2 . Very few people enjoy going to the dentist, especially for a filling. Often fillings need to be replaced during the patient’s lifetime. But is filling the cavity (蛀牙洞) with a foreign material really the best treatment? Is it possible that the tooth could repair itself with its own material — dentine (牙质)? Researchers at King’s College London have found a process that may replace the traditional method.

Paul Sharpe of King’s College London says the new treatment for cavities is simpler. It uses a drug that causes the tooth to fill in the hole naturally with dentine. “It involves putting a drug in the hole. It excites a natural process, which starts to occur anyway following the damage, so you can actually get the big hole repaired and the repair is the production of the natural material, the dentine.”

Usually a new drug requires repeated testing before it is approved for treatment. However, this drug that produces the regrowth material in teeth has already been approved. It is a drug used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders of the nervous system. Researchers explain that they use only a small amount and they use it locally. Usually that means the medicine is put directly on the affected area. It does not travel through the patient’s blood.

Nigel Carter heads Britain’s Oral Health Foundation. He describes the new treatment as an exciting possibility for dental care. But Carter also has a warning, “Actually regrowing the tooth that has been lost with a cavity would be really a huge step forward. But it's also important that we remember that filling the cavity is not the first place. It’s a preventable disease.”

4 . PRACTITIONERS

One day, I felt terrible pain in different part of my body. When I touched my hand, I felt pain in the hand. When I touched my cheek, my cheek hurts. Wherever I touched, I felt the pain. I found this condition very frightened, so I saw a doctor but explained my strange condition. A doctor examined me and found nothing abnormal. She asked me to get a completely health check-up. All reports were quite normal, what made the doctor rather surprised. Suddenly the doctor realized something and asked myself to touch her hand. I touched her hand and still felt the pain. The doctor finally worked out to what my problem was — my finger injured.

7 . A small implant connected to electrodes (电极) inserted into the skull bone (颅骨) is providing huge relief to younger patients living with Parkinson’s disease, such that it could allow sufferers to pick up fine motor skills like playing golf again.

While it isn’t a cure, the implant is a treatment that makes living with Parkinson’s ten times more bearable. “Before the operation I went for a walk on Boxing Day with my wife and I got 182m from the actual car,” Tony Howells, who received this implant in 2019, said. “Then after the operation, which was 12 months later, I went on Boxing Day again and we went as far as 4km and could have gone further. It was amazing,” he added.

25 patients like Howells have been selected to participate in the trial at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, England, which will conclude next year. Most of them are older than 50, but those who may be old enough to begin losing memories are too old for the operation.

The operation involves inserting the tiny battery within the skull bone and running electrodes down into the center of the brain in the subthalamic nuclei (底丘脑核). It then delivers delicate electrical impulses (脉冲) to help stimulate nerve cells to work correctly, thereby restoring some of the normal muscular function which Parkinson’s disturbs.

Previous implanting operations involved batteries implanted into a patient’s chest. This new method takes just three hours, and could be available for as many as 10% of all Parkinson’s patients.

“You can’t understand how upsetting Parkinson’s is until it happens to you. Just doing your shoelaces up is a major operation... it affects your everyday life no end,” said Howells, who is even able to play fine-tuned sports-including golf-again.

9 . Jones Thando was a 16-year-old senior high school student, who had an idea for a new method of finding pancreatic cancer. When Jones was 15 years old, her aunt died of this kind of cancer, which_______her deeply. This disease is_______serious because there is no way to detect it as early as possible. By the time_______tests determine the patient has the possibility of cancer, it’s often too late to do anything!_______that it was often the case, Jones was determined to do whatever she can to develop a test that could_______problems as early as possible.

The way ahead seemed_______for Jones. She was_______a senior high school student, and what she_______to create was something no one else had tried. So Jones read_______about this kind of cancer, wrote a letter of advice about her idea, and sent it out to more than 500 medical ________. But only one expert, Dr. Amy Maitra ________to her timely and enthusiastically. Dr. Amy promised to cooperate with Jones and gave her some assistance as well as________to a lab.

Another great reward for Jone’s________was winning the big prize at the World Science and Technology Conference. This grand award is presented to young creators that have got a ________ idea. It’s bound to take many years to develop a new test way, ________Jones hopes the way will ________enhance people’ lives and maybe save them, so she insisted on trial and error. Luckily, Jones is not alone as a young creator.________, there were nearly 1500 other competitors for the International award, all of whom had ground-breaking________. For Jones, growing up in a family that is attracted to science and________innovative thinking offered him many advantages. But the key for Jones is that reading, experiment, survey and________are just for fun, and the possibility to enhance the world around her during the process makes it much better.

10 . About 600,000 people die of heart attacks at home each year. And the survival rate (存活率) of out-of-hospital heart attacks is much lower than those that happen at the in-hospital setting.

Pumpstart, a program created by students at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) which is meant to teach hands-only CPR (心脏复苏术) to the general public, is effective in both teaching high school students a life-saving skill and providing medical students with a chance to take part in public health and medical education after several surveys.

High school students in the Boston area who joined in the Pumpstart program completed pre-/post surveys. The pre-surveys were carried out before they watched a 60-minute training session (培训课程) on hands-only CPR. And the post surveys were done after the training session. Medical students also completed surveys judging their comfort in learning CPR both before and after they took part in the program. The high school students reported huge improvements in CPR skills following their training from Pumpstart. And it was reported that the medical students had higher confidence levels regarding their abilities to answer questions about CPR and helping new medical students to better understand the training sessions after they joined in Pumpstart.

“Getting the general public to feel comfortable performing CPR is important to overall improved survival from heart attacks,” explained Anita Knopov, a fourth-year medical student at BUSM. “Using educational resources provided by the city medical center and offering training to inner-city high school students allow medical students to serve as both educators and experienced people in CPR within the community, while making high school students interested in the healthcare field (医疗领域). That’s what Pumpstart does.”

Knopov believes Pumpstart can serve as a model for other organizations and can have a long-term (长期的) public health influence as the bystander CPR continues to be one of the most useful factors in out-of-hospital (医院之外) heart attack survival. “Although Pumpstart is offered only in Boston, we hope that our work may stimulate the development of similar programs in other areas. And in that case we can use lots of new ‘Pumpstarts’ in other regions.”