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Ties That Bind Help Stroