1 . Rolland and Adeline are proud parents to nine beautiful children. Their youngest two, daughter Lanto, and son, Rindra, were both born with cleft lip (唇裂) conditions. In Madagascar, many families have never seen a cleft lip before, so it’s a condition often greeted with fear and misfortune in some rural communities.

However, the news of Lanto and Rindra’s cleft lip wasn’t much of a shock for Rolland and Adeline because Rolland’s cousin — a man in his fifties — had lived his entire adult life with an untreated cleft lip. Although seeing a relative with a cleft lip meant the family weren’t fearful of the condition, they knew the negative impact an untreated cleft lip can have on aperson’s health and life. As any loving parents would, Rolland and Adeline wanted a better future for their children.

Rolland heard an advertisement on the radio about an Operation Smile surgical programme in Antsirabe, Madagascar. Finding out that Rindra and Lanto could have the cleft lip surgery they needed, for free, was a dream for the family. Unlike here in the UK, health services aren’t free in many parts of the world, and the costs of treatment — or even travelling to reach medical facilities — are out of reach for most families.

When Rolland and his children arrived at the patient village, they were surprised to see so many other families in the same position. After a thorough medical evaluation by medical volunteers, Lanto was found to be fit enough for surgery, and later got the new smile her parents had dreamed of for her. But, for younger brother Rindra, the journey to a new smile would take a little longer.

Operation Smile has provided hundreds of thousands of safe surgeries for children with cleft lip conditions worldwide. For more information about our work or to find out how you can help, visit www.operationsmile.org.

2 . With the widespread use of smartphones, emojis(表情符号)have become a popular medium for expressing emotions and ideas. Researchers now believe these expressive symbols can play a significant role in medicine, increasing the response rate of health surveys(调查).

Scientists say that employing emojis in healthcare communications has several benefits, such as general recognition across diverse populations. So the study authors strongly support the use of emojis to bolster communication between patients and physicians.

“By promoting more effective communication between patients and care providers, as well as between physicians themselves, an emoji-based language system with a common agreement of meanings can be developed,” says Professor Kendrick Davis, who is an associate professor at the UCR School of Medicine. The professor has been working on creating an emoji-based measurement system for the past two years. And he has even conducted a study using emojis to measure health among college students.

Davis further explains that a significant part of medical communication includes surveys, which are often areas of communication breakdown. “Surveys are usually passed to patients in a variety of different stages of their care. But many surveys are explained with language that can introduce an obstacle. This is where emojis, which are friendly and widely used, come into play by replacing survey language that can be hard for some patients to understand,” he says. The authors also point out that while effective communication is important for successful treatment and care, certain health conditions such as brain injury can cause major obstacles. In such cases, emojis could be helpful.

However, Davis also acknowledges the importance of qualitative(定性的)methods. He expresses an interest in partnering researchers whose methodologies are heavily qualitative.

4 . Growing up in a small village in southern Ghana, Osci Boateng watched many of his family members and neighbors struggle to access basic health care. In many regions of the country, it can take hours to get to the nearest hospital. Boateng said many people lost their lives due to preventable or treatable diseases. His grandmother and aunt were among them.

Feeling an urgent call to help, Boateng decided he would make it his life’s mission to bring health care to remote communities in Ghana where education and preventative health care were lacking.

Boateng wanted to find a way to remove these barriers to health care access and education. He started his nonprofit organization, OKB Hope Foundation. In 2021, he converted (转变) a van (面包车) into a mobile doctor’s office and started bringing health care directly to those in need. A few times a week, the mobile clinic and medical team travel long distances to remote communities and provide free routine medical care.

On each trip, Boateng’s team consists of a nurse, a physician assistant, a doctor, and an operation assistant. In the van, they can run basic labs like bloodwork and urinalysis (尿液分析) as well as provide medicine. “It’s like a one-stop shop for people, ” said Boateng, adding that most of the people they see have one health issue or another. Since its launch, the Hope Health Van has served more than 4,000 Ghanaians across more than 45 rural communities who otherwise don’t have easily accessible medical care, according to Boateng.

Boateng has gone all in on his OKB Hope Foundation, recently quitting his job to dedicate his time to bringing health care to his home country. But for him, the sacrifices (牺牲) are well worth. “Words cannot describe the feeling that you provide care for someone who otherwise wouldn’t be alive if your mobile health van wasn’t there.” He has big plans for the future. He hopes to expand them to provide more consistent and high-quality medical care not only to those living in remote areas of Ghana but those in other countries.

6 . Medical artificial intelligence (AI) can perform with expert-level accuracy and deliver cost-effective care. IBM’s Watson diagnoses (诊断) heart disease better than cardiologists (心脏病专家) do. Chatbots give better medical advice to patients in place of nurses. Some forecast that medical AI will enter 90% of hospitals and replace as much as 80% of what doctors currently do. Yet, as our recent research suggests, patients show a strong resistance to medical AI.

The reason, we found, is not the belief that AI provides lower care. Nor is it that patients think that AI is more costly or less informative. Rather, resistance to medical AI seems to come from a belief that AI does not take into account one’s specific circumstances. People view themselves as unique. By contrast, they think medical care delivered by AI providers is suited to treat an average patient but unsuitable to account for the unique circumstances that apply to an individual. No wonder that medical AI providers are given a cold welcome.

There are a number of steps that care providers can take to overcome patients’ resistance to medical AI. For example, if an AI provider is capable of tailoring its recommendation for whether to have a surgery to each patient’s unique characteristics and medical history, patients would be likely to follow the treatment recommendations of the AI provider. In addition, health care providers could also deliver individualized health care by explaining how the algorithms (算法) work and sharing patients’ reviews with the media. Having a physician confirm the recommendation of an AI provider should make people more willing to accept AI-based care. People are comfortable using medical AI if a physician remains in charge of the ultimate decision.

AI-based health care technologies are being developed and employed at an impressive rate, providing better medical services for the patients. But harnessing the full potential of them will require that we first overcome patients’ doubt of having an algorithm, rather than a person making decisions about their care.

7 . If you followed the Rio Olympic Games, you may have noticed that several athletes, including US swimmer Michael Phelps, had circular bruises (青肿) on their bodies. These bruises were the result of “cupping (拔火罐) therapy”, a traditional Chinese medicinal practice that has been around for more than 2,000 years.

Many athletes say that they have benefited from the therapy. Phelps used the therapy in the fall of 201 and has used it about twice a week since, reported ABC News. Another US swimmer, Dana Vollmer, also believes that “it really helps with blood flow”.

However, some have said that the supposed health effects result from people’s feeling that the treatment works, rather than any physical effect of the treatment. To figure out cupping therapy has any physical effect, last year researchers from Germany carried out a test in which a false treatment was provided.

In the study, the same type of cups was used in the real treatment and the false treatment. But in the false treatment, the cups had a hole at the top so that they couldn’t create the proper suction (吸力).

The tested patients, who suffered from a disorder that caused a lot of pain, were told that they would receive either a traditional cupping or “soft cupping”. But they were not informed that the so-called “soft cupping” was a false treatment.

It turned out that most patients correctly guessed which kind of cupping they had received. In both groups, patients also experienced about the same reductions in pain. “The results suggest the effects of cupping therapy might come from factors that are not necessarily part of the treatment itself,” the researchers told the Live Science website.

The question of whether cupping therapy works still needs to be answered. “But because the treatment is relatively safe and it could be helpful for some people, the therapy can be used as part of a comprehensive treatment program involving other exercises, nutritional choices and lifestyle changing,” Dr Brent Bauer, director of the US Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program at Mayo Clinic, told Live Science.

9 . Using needles to deliver drugs has been common for more than a century. The past hundred years have seen all manner of medical advances, from life-saving medicine and X-rays to mRNA vaccines and special cancer treatments. Yet the needle has stayed mostly unchanged. Although now available in a variety of different sizes, it remains a hollow (having a hole or empty space inside), pointy tube.

With luck, that may soon change. As Yichi Ma, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues outline in a review paper, researchers around the world are looking for ways to ease the pain when needles go into the skin. Many have been inspired by nature.

The team got their idea from mosquitoes, which manage to get their blood meals without causing great pain to people. One reason is that the insects use painkilling chemicals when they first puncture(刺穿) the skin. But there is another reason. The point of a mosquito’s saw-like proboscis(锯齿状的喙) is softer at its tip. The insect makes the skin of its target tight before biting, and shakes its proboscis as it pushes the proboscis in. All of this helps reduce the force needed to puncture the skin.

One paper, published in 2020 by a group of researchers in America and China, found that a mosquito-inspired needle required 27% less puncturing force than an ordinary one. And less force means less pain. Mosquito-inspired needles might also be useful for delicate procedures such as biopsies (the examination of tissue taken from a living body). A paper from the University of Michigan, also published in 2020, found that scientists could improve biopsies of tissue in some body organs. The lower force led to less movement of the organ itself, ensuring that the needles were guided accurately to the area that needed sampling.

For now, such devices remain limited to labs. But there is a big market for better needles. According to WHO, around 16 billion injections were given in 2018. With one person in four saying they suffer from a fear of needles, the savings on stickers and sweets for the brave souls who roll up their sleeves would be considerable.