Five Baby Boomer medical breakthroughs

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Not that they'd care to admit it, but the nation's 78 million Baby Boomers are aging fast.

Lucky for them, medical advances are keeping pace. When Boomers were born, heart disease or cancer amounted to death sentences. Arthritic hips and knees meant years of limping.

Now, Boomers can live for decades after heart attacks or cancer. And knee replacements and hip replacements let patients walk as well as they ever did.

"We're at an exciting time," said Dr. Gene Shieh, a radiation oncologist at Jupiter Medical Center. "Computers and mechanical capabilities are catching up to the things previous generations of doctors wished they could do."

Boomers are an important market for doctors. And they're catering to their patients with these breakthroughs in care.

For breast cancer patients, a better way to rebuild.

Dr. Martin Newman is an expert at reconstructing the breasts of women who lose a breast to cancer.

But even with his years of experience, Newman admits he never was completely sure which tissue to remove and which to leave. The problem nagged him, because making the wrong call can lead to complications such as pain, bleeding, infection and even the need for another operation.

A few years ago, Newman and his colleague, Dr. Michel Samson, had a brainstorm: The two Cleveland Clinic Florida plastic surgeons tried the laser used by heart surgeons to help with reconstruction.

"We saw them using it in the cardiac room, and we wheeled it down the hall," Newman said.

He trains the laser on the patient during surgery, and it reads blood flow and tells him which tissue to remove and which to keep. The result, Newman said, is a "remarkable" decrease in complications.

"The lasers seem to give us a clear-cut window into tissue viability," Newman said. "It tells us what's going to live and what's going to die. The ability of the laser to make that decision far exceeds the ability of the surgeon to make that decision."

The technique is novel enough that Samson and Newman have spoken at medical conferences throughout the world, and doctors in other parts of the country have begun to follow suit.

"We've really broken ground," Newman said.

A more precise knee replacement.