Posted on July - 19 - 2011
An art she doesn’t want you to notice
“I don’t want the general public to know what I do is fake,” Erickson says. “It’s best if it’s not noticed at all.”
Erickson is an ocularist, or trained technician who makes prosthetic eyes. While some call it a skill, Erickson says recreating the “personality,” “emotion” and “sparkle” conveyed in a person’s eye is an art.
Each eye “tells a story and reflects a lot,” Erickson explains.
Erickson and her son Todd Cranmore are two of the six ocularists in the state of Washington and among the few hundred in the country.
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Posted on July - 18 - 2011
What started as a bet turned out to be a life-changing experience for Megan Pritchard.
A friend bet her she couldn’t last at boot camp class for a month.
Lesley Young/Special to The Commercial Appeal
“She was doing it, and she bet I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it for a month straight,” said the medical sales rep.
A month led to 31/2 years, and what Pritchard won in the bet were some important life improvements.
“It taught me how to plan,” said the 31-year-old.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, summer or winter, Pritchard shows up at Overton Park at 5:30 a.m.
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Posted on July - 18 - 2011
As many as one in every four men has a gene mutation that makes it harder for their sperm to reach female eggs, researchers at the University of California, Davis found in a study released today.
Published in the July issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine, the UC Davis research sheds light on one potential cause of male infertility. Researchers emphasized that many other factors -including sperm quantity, vigor and shape – also play a role.
But about 20 percent of male infertility cases now have no identifiable cause. The newly discovered mutation could account for a majority of those, said Charles Bevins, one of the senior authors of the paper and a professor at the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology.
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Posted on July - 17 - 2011
Growing pains aren’t just physical maladies. At least 20 percent of children need mental health services, but often they fall through the cracks at schools, which are often poorly equipped to give them the help they need.
Schools that have health centers on site are the exception. Three-quarters of these clinics provide not only primary care but mental health services as well. Many also provide dental care.
They’re often located in urban or rural areas that are considered medically underserved. But unfortunately, they’re all too rare. Only about 1,900 of all the 133,000 K-12 schools in the country have these comprehensive clinics on site.
The centers got a recent boost when the Department of Health and Human Services said it would award $95 million in grants to 278 school-based health center programs to build, renovate or equip clinics.
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