Columns
Category: General Medicine
Medical needs, politics collide
Sixteen years ago, Doris Laird, a humanities professor at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University in Tallahassee, developed a benign brain tumor the size of an orange. She had surgery — an operation that took 22 1/2 hours. It worked, or so she thought. But four years later, the tumor, a meningioma, was back. She had…
For some, it’s sneezing all the way
You’re running around getting ready for Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Ramadan – or just a generic holiday party. You shop. You cook. You get the candles from the bottom drawer, the decorations from the basement. If Christmas is your tradition, you probably get a tree, too, all fragrant and piney.You certainly don’t need…
Freezing, balsting, peeling away scars
Ken Glasser, a 39-year-old Billerica man who works as a buyer of components for aircraft instruments, has been through hell trying to get rid of the stubborn scars on his chest. He tried laser treatments, which reduced the thick, ropy scars, called keloids, for a while. But when the treatments ended, the scars – which…
At last, help for the fungus amoung us
So you think toenail fungus is a joke. Not even a blip on the radar screen. Of interest only to your pedicurist, if that. Well, try telling that to Gertrude Patenaude, a 57-year-old teacher-librarian from Portsmouth, R.I. who had the fungus on every toe. “It was brutal,” she says. “I couldn’t put my feet in…
That second concussion could be a deadly one
It was five years ago, a classic football afternoon. With his mom and stepfather cheering from the stands, Brandon Schultz, a lineman for Anacortes High School in Washington state, took what his mother, Lane Phelan, recalls as a “hard tackle.” Brandon looked “shook up” and sat out the rest of the game. Later, he told…
Finding a combination to fight hepatitis C
Until now, there has been no truly effective treatment for hepatitis C, the blood-borne virus that is spread in the same ways as AIDS, and that is believed to infect about 4 million Americans. A drug called interferon helps in 40 percent of cases, but the benefits are short-lived. Only 10 to 15 percent of…
Meditating helps, but how is a mystery
The idea of standing stark naked in a little booth soaking up UV light three times a week doesn’t seem all that bad as medical treatments go, especially since it can help ameliorate psoriasis, an itchy, scaly, disfiguring skin disease. But many people do find the experience stressful, which is why meditation guru Jon Kabat-Zinn…
‘Deep pockets’ that nobody wants
It was the “Floss or Die” poster that got to 54-year-old Jack Kelsch of Wareham. Kelsch works as a grants administrator at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, where the perils of periodontal disease are standard water cooler fare and “deep pockets” means gum disease, not money.But as Kelsch discovered, that poster was no joke….
The midwives’ time has come – – again
Carol Rose, a Harvard-trained lawyer from Melrose, was pregnant with her first child two years ago when her health plan pulled a switch. She was in the exam room, waiting for her female doctor when a male doctor walked in. She’s not anti-men, or anti-doctor, but this guy was a bad match. “I had a…
Herbal hazards taken alone or with prescription drugs, some of these innocent-sounding `natural’ remedies can be dangerous
If your doctor suggested that you take two different sleeping pills that have never been tested in combination, would you do it? If she recommended an energy-booster, but you couldn’t tell from the label what was in the bottle, would you take that? What if she told you to ingest a medication normally used on…
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