KEYWORD

health

Camille Fitpatrick and Alex Vasquez

A cure for healthcare

In a bustling trailer at the El Sol Science & Arts Academy in downtown Santa Ana, UC Irvine’s Program in Nursing Science offers a window to healthcare’s future. Children and their parents fill a sparse waiting area, but the people in white coats who move from room to room seeing the young patients aren’t physicians. […]

Cinder the golden retriever sits with children

Different breed of therapist

Cinder, a golden retriever with a sweet face and slow gait, reclines on a dog bed at the UC Irvine Child Development Center as, one by one, half a dozen 8- and 9-year-olds deliver pats and hugs. One boy puts his arms around her in a warm embrace; another gently curls up at her side. From behind […]

Ivan Soltesz

Uncharted territory

Neuroscientist Ivan Soltesz is recognized as one of world’s leading epilepsy researchers, but when talking about the focus of his work, he sounds more like the young dreamer and poet he was growing up in Budapest. “The brain is the last great frontier,” says Soltesz, UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor and chair of anatomy & neurobiology. […]

Students prepare Evans for contamination simulation

Handle with care

Safety staff do hands-on training with chemistry majors.

Dr. Kristen Kelly zaps port-wine stain blood vessels on the anesthetized child’s face and arm

Lighting the way

The concept that revolutionized laser surgery and earned UC Irvine more than $40 million came to Dr. J. Stuart Nelson in 1992 while he was watching a baseball game. In the early 1990s, surgeons like Nelson were trying to adapt laser technology for medical use, and the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic was an […]

David Reinkensmeyer with Robert Sanchez

Can robots take over rehab?

Visiting the iMove center at UC Irvine’s Gross Hall is like being on the set of a sci-fi movie. Here, the merging of machines and humans — the premise of such futuristic films as “Alien” and “The Terminator” — has become a reality. Inside the lab, at Sue & Bill Gross Hall: A CIRM Institute, patients whose […]

Getting in tune with patients

Matt Fradkin, a fourth-year student in UC Irvine’s School of Medicine, was doing research at CHOC Children’s Hospital when he saw firsthand how music could relieve a patient’s suffering. A boy of about 7 with cancer had been lying in bed complaining constantly of pain when a music therapist entered his room and began playing […]

Medical center again among top in America

UC Irvine Medical Center’s programs in gynecology, urology, cancer and kidney disease among top in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report.

Dr. Nitin Bhatia (left) and Dr. Samuel Bederman use the SpineAssist robot to place spinal implants during a recent surgery.

Expanding the role of robots

Lourdes Medina had a common problem: relentless back pain and sciatica caused by a herniated disk and an unstable spine. The solution, however, was anything but common. At UC Irvine Medical Center, she underwent the first robot-assisted spinal surgery on the West Coast. Within a day of her March 15 operation, the 32-year-old Los Angeles woman was […]

Aileen Wiglesworth

Uncovering elder abuse

Physical abuse of the elderly has long been difficult to prove because of older people’s propensity to bruise easily and their sometimes-dubious powers of recall, giving perpetrators a handy defense. But thanks to studies by UC Irvine’s Program in Geriatrics, that’s changing. The research has identified bruises most likely caused by abuse and established that […]