When Las Vegan Rick Tope showed me a bottle of Canker Cure pills he advertises as preventing and healing painful canker sores in the mouth – I noted some ingredients had been crossed out with a black pen.
“I have better ingredients now,” he said. “I don’t want to tell you for proprietary reasons
there’s amino acids, too.”
I watched as a transplant surgeon sewed a new kidney into George McLaurin Jr.
Almost immediately after McLaurin received the kidney in 2009, it produced urine and Dr. John Sorensen matter of factly delivered the good news to the operating team: “The kidney is working.”
A couple of years ago, I sat in the office of Lynn Leany and heard him talk about the opportunity to receive Provenge, then a new drug therapy for men with advanced prostate cancer.
His battle with cancer continues today as he seeks out new drugs to keep him alive.
At first blush, it doesn’t make sense. We live in Southern Nevada, where the sun shines about 320 days a year, yet it isn’t difficult to find doctors who say many of us are deficient in vitamin D, which is often called the sunshine vitamin.
My 88-year-old mother’s last days in the hospital were pure hell. There is no doubt that she thought the members of the hospital staff were trying to kill her. A recent study found that for people with Alzheimer’s disease, a stay in the hospital accelerated mental decline and increased the risk of going into a nursing home or dying.
