Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

Doctors have been freezing sperm for 60 years and embryos (fertilized eggs) for 30. The first pregnancy that resulted from a frozen egg occurred in 1986. But it’s been only in the past few years that fertility specialists have begun freezing eggs with any regularity – so short a time that two major professional groups,…

Christina Shimek, a senior at St. Bernard’s High School in Fitchburg, is only 17, but she has already had more pain than many adults have in a lifetime. A year ago, Shimek, who lives with her parents in Leominster, said she woke up one morning “in excruciating pain in my lower back and pelvic area….

After years of frightening findings on hormone therapy, there is finally some reassuring news for women who start taking hormones close to menopause. The new results suggest that there is a “window of opportunity” near menopause during which estrogen therapy may actually reduce heart disease risk, not raise it, as starting hormones a decade or…

True confession time again: Just when I thought I had made peace with the Great Post-Menopausal Hormone Decision — in my case, sticking with very low dose oral hormones, despite the risks revealed in a 2002 study — I have plunged into the murk again. This time, my curiosity and my game plan are focused…

Millions of American women are being diagnosed with osteopenia, which is not truly a disease, and many are told to take medication they may not need to prevent broken bones they might never get. At the same time, millions of others are never properly diagnosed – or treated – for osteoporosis, a serious condition that…

At teaching hospitals around the country, medical students routinely practice doing pelvic exams on unconscious, anesthetized female patients — often without the patients’ knowledge or consent. Some of the nation’s 126 medical schools have forbidden the practice, but Dr. Ari Silver-Isenstadt, a Baltimore pediatrician and co-author of a 2003 paper on the topic, said the…

Judi Bartnicki, 53, had been an artist all her life. Then MS, or multiple sclerosis, struck four years ago, doing its worst damage in her left hand, the one she needs for painting and drawing. “I kept trying to paint and I would drop everything,” she said. Finally, her fiance David Richardson, figured out a…

Years ago, Boston University psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk tried a simple experiment to understand one of the most disturbing, and bizarre, of all psychiatric disorders: self-mutilation, or more simply, cutting. He asked his cutters, mostly young women, to come see him when they felt the urge to scratch, slash or burn themselves. When…