Shanyna Isom Grows Nails Instead Of Hair Due To Skin Condition

OMG?!? Woman Develops Strange Condition Where Fingernails Grow From Hair Follicles…
Aug. 10 2012
Written by ATLien
Straight from the A

A 28 year old beautician and former University of Memphis law student named Shanyna Isom has developed a condition that cannot be medically explained.

Isom has consulted several specialists, including a doctor in the Netherlands, but she still as no idea what is wrong with her.

“Black scabs were coming out of her skin,” said her mother, Kathy Gary.

“The nails would grow so long and come out and regrow themselves. They are hard to touch and stick you.”

Yes… you read right. Oddly enough fingernails have begun to grow from the hair follicles all over Isom’s body.

Isom’s disease has affected not only her skin, but her bones and her vision. The once vibrant single mother is now unable to walk without a cane, and her mother has to help her out of bed every day.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, where Isom is being treated, told her family that she is the only person in the world with this unknown condition.

And now she has $500,000 in unpaid medical bills. Isom has state insurance, but it doesn’t cover medical care in Maryland. Her mother lost her job as a medical receptionist because she looks after her daughter at home, so savings have dried up.

Friends and family of the young woman have organized fundraisers, and her high school has dedicated a football game to her charity. Bank of America has even agreed to take donations at any of their branch offices.

Despite her debilitating illness, Isom told ABCNews.com, “I don’t know whether to smile or cry. I am very blessed.”

Shayna also has a blog called Pray for Shanyna where she shares her thoughts and fears surrounding her illness:

It has taken all of my hair out and has left my body with scabs all over it, plus I have lost about 200 pounds.

Two years ago, I was a healthy woman on my own … had big dreams and goals that I was following until one day my body completely shut down on me.

According to WLBT in Memphis, Isom was a junior studying criminal justice when the mystery illness first occurred in September 2009.

Her doctors suspected that steroids she’d been subscribed for a previous asthma attack had caused an allergic reaction of some sort. However, after returning home, Isom began itching.

Doctors prescribed Benadryl, but it got worse.

“It was uncontrollable and we didn’t know what it was,” said her mother.

Soon, her legs turned black. “It looked as if she had been in a house fire and gotten burned.”

Doctors thought she had eczema or a staph infection and prescribed drugs, but it got worse. Meanwhile, all tests came back negative.

“We could not figure out what was going on,” said her mother. “She was just breaking out everywhere. Her body was scabbed all over.”

Today Isom is slowly improving but she is on at least 25 medications (her insurance only pays for five of them). She is currently awaiting the results of genetic tests that may give doctors clues to what is wrong.

Asthma study reveals the power of the placebo effect

Asthma study reveals the power of the placebo effect
In a new study, the placebo effect was so strong that asthma patients couldn't tell whether the inhaler they used had actual medicine in it.
By Karen Kaplan
Los Angeles Times
July 13, 2011

The placebo effect is alive and well, at least for patients with acute asthma.

That’s the finding of a pilot study funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine -- part of the National Institutes of Health -- and published in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and colleagues decided to test the placebo effect in asthma patients because it’s easy to assess their physical improvement (as measured by lung function tests) in a short period of time.

They recruited 39 patients who cycled among four treatment options over 12 visits. In some cases they got albuterol -- a bona fide asthma treatment -- through an inhaler, and sometimes they used an inhaler with no medicine, though the subjects didn’t know which was which. Other times, they were given sham acupuncture treatment (but told it was real), and on some visits there was no treatment at all.

Patients said their symptoms improved by 21% on the occasions when they got no treatment. But when they thought they were getting some kind of treatment, they said their symptoms improved much more -- by 50% when they got the albuterol, by 45% when they had the placebo inhaler, and by 46% with the sham acupuncture. (There was no statistically significant difference among those three outcomes.)

Did they really get that much better? When they had the albuterol, patients’ maximum forced expiratory volume in 1 second (a measure of lung function) improved by 20%. But in all three other cases, lung function improved by only 7.1% to 7.5%.

The results demonstrate that the placebo effect is powerful, the researchers said. When it came to patients’ assessments of the treatments, “the placebo effects were equivalent to the drug effect,” they wrote.

These results also suggest that patients can’t be relied upon to make accurate reports of whether their symptoms are getting better. In this study, patients couldn’t tell when the albuterol was making a real difference. In fact, any time they got something that looked like a “treatment,” they reported roughly the same degree of improvement, the researchers said.

“Even though there was a large, objective drug effect ... that was nearly three times the effect of the two placebos and the no-intervention control ,” they wrote, “patients could not reliably detect the difference between this robust effect of the active drug and the effects of inhaled placebo and sham acupuncture.”

A summary of the study is available here.