According to the World Health Organization, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide, and the American Cancer Society estimates that the lifetime risk of breast cancer will rise to one in seven women by the year 2024. This program shows how breast cancer develops, how can it be detected and diagnosed, and how it is typically treated. Sophisticated 3D graphics show the way breast tumors form and grow, as well as how they ideally...

Parkinson's disease currently afflicts one out of every 100 Americans over the age of 60. How do they cope with it? And what new medical insights are being derived from the study of it? This program from The Doctor Is In sheds light on both of those questions through interviews with Stanley Fahn, professor of neurology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and scientific director of the Parkinson's Disease Foundation; neurosurgeon David Roberts,...

In a severe impact to the head, the brain moves and hits the skull, causing injury. During a boxing match, the brain moves from side to side after the impact of a punch. Following a concussion head injury, confusion and disorientation due to temporary distortion of the brain may result.

Sleep has long been regarded as nothing more than a way to charge our batteries. But what if it can control our weight, allow us to make memories, and help us to fight off diseases like Alzheimer’s? We travel the world to investigate how revolutionary new technology has revealed the sleeping brain as an energetic and purposeful machine.

Brain cancer can be a deadly disease that's often hard to treat because of where it is located. But a new type of therapy involving a wearable cap could slow down or even stop cancer cells from multiplying, and help extend the lives of patients.

Meningococcal disease has a well-deserved fearsome reputation. It can cause a lethal form of bacterial meningitis as well as septic shock, and is capable of striking quickly-often without warning-leaving patients dead or seriously impaired in a matter of hours. This program gives an overview of meningococcal disease and the vaccines that are available to prevent it. Viewers meet a patient whose case wasn't discovered by the ER doctors who initially...

A major stroke can hit without warning and leave a broken body and a damaged mind in its wake. But there are ways to prevent strokes, even among high-risk groups. This program looks at anticoagulation and its role in averting strokes and other devastating conditions. Viewers learn how doctors identify risk factors in patients and how certain treatments can stop blood clots from forming and making their way to the brain. Subjects include ischemic strokes,...

Feared and misunderstood for centuries, epilepsy is now a completely manageable condition for many patients. This program overviews newly developed treatments that have greatly reduced, and for some people eliminated, the occurrence of epileptic seizures. It also presents case studies suggesting that the disabling prejudice which has traditionally surrounded epilepsy is fading-and that it no longer inhibits employment, an active lifestyle, or pregnancy....

Writer Siri Hustvedt is a migraine sufferer and will often experience aphasic dreams. As she enters the slumbering state she will have hallucinations. As she says, these "are anomalies, no doubt, tics of the nervous system that affect some, not all, but they could well help explain more general human qualities—who we are, what we feel, and how we see. I suspect that everyone has a few Lilliputians in hiding. It may be just a question of whether...

At the age of 37, Dr. Jill Bolte suffered a massive stroke that took eight years to recover from. This experience has informed her work as a neuroanatomist - a brain anatomy scientist - and led her to start Jill Bolte Taylor Brains, Inc. In this ABC News report, Dr. Bolte discusses her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Experience and what the stroke taught her about the workings of the human brain.