Nationally Sindicated Fitness, Health, and Medicine Columnist
by Judy Foreman
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 can lead to potentially devastating fractures.
by Judy Foreman
Nancy Achin Audesse, 45, knows a thing or two about serious illness and optimism.
by Judy Foreman
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 practice continues to be widespread.
by Judy Foreman
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.
by Judy Foreman
Eighty-two year old Marie Desilets lives in Dunstable, about an hour’s drive from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. When she discovered that she needed radiation for breast cancer a year or so ago, she faced a dilemma.
by Judy Foreman
She had been, she says, “a smart cookie,” a university grad who had built up a successful business in Toronto as a marketing consultant.
But several years ago, when she was 38, she had chemotherapy for breast cancer and wound up with a bad case of “chemo brain” — cognitive problems such as trouble with thinking and memory that many cancer patients, and a growing number of doctors, believe may be related to chemotherapy.
by Judy Foreman
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.
by Judy Foreman
Do men and women handle stress differently? Or, to put it more provocatively, do women have a built-in hormonal advantage when it comes to dealing with chronic stress?
That’s the (highly loaded) question at the heart of a fascinating body of research that’s got the Net humming, with enthusiastic emails flying from woman to woman.
by Judy Foreman
Anna Coppinger, 61, a school cafeteria worker from Hingham, lies waiting outside the operating room at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, chatting with her husband and daughters – and wincing whenever she jostled the needle that had been placed in her left breast several hours earlier to guide surgeons to the exact spot where her tumor lay.
by Judy Foreman
Let those biostatisticians slug it out down at the National Cancer Institute – I’m getting my yearly mammograms anyway. Then again, the way things are going, should I?