Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

Teresa Menz, a 34-year-old teacher from Sidney, N.Y., tried almost everything for her fibroids — benign uterine tumors that cause pain and bleeding in millions of women. With more than 100 fibroids, Menz’s belly was as big as that of a woman 26 weeks pregnant and she hemorrhaged during every menstrual period. She tried hormone…

For the past year, Barbara Lash, a 49-year-old ex-nurse from Franklin, has been determined to fight her hot flashes with anything but the standard prescription drugs like Premarin. On the advice of her nurse practitioner, Lash drinks a soy shake and eats tofu every day. She also nibbles cereal with flax seed, uses herbs like…

When Barbara Doherty, 32, returned to her job at John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. last year three months after having a baby, she encountered a modern woman’s dream. Like a growing number of companies, the Hancock provides a “mother’s room,” where Doherty used a company-funded electric breast milk pump three times a day —…

This summer, a Canadian study of nearly 7,000 women came to a startling conclusion: that a mammogram done during the second half of the menstrual cycle is twice as likely to miss a lurking cancer as one taken during the first half. For now, these researchers think this applies only to women who use or…

It was a moment that 14-year-old Meaghan O’Connor of Dover, N.H., says may stay with her for the rest of her life. She was charging for the ball in the midst of a heated basketball game last summer. Suddenly, another girl’s knee smashed into hers. “I fell to the floor,” recalls O’Connor. Right away, “it…

Call it coffee klatch research. Or book group medicine. Or just plain winging it. By whatever name, women of a certain age are trying to figure out for themselves — and with each other — the answers to a midlife question doctors won’t have good answers to for years: If you’re taking postmenopausal estrogen and…

Lupus — “the wolf” — began stalking Debra McGann, a 40-year-old Waltham teacher, 15 years ago. It made her deathly ill during all four of her pregnancies, and probably caused two of those pregnancies to fail. It also triggered intermittent seizures and what McGann calls “little confusions.” For years, though, neither she nor her doctors…

When a stressed-out man walks into Alice Domar’s office and walks out an hour later with a relaxation tape in hand, chances are he’ll do what she recommends — take 20 minutes a day to listen to it. And feel much better. But when a woman with the same — or worse — symptoms gets…

What if you had breast cancer and discovered that timing surgery to coincide with a particular point in the menstrual cycle might make a difference in your prognosis? Or what if you had diabetes and learned that insulin sensitivity varies with menstrual rhythms? And what if you were plagued by other miseries, like migraine headaches…