama, the apparent scale of the problems seems daunting. And it doesn't fuel a lot of optimism that the websites will be up and running by Dec. 15, the deadline for open enrollment under the new law. And that's despite the president's promised "tech surge" featuring "some of the best IT talent in the entire country," as Obama put it.
The Washington Post reported that experts say the problems need to be fixed by Thanksgiving to keep the program on track. But there are already murmurings the repair project could go past Dec. 15, reportsThe New York Times. The same story mentioned that potentially 5 million lines of computer code could need rewriting. If that's true, it sounds like it could be the code-writing equivalent of the D-Day invasion — massive, complex and arduous.
Which is not exactly what nervous Democrats want to hear. But they're sure to ask about it at an Obama administration briefing for House Democrats on the health law's travails scheduled for Wednesday morning. (House Republicans are requesting a similar briefing as well.)
For the congressional Democrats whose votes made the Affordable Care Act a reality and who will have to defend their support for the law in the 2014 midterm elections, the problems with the federal website are a political nightmare.
Not only do the website's problems embolden the Republican opposition to the law; they place Democrats on the defensive at a time when the party appears to have the advantage coming out of the shutdown/debt default crises.
Several recent polls suggest that Republicans greatly damaged themselves by forcing the crisis, a self-inflicted wound Democrats are eager to exploit. Some of the more ebullient Democrats even claimed that their chances for retaking the House had improved significantly.
But now there's a chance 2014 could find Democrats conducting their own version of damage control, as a result of the disastrous digital rollout.
They'll be looking for any assurances the White House can provide that the problems with the federal website will be ironed out so that the Obamacare timeline can continue as planned. The critical dates as of now are Dec. 15, when the open enrollment period ends; Jan. 1, when new policies sold by the December deadline are to take effect; and Feb. 15, the last day by which premiums must be paid for those hoping to avoid the individual mandate penalty.
But congressional Democrats may not receive assurances from the White House that those dates will be met. And based on how things have gone so far, they'd probably be skeptical if the White House gave them.
The mood within the Health and Human Services Department, as described in one recent report, probably wouldn't give Democrats reason for optimism. Yuval Levin, who worked on bioethics issues in the George W. Bush White House, talked with officials inside HHS and wrote about it for the conservative National Review last week:
"No one wants to say how long it might take, and no one would share with me what estimates they might be getting from their contractors (whom they no longer trust anyway), but there has so far been relatively little progress and it seems like everyone involved is preparing for a process that will take months, not weeks."
Levin goes on to say that HHS officials seem to be expecting that the enrollment period will be extended to March.
That, of course, could force the administration to do something Republican opponents of the law have asked it to do: delay the individual mandate provision. The mandate requires everyone to be insured by Feb. 15 or pay a penalty.
In short, the people who have some idea of what it takes to fix problems of the scale the Obama administration has ahead of it think it's a mission impossible to get all the needed work done in time to delay a central part of the law.
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