Lifting the Veil of Depression

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 21 million Americans suffer from some kind of depressive disorder. For about 4 million of the most severe cases, no treatment can help. But there is a promising experimental therapy now in clinical trials that, in essence, “rewires” the brain. It is most definitely medicine on the cutting edge.

Diane Hire of Norwalk, Ohio, is 54 years old. For the past 20 years, she has lived with severe, unrelenting depression.

“You felt like a dead person walking. There was just nothing left in me,” Hire told ABC News. “I had no emotion left. I had no energy left. I had nothing. I was an empty shell of a person.”

She was prescribed one anti-depressant after another, as well as psychotherapy. Nothing worked. She tried to commit suicide three times.

New Skin Cancer Treatment Saves Man

ATLANTA – A man who had been given less than a year to live had a complete remission of advanced deadly skin cancer after an experimental treatment that revved up his immune system to fight the tumors.

The 52-year-old patient’s dramatic turnaround was the only success in a small study, leading doctors to be cautious in their enthusiasm. However, the treatment reported in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine is being counted as the latest in a small series of successes involving immune-priming treatments against deadly skin cancers.

“Immunotherapy has become the most promising approach” to late-stage, death-sentence skin cancers, said Dr. Darrell Rigel, a dermatology researcher at the New York University Cancer Institute in New York who had no role in the research.