Recovered from a debilitating illness

That's also true in a metaphoric sense. Seven years ago, when he was 12, Duggan was stricken by a crippling illness that kept him from attending school for four years. Yet, that didn't stop him from completing his work.

Tonight, Duggan will be one the 59 students honored as Excellence in Education recipients. The award recognizes Kalamazoo County's top graduating seniors based on grade-point average and test scores.

"To go through what he's gone through and get all A's - I've been doing this for 11 years, and I've ever had anything like this before," said Susan Benton, Duggan's counselor at Norrix."John-Michael is amazing. He turns everything into a positive."

In the fall of 1999, when he was in seventh grade, Duggan discovered an odd rash on his leg.

It was diagnosed as ringworm, but puzzling ailments followed over the next year, including two bouts with pneumonia and a series of strange symptoms - dizziness, body aches, fatigue.

By the winter of his eighth-grade year, Duggan could no longer attend school. Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic thought it was chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia. Doctors at The Mayo Clinic suspected multiple sclerosis.

It wasn't until June 2002 that Kalamazoo doctors realized he had Lyme disease, a bacterial illness spread by deer ticks. Relatively rare in the Midwest and often misdiagnosed, the disease can cause chronic arthritis and nervous-system abnormalities if untreated.

Duggan's vision became so bad he couldn't read, and he was so dizzy and weak that he had to use a wheelchair. After the diagnosis, it took two years of treatment and therapy for him to recover.

Too ill to go to school for eighth through 11th grades, Duggan kept up with his schoolwork with the help of Doug Barrow, a Kalamazoo Public Schools' tutor.

"He was an absolute lifesaver," Duggan's mother, Karen Duggan, said of Barrow.

Duggan was allowed to honor two "significant educators" as part of the Excellence in Education award. He named Barrow and Benton, who will accompany him to tonight's reception.

Even with tutoring, the challenges were daunting. Because of his poor vision, Duggan had to listen to books on tape and dictate book reports. He had to do math problems in his head instead of on paper. Extreme fatigue limited how much work he could do at one time.

It wasn't until the fall of 2004 that Duggan was finally healthy enough to return to school for what was supposed to be his senior year.

"I was terrified to go back," he said. "I hadn't talked to most of my friends for four years, and they'd gone on with their lives. The last time I'd gone to school was (middle school), and now I was going to this big school with all these people. I didn't know how high school worked."

He had spent four years surrounded by adults rather than teenagers. In some ways, Duggan's illness had made him more mature, but in other ways he felt stuck in eighth grade.

Fortunately, he said, "the minute I walked in the school, those fears went way."

He became a disc jockey for the school radio station and worked in the school store and the library. His old study habits kicked back in, and Duggan has worked hard to maintain his straight-A average.

Instead of graduating with his class last year, he decided to stay at Norrix for a second year to better experience high school and take classes he missed during his illness.

This spring, he's been battling kidney stones, but no matter how much pain he's been in, he hasn't missed school. "I missed four years of school," he said, shrugging. "Now, as long as I can see and I can walk, I'm coming."

Next fall, he's going to Western Michigan University to major in psychology and Spanish, with hopes of becoming a psychologist. His Lyme disease symptoms have mostly abated, although doctors predict he'll have some aches and pains for the rest of his life.

Still, Duggan and his parents see his future as bright.

"The other day I realized, I can do whatever I want," he said. "There are unlimited possibilities."

Winning an Excellence in Education award has been icing on the cake, his parents said.

"My mom always says that everything happens for a reason, and for years I didn't see it," his mother said as she dabbed at tears. "But this is the reason."

`Shock therapy may improve erectile dysfunction`

Good news for those suffering from sever sexual impotence -- scientists have developed a new shock wave therapy which they say could significantly benefit
people who don`t respond well to conventional therapies.

A team at Rambam Healthcare Campus in Haifa who carried out the "extracorporeal shock wave therapy" on 29 men with sever erectile dysfunction (ED) found that the technique significantly improved their sexual function.

The patients in the study continued to see improvements two months after the treatment had stopped, and close to 30 per cent of them achieved normal sexual function and no longer required medications, LiveScience reported.

Extracorporeal shock waves have been used to break up kidney stones, but the sound waves used in the study to treat ED were much less intense and no men reported pain or adverse events during the treatment, the researchers said.

The results, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, suggest that sound wave therapy may used to treat ED patients who don`t respond well to conventional therapies, they said.

However, the researchers said, the study was small and the results could have been a placebo effect, so more work is needed to validate the findings.

In the study, the participants, aged over 60, underwent 12 shock treatments over nine weeks. One month after the last treatment, participants began taking ED drugs.

Two months after the treatments concluded, the ED scores improved in 75 per cent of the men in the study. Eight men, nearly 30 per cent, had erections in the normal range when
they used an ED pill. Blood flow improved in all the men.

"For many men, this means the difference between being able and being unable to achieve vaginal penetration," said study researcher Ilan Gruenwald, an associate director of the neuro-urology unit at the Medical Center.

However, other experts have expressed doubts over the success of the the therapy.

The results of the study are somewhat counterintuitive, considering that sound waves used in kidney stone treatments are designed to be destructive, said Dr Andrew Kramer, a
urologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

"It`s like saying, take your penis and hit it with a hammer a couple of times," Kramer said.

Even if the benefits of extracorporeal shock wave therapy are confirmed by future research, the therapy may never be mainstream, Kramer said. For one reason, it requires a special machine.

The researchers acknowledged their work is preliminary, but, given their results, they said they hope others in their field remain open-minded about the therapy.

