Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

Among ancient peoples, it is said, this precious bodily fluid was used as the basis of a primitive lie detector test. The accused would be given a handful of rice and told to swallow it; if he couldn’t, it meant he was nervous – and guilty. This slippery stuff also helps moisten and digest food,…

Problems with the shoulder, the second most unruly joint in the body after the knee, send 4 million Americans to their doctors each year. With young people – and active older folks as well – it’s usually a sports injury. But aging, along with plain old wear-and-tear, also wreak havoc on this flexible yet delicate…

Doctors have a saying: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras, which means: if you’re stumped by a diagnosis, think of the most likely cause, not the rarest or most exotic. But for 20 to 25 million Americans, the problem really does turn out to be zebras, that is, one of more than 6,000…

As a high school kid, Moe Armstrong had lots going for him. ”We were poor people,” he says, but he was captain of the football team in Bushnell, Ill., and with his high hopes for a military career, was clearly his parents’ ”dream.” While serving in Vietnam, however, Armstrong, now 55 and living in Cambridge,…

Melvin Small, a 36-year-old Dorchester man who works as a parking lot cashier, has your basic guy-thing about going to the doctor. “I’m not really into doctors and stuff like that,” he says. When he finally does go, he asks no questions because he doesn’t want to hear anything bad. “I let him tell me,”…

Boston University psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk likes to tell the story of his trip to Puerto Rico 10 years ago after Hurricane Hugo. The place was humming. ”Everybody was rebuilding houses. I came into this devastated island scene of human resiliency,” he says. Then the feds swooped in, telling people…

For Monica Cianci, a 38-year-old housewife in Cranston, R.I., hell began five years ago — and getting cancer was just the beginning. Before her cancer surgery, she’d had “no trouble with drugs.” But afterward, she wound up addicted to prescription painkillers, opiate drugs like Vicodin and Percocet. To combat that, doctors switched her to the…