For two-year-old Connie Lloyd, there was nothing amusing about having a bright red ‘clown’s nose’. Born with a benign tumour that grew to cover her nose, she suffered cruel taunts and name-calling and was told the rare condition could not be cured. But the shy little girl has a reason to smile at last after surgeons defied the odds and left her with a ‘nose like mum’s’. Doctors had spotted a shadow on Connie’s nose at the 26-week scan but when she was born in September 2008, she appeared perfectly healthy. Connie, from Slough, Berkshire, was just a day old when parents Zara Green...

By Daily Mail Reporter Kerri Dowdswell is a trim young woman who has no trouble fitting in to her size 10 jeans… until she eats her dinner. The 23-year-old has a mystery condition which means minutes after she eats a meal her stomach becomes so bloated that strangers think she’s about to give birth. Within hours, her stomach has shrunk back to its normal size – but the problem has got so bad that Kerri now wears maternity trousers when she goes out for dinner. Read more…

Crossing your arms really is a defensive gesture – scientists find it can reduce pain. Simply crossing your hands confuses your brain and distracts it from any pain being administered, a study suggests. The brain is used to your left hand carrying out tasks on your left hand side and the right hand carrying out tasks on the right. By crossing them, the brain is momentarily bamboozled and this makes it less susceptible to pain. Researchers think the theory has most impact on pain felt in the hands, and have not yet tested it on other parts of the body. Read more…

By Mary Brophy Marcus, USA TODAY Heart patients with an optimistic outlook are more likely to be healthier down the road and survive longer than those with less rosy views, new research suggests. A study in Archives of Internal Medicine, out Monday, that followed 2,800 heart patients shows that those with more positive attitudes about their recovery had about a 30% greater chance of survival after 15 years than patients with pessimistic leanings. Although other studies have looked at how long it was before patients returned to normal activities, this is the longest, largest study to track survival,...

A leading neuroscientist on the intriguing case studies that are revealing the powerful, adaptive potential of the human brain A 70-year-old engineer who has just retired confesses that he has had a life-long urge to have his left arm amputated below the elbow. He has the arm removed and feels much better. Another man loses his arm in a car accident, but still feel its ghostly presence; this phantom limb is clenched in a painfully awkward position. A third man, a student of mine, makes a remarkable recovery from a coma, only to become convinced that his mother and father are impostors. All three...

By Maia Szalavitz Physicians have long believed that some form of deception is essential to the placebo effect: after all, if you tell people that you’re giving them a fake drug, why would they respond by getting better? But new research suggests that it may one day be possible to use placebos in everyday medicine without misleading patients into thinking they might get active treatment. The study, which was published in the journal PloS One, included 80 patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a condition that causes abdominal pain, bloating and frequent bouts of either...

A million-to-one mother has no problem telling her newborn twins apart – because one was born black and the other white. Baby boy Leo and baby girl Hope were born by caesarean within a minute of each other but when the midwife handed them to their new mum, Shirley Wales was shocked to see the difference. With light skin, blue eyes, and fair hair, little Hope is the image of her white father, whereas brother Leo has the same black skin, dark eyes, and thick hair as his Grenadian mother. Leo was born first weighing 5lb 14oz closely followed by his sister Hope at 6lb 3oz at Dewsbury District Hospital,...

Some people meet, fall in love and get married right away. Others can spend hours in the sock aisle at the department store, weighing the pros and cons of buying a pair of wool argyles instead of cotton striped. Seeing the world as black and white, in which choices seem clear, or shades of gray can affect people’s path in life, from jobs and relationships to which political candidate they vote for, researchers say. People who often have conflicting feelings about situations—the shades-of-gray thinkers—have more of what psychologists call ambivalence, while those who tend toward unequivocal...

Before you hunker down in your panic room, take a closer look at what the latest “superbug” really is. THE GIST A new gene gives bacteria resistance to almost every antibiotic there is. The drug-resistant gene can jump between completely unrelated types of bacteria. The public health threat is probably small in the United States, but the worldwide threat could be quite large. Bacteria have developed a new way to resist a sweeping array of antibiotics, raising alarms about the spread of infections that might defy nearly all treatments. Three Americans were recently diagnosed with the...

By Chris Brooke A retired teacher has astonished doctors after his body rid itself of cancer without treatment. Peter Crane, 60, was diagnosed with a form of leukaemia 18 months ago. He was was warned that the disease cannot usually be cured but told that chemotherapy could help. However, Mr Crane did not start the treatment straight away because the cancer had not reached the stage where it would be most effective. In the meantime, it appears the cancer simply vanished. Blood tests have shown his body is free of the disease and he is now officially in remission. Experts said Mr Crane was a very...