Columns
Category: Women's issues
Overlooked Benefits of RU-486
Doris Laird, a humanities professor at Florida A&M, believes RU-486, the controversial abortion pill that won government approval late last month, will be a lifesaver. She should know. The 69-year-old Laird has been taking the drug for seven years, not to induce abortion but to control a slow-growing, benign brain tumor called meningioma that once…
When Drugs Are The Only Choice For A Mother-To-Be
Jennifer Peterson was 35 and barely one week pregnant when she noticed a lump the size of half a banana in her breast. A few weeks later, tests showed she had invasive breast cancer. The irony was mind-numbing: A potential new life beginning inside her, her own life threatened. For months, Jennifer, a resident of…
Treatments Offer Some Relief For Incontinence
Maria Dube is a 37-year-old Burlington woman with two young sons who has a problem that’s often hushed up, though it’s shared by 20 million Americans, two-thirds of them women. The wear and tear of childbirth left Dube, a telephone service representative for a Boston bank, with stress incontinence, which meant that every time she…
Domestic Abuse: Out Of The Shadow
Alerting The Neighbors, Doctors, Courts To Domestic Abuse Helps Women Bring problem To The Fore – And It May Save Their Lives The rice was the tip-off. When the young woman’s mother came to visit her in New York, she was astounded at all the rice her daughter kept in the cupboard. When the mother asked why, the…
Thyroid, Cholesterol Are Linked
Most Americans know by now that eating a diet high in saturated fat can raise cholesterol, a major risk factor for heart disease, which kills nearly 500,000 people a year and is the leading cause of death for both men and women. But what many people don’t know is that an underactive thyroid – the butterfly-shaped gland in…
Calculating The Risks Of Hormone Therapy
It takes a village, or so they say, to raise a child. Well, it’s beginning to take a whole village – and a high-tech one at that – to sort out the risks and benefits of hormone-replacement therapy. Luckily, there is such a village. It’s at New England Medical Center in Boston, where Drs. Nananda…
HPV Test Is Urged By Some
The Pap smear, used to detect cervical cancer, is done 50 million times each year in the United States and remains one of the best cancer-detection tools doctors have. In the 50 years since it was introduced in the United States, the death rate from cervical cancer has dropped by 70 percent. In poor countries…
The Saga Of Soy
Consumers Believe Soy Is Good Food, And Research Shows They’re Partly Right. Americans have fallen in love with the humble soybean. Convinced that in its many incarnations – tofu, soy milk, dietary supplements – soy can prevent everything from heart disease to hot flashes to cancer, consumers have sent soysales soaring. In the 12 months ending in October 1999, supermarket sales of soy foods…
Facial Workouts Don’t, In Fact, Really Work At All
I sat there glued to the TV, trying to imitate the model on the video, who was cheerily flexing her zygomaticus muscles – which run from the cheekbone to the corners of the lips – and keeping the rest of her face relaxed. Not so easy. Then she worked her levator labii superioris, raising her…
Cutting-edge drugs a must in treating rare cancer
With any serious disease, it’s obviously a good idea to find the best doctor – and the best hospital – you can. But with ovarian cancer, a rare disease that strikes 25,000 women a year, kills nearly 15,000, and is almost impossible to detect early – it’s absolutely essential. That’s because there are often no…
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