Study links kidney stones and gallstones

People who have had a kidney stoneseem to have a heightened risk of gallstones -- and vice versa, according to a new study.

Researchers already know that obesity, diabetes and having a generally unhealthy diet put people at risk for both types of stones. But even when those common risks were taken into account, the link remained.

The report "raises our antenna to this shared relationship between these two disorders," said Dr. Brian Matlaga, a urologist at theJohns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

"From an anecdotal standpoint, certainly it's not an uncommon scenario that a patient would have had both," Matlaga, who wasn't involved in the new research, told Reuters Health. But, he continued, "I'm a little bit at a loss trying to define what that relationship would be."

That's because stones in the kidney and gallbladder form differently, he said, and are made of two different things -- kidney stones of calcium and gallstones of cholesterol, most of the time.

Data for the current analysis came from three different long-term studies of nurses and doctors who completed a health and lifestyle questionnaire, then reported any new medical conditions every two years afterward. In total, more than 240,000 people were followed for between 14 and 24 years.

Over that time, there were about 5,100 new kidney stones diagnosed and close to 18,500 new cases of gallstones.

Depending on the population -- male or female, older or younger -- people with a history of gallstones were between 26 and 32 percent more likely to get a kidney stone than people who hadn't ever had gallstones.

And the link also went in the opposite direction. A past history of kidney stones meant study participants were between 17 and 51 percent more likely to report a new gallstone.

That was after factoring in the impact of age, diabetes, high blood pressure, weight and certain aspects of diet on the risk of both kinds of stones.

Researchers led by Eric Taylor from the Maine Medical Center in Portland said it's possible that a shift in the type of bacteria in the intestines might somehow predispose people to both kidney stones and gallstones. But, Taylor said, "the fairest thing is that we just don't know" why the two would be linked.

In their report in the Journal of Urology the researchers echoed Matlaga's call for more detailed research into any explanations for a common cause -- which might help doctors prevent or treat both kidney stones and gallstones, they added.

"They are really two different kinds of stones, so the relationship is not going to be simple between the two conditions," Taylor told Reuters Health.

Matlaga said that for now, there are steps people can take to reduce their risk of both gallstones and kidney stones, even if they've already had one condition.

"You'd like to try to minimize those common risk factors and work on things like weight loss and cholesterol control," he said.

Taylor agreed that the findings "emphasize the importance of healthy diet and healthy weight."

Sixteen budding businesses to watch, from the UW Business Plan Competition

Yesterday was my first exposure to the annual UW Business Plan Competition, held by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Foster School of Business — and it was great to be in the midst of all that entrepreneurial energy.

I was one of nearly 280 judges who were given $1,000 in fictional money to “invest” in at least five of the 37 teams pitching their businesses during the trade-show style investment round at the Bell Harbor Convention Center in Seattle.

That process led to a “Sweet 16″ of businesses that will compete in the next round, on May 26. Here’s the list, along with alternates. Lots of interesting businesses here, with many intersections with technology.

AgComm, UW Bothell, UW: Offers an affordable solution of hardware, software and services that help farmers monitor and combat environmental threats to their crops through a single web-based application.

Aqueduct Neurosciences, UW: Developing innovative medical device technology to improve the treatment of hydrocephalus through improved control, feedback, and failure prevention.

C6 Systems, UW: Developed a novel slow-pyrolysis system that turns woody biomass into charcoal, or biochar, at the site of forestry operations.

Fluentizer, UW: Windows PC and Android mobile software that helps people learn English at the level of a native speaker. It works like an audio book reader and provides translation for words that you don’t understand.

LodeSpin Labs, UW: Manufactures tracers for Magnetic Particle Imaging, a new medical imaging technology capable of replacing CT and MRI for imaging patients with heart disease and cancer.

Point of Care Technologies, UW: Developed prototype medical devices which interface with Android-based smart phones via Bluetooth.

PotaVida, UW: Provides a low-cost, reusable tool that takes the guesswork out of solar disinfection of water, for use in disaster relief and areas lacking potable water.

Pterofin, UW: Designs and manufactures innovative wind energy devices for residential and commercial use.

Punchkeeper, Seattle University: A customer loyalty smart phone application that digitally replaces paper punch cards making businesses more competitive while saving consumers money, hassle, and wallet space.

Rolling Stone Medical Ultrasound, UW: Provides radiation-free kidney stone detection and the application of “ultrasound-induced acoustic force” to reposition the stones.

SkyFu, UW: Provide small to medium-sized firms a comfortable and easy to use software platform to manage their Social Media presence and reputation. We are different from the competition in cost, scope and expertise.

Solanux, WSU, University of Idaho: Produces patented potato food ingredients with high amounts of resistant starch (RS) which help lower a person’s glycemic index response, improve insulin levels, and lower fat and cholesterol levels.

SoothieSuckers, UW: Creates all-natural ice pops infused with herbal remedies for children’s cough and cold.

Stockbox Grocers, Bainbridge Graduate Institute: A mini grocer tucked inside a reclaimed shipping container, to provide fresh produce and basic staples in urban food deserts.

Tripbox, UW: Makes leisure trip planning simple, smart and enjoyable by providing an easy to use online service that automatically generates an itinerary that optimizes cost, timing, and routes and allows users to further customize their trip.

Urban Canopy, UW: Provides SaaS software that guides customers through design, execution, and maintenance of green building initiatives, including LEED certification.

First Alternate: Feral Motion, Seattle University, UW: Provides the best automated filming experience in the action sports world.