Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

A SPECIAL REPORT Etched in the memories of Dennis and Melinda Stover is the day they learned their baby would be born with spina bifida. It was January, and Melinda, a 26-year-old-bank teller from Murfreesboro, Tenn., was 20 weeks pregnant. She was having an ultrasound exam because they already had two girls “and if it…

She’s 37, and, at 5-feet-7 and 160 pounds, not as thin as she’d like. So when her new boyfriend suggested liposuction and agreed to foot the $6,500 bill, she agreed. “I was slightly insulted,” says the woman, a graphic artist from Roxbury. But her boyfriend had had the same surgery and she wanted to be…

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…

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…

To listen to Lisette Mancini, a 40-year old Walpole audiologist and mother of three, you might be tempted to conclude that thyroid troubles are a blessing. Years ago, as a student at Boston College, her metabolism was cranked so high she “flew through school because I had so much time to study. I never slept….

For years, millions of Americans with arthritis have been caught in a troublesome trap. If they don’t take medication, they often suffer severe pain and life-wrecking disability. Yet if they do, they risk worrisome side effects. Some drugs, like methotrexate and high dose prednisone, can suppress the immune system. Others — notably painkillers like aspirin,…

Women, at least in America, outlive men by six years. So how, then, do you account for this: Women are five times as likely as men to get migraines and osteoporosis, two to three times as likely to get seriously depressed, and much more likely to get diseases like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and scleroderma, in…

Over the years, Kathy Duffy, a 38-year-old school teacher in Reading, tried many treatments for her severe incontinence — pills, injections, exercises, even “retraining” her bladder. Everything helped some. Even so, she was always ducking out on her second graders to rush to the bathroom. She didn’t sleep much, either. The urge to urinate woke…