A caregiver, an expert, a patient: How complementary therapies support the roles of parents of children with life threatening conditions in hospital settings.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to understand emerging roles of parents of hospitalized children with life threatening conditions and to explore how complementary therapies integrated into conventional pediatric care may shift and/or support these roles.

Design: This study is part of a larger research study that examined the introduction of a pediatric integrative medicine service at an acute care children's hospital in Canada. A qualitative descriptive study was conducted using one-on-one telephone interviews with a sample of parents of children included in the larger study.

Parents' experiences of an inpatient pediatric integrative medicine service for symptom management.

Background: Pediatric integrative medicine (PIM) refers to the combination of treatments from conventional medicine and complementary therapies for which there is evidence of safety and effectiveness. As pediatric use of complementary therapies increases, it is important to determine parental views on the use of these therapies by their children.

Objective: To describe parental experiences with a PIM service for management of pain, nausea/vomiting and anxiety in the context of an inpatient pediatric cardiology unit.

Whispering gallery mode resonators for rapid label-free biosensing in small volume droplets.

Rapid biosensing requires fast mass transport of the analyte to the surface of the sensing element. To optimize analysis times, both mass transport in solution and the geometry and size of the sensing element need to be considered. Small dielectric spheres, tens of microns in diameter, can act as label-free biosensors using whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonances.

Label-free detection of ovarian cancer biomarkers using whispering gallery mode imaging.

Small optical microresonators that support whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonances are emerging as powerful new platforms for biosensing. These resonators respond to changes in refractive index and potentially offer many advantages for label-free sensing. Recently we reported an approach for detecting WGM resonances based on fluorescence imaging and demonstrated its utility by quantifying the ovarian cancer marker CA-125 in buffer.

Near-field scanning optical microscopy for high-resolution membrane studies.

The desire to directly probe biological structures on the length scales that they exist has driven the steady development of various high-resolution microscopy techniques. Among these, optical microscopy and, in particular, fluorescence-based approaches continue to occupy dominant roles in biological studies given their favorable attributes. Fluorescence microscopy is both sensitive and specific, is generally noninvasive toward biological samples, has excellent temporal resolution for dynamic studies, and is relatively inexpensive.