By Noralyn O. Dudt About 18 years ago, I went through a medical procedure known as endoscopy. It's a procedure that enables a gastroenterologist to look into the inside of the stomach without making an incision using a medical device called endoscope. Endoscopy is derived from the Greek words "endon", which means 'in or within' and scope which means to 'see'. An endoscope is a thin, tube-like instrument with a light and a lens for viewing and is inserted into the body through the mouth. The tiny video camera on its tip enables doctors to view the internal parts of the stomach and the esophagus. As I was burping more than the normal, the gastroenterologist wanted to check if my sphincter had become loose. A sphincter is a ring of muscle at the junction of the esophagus and the stomach whose function is to prevent reflux of food and acid from the stomach into the esophagus. If the sphincter does not close properly, food and liquid can move b
By Noralyn Dudt BACK in 1790 when Pierre L'Enfant was at work designing what was to become the nation's capital with wide boulevards and common squares, he probably never envisioned the Washington, DC that it is today. Although he had helped George Washington's Continental Army in fighting the army of another George (the King of England) and had an inkling what the new republic would look like, he may not have foreseen nor understood the magnitude of what it would take to smoothly run a democratic republic. That this new nation would require three branches of government to check each other may not have crossed his mind. This was a rather new idea—not since the Athenians who introduced the concept of democracy around two thousand years earlier. That checks and balances would need a myriad of federal agencies to efficiently maintain the functions of government would have been unthinkable at the time: the Supreme Court, the Department of Defense; the Depar