Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us into a small village near Lima, Peru hospital where tuberculosis is running rampant, in part due to the impoverished living conditions. He looks at the work Partners in Health and the Peruvian government are doing to prevent and contain outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

While on assignment in the mountains of Peru, Dr. Sanjay Gupta experienced the dangers of altitude sickness firsthand. After ten minutes of pure oxygen treatments, he felt much better and returned to work reporting on a dangerous public health threat in a nearby village.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta | Bio
Chief Medical Correspondent

Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us into the tuberculosis ward of a Lima, Peru hospital. Donning a mask, he shows us patients who are masked and hospitalized to contain infection. He also shows us x-rays of a TB infected person.

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta tries out a vertical treadmill used by NASA in research to cut astronaut's risk of bone loss

Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

This week, I did a series of pieces about how astronauts stay fit in space. Sure, it was fascinating to be strapped into a system of pulleys and harnesses that effectively simulate weightlessness. It was interesting to be pulled up to a vertical treadmill or eZLS - the enhanced zero gravity locomotion system. And, yes, I got to be an astronaut for a day, experiencing firsthand what it may feel like to exercise in space. (watch video)
 
I learned that exercise in space, especially for those long missions, is essential for astronauts, not something you might do occasionally. It has to be comfortable to do and it cannot interfere with the function of the spacecraft. (read more)  More than that, though, I learned how beneficial gravity is for us on Earth. Doctors call it axial load. You can think of it as a slight tension on our bodies, more importantly our ligaments, tendons and bones. Turns out, this slight pulling of gravity slows down the loss of bone mass, which in space accelerates 10 times faster than a post-menopausal woman.

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

A few weeks ago, my producer Chris Gajilan and I got on the phone to talk about a series of stories we wanted to do on space medicine. I was really excited because since I was a kid, I have always been interested in space and had dreams one day of going there. Life, though, does sometimes take you in different directions, and I opted for the brain surgery job, instead of the rocket scientist…ba dum. I’ll be here all week…

Seriously, though, when I heard NASA scientists had come up with a model of weightlessness here on Earth, I jumped at the chance to investigate. It wasn’t exactly what I expected. In order to re-create the fluid shifts that are seen with prolonged space travel, scientists decided to put a group of patients at bed rest… for 3 months. Head down about 6 degrees, feet up, and absolutely no getting out of bed. As I learned, while extremely cumbersome, it is a pretty good model.

Over time, lots of things start to happen to your body, things that can be devastating. Turns out, as human beings, we like a little gravity. It keeps just enough pressure on our joints and bones to keep them strong. Without the usual gravitational force, our bones start to wither away. And, the calcium that starts seeping out of the bones finds its way into our bloodstream and can cause painful and sometimes dangerous kidney stones. Astronauts can develop advanced bone loss. As astronauts push farther into space on longer missions, the concern is that they will face debilitating osteoporosis so severe they can spontaneously break bones…

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

Three years ago, I covered Hurricane Katrina. At the time that hurricane made landfall, I was attending a family funeral in Denver. Like many people I watched the reports on television and heard that the hospitals had been evacuated. At the same time, however, doctors from Charity hospital were e-mailing on their dwindling blackberries telling me they were still caring for around 200 patients and they had lost their emergency generator power and were without adequate food and water.

After checking with my wife and kissing my 3-month-old daughter goodbye, I caught the first flight to Baton Rouge and then a helicopter to the parking deck next to Charity. As a physician, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were patients as far as my eyes could see on the parking deck. They had been brought by boat across flooded streets, most of the water above my head. They were then carried on stretchers and backboards up eight flights of stairs to wait in the oppressive Southern August heat. For those with breathing tubes, diligent nurses sat there pumping air into the patients’ lungs. Second after second ,they pumped, for hours, even a full day on end.

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta | Bio
AC360° Contributor
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

Every year in the United States, there are around 200,000 ACL injuries a year. As you might guess, they are most common in soccer, football and basketball. So, when you heard about Tiger Woods golf injury, you may have been a little surprised. In fact, he has had four knee operations since 1994, with the most serious one being on June 24th of this year. As you watch this video, pay close attention to the left knee and the amount of torque that is placed on it. There is a pivot like motion that orthopedic surgeons seem to believe caused the problem.

The operation itself is a fairly straightforward one but now the name of Tiger’s game is rehab.

Woods tell us in his blog that he is more mobile than a month ago, and that he spends most of his rehab time riding a stationary bike. It sounds like he would look a lot different as well. He says he has lost 10 pounds of muscle and is mainly eating a raw and organic diet. The kicker is that he is not even planning on swinging a golf club until next year. That’s quite a change of lifestyle for someone who has played golf for almost his whole life.

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent

A few years ago, a woman called me in the middle of the night to tell me her son-in-law had been taken to jail. This was a woman I knew pretty well, and I was stunned to hear the story she proceeded to tell me. Her grandchild (his daughter) had been found unconscious at the house and taken to the hospital. Doctors there quickly figured out the child had been shaken. Just a few months old, her little neck muscles had not been strong enough to stabilize her head, which in young children is relatively bigger with respect to their bodies. She developed a blood collection on her brain and shearing of small blood vessels deep inside. Ultimately, she never recovered; she died in her mother’s arms. The little girl’s dad had been the only one in the home and subsequently admitted to handling the child in a rough manner when she was persistently crying.

In a moment of anger, he had killed his child and essentially sentenced himself to imprisonment. As a dad, I can’t imagine the incredible grief he is still suffering today, so many years later. As a neurosurgeon, I have seen this story play out more times than I care to remember.

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Watch Dr. Sanjay Gupta's report on drug testing.

When an athlete is tested for banned substances, most of us have a certain expectation the result will come back positive or negative. And, based on that result, an athlete will either be innocent or guilty. But, it’s not even close to being that easy, according to a new article in Nature, written by biostatistician Dr. Donald Berry (Read study). Dr. Berry calls the science so “weak,” it is often impossible to tell whether an athlete, who has tested positive for a banned substance, really doped or not. Even as a student of statistics, this was pretty amazing to me, so I decided to look further.

Dr. Berry uses the example of Floyd Landis to make his point. Berry concurs Landis had an unusual test result, but argues that result is pretty meaningless. Here’s why: because Landis provided 8 pairs of urine samples, and assuming an approximately 95 percent specificity, the probability of all 8 samples being labeled “negative” is the eighth power of .95 or just .66 (66 percent).

If that’s a little too much math and science for you at this hour, here is the final conclusion: Floyd Landis’ test had a 34 percent chance of being a false positive! Keep reading

Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Chief Medical Correspondent

With the Olympics coming up, there is a lot of concern surrounding the pollution. As the athletes have started to arrive, many of them are wearing masks. They say it is to protect themselves, whereas some in the Chinese government say it is only to be insulting.

Here are a few things to consider. According to a new study out of Northwestern University, the level of particulate matter in the air in Chicago is 20 micrograms/m3. That probably means nothing to you, other than telling you the average level of pollution of a big U.S. city. Here is what caught my eye. The level of particulate matter in Beijing: 260 micrograms/m3 — 13 times as much as Chicago. (See Study)

It is well known that high levels of particulate matter can cause inflammation in the lungs, and that a protein called Interleukin 6 is released in response. The end result may be that your blood gets a little stickier and thicker. That can cause problems such as heart attacks or strokes, especially in those with a pre-existing history.

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