BACKGROUND Animal studies of arthritis have suggested that bisphosphonates may have chondroprotective abilities. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of bisphosphonate treatment on cartilage degradation. METHODS Type II collagen is almost exclusively localised in cartilage, where it is the major structural component of the tissue. Hence fragments derived from this protein should represent a spe...

provides us with several answers. First, in recent decades there has been a revival of homeopathic medicine, especially in Germany. The renewed popularity among patients of homeopathic remedies must at least in part be attributed to dissatisfaction with "scientific medicine", the elite of which seems primarily interested in modem medicine's technical tools; as Roy Porter put it in his perceptiv...

BACKGROUND Ala-al-din abu Al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qarshi al-Dimashqi, known as Ibn al-Nafis (1210-1288 AD), was a Muslim Syrian physician primarily famous for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood. The most voluminous of his books is Alshamel fi Sana'at tebbi'at, which is a comprehensive medical encyclopedia. It comprised 300 volumes of notes, from which only ...

A novel bacterial strain, designated ANL-iso2(T), was obtained from an enrichment culture inoculated with a mixture of soda lake sediments by using isobutyronitrile (iBN) as the carbon, energy and nitrogen source at pH 10. The enrichment resulted in a stable binary culture containing iBN-degrading Gram-positive rods and a satellite Gram-negative gammaproteobacterium Marinospirillum sp. strain (...

T Ferdous al-Hekma (Paradise of Wisdom) is one of the oldest medical texts in the Islamic world written in Arabic in 850 AD by Ali ibn Raban Tabari. He was a Persian physician who moved from Tabaristan (Mazandaran province of modern day Iran) to Samarra during the reign of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-861 AD). We studied the book of Ferdous al-Hekma fil-Tibb, in an attempt to comprehen...

A t e r t h e c o m i n g o f P r o p h e t Muhammad, the Arabian tribes, in a great burst of expansionist energy, swept over Western Asia and North Africa. They disrupted, but did not destroy the Eastern Roman Empire, which had survived the barbarian onslaughts that had wiped out the empire in the West. The Eastern Empire, particularly after the Arabian conquests, came to be known as Byzantine...

Abu Ja'far Ahmad b. Abi Khalid Ibn al-Jazzar, born in Qayrawan, the medieval capital of Tunisia, hailed from a family of physicians. ' His father IbrThim was a doctor, as was his paternal uncle Abu Bakr. He studied with the famous Jewish philosopher and physician Ishaq b. Sulayman al-Isra'ili (c. 243/855-343/955),2 who had been a student of Ishaq ibn 'Imran (d. 296/908),3 and who at the age of ...

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this research is to assess the effects of oral ibandronate on bone microarchitecture by using high-resolution peripheral quantitative computed tomography (HR-pQCT) in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) taking a long-term glucocorticoid. METHODS In this double-blind placebo-controlled study, 40 Chinese female SLE patients taking prednisolone were rando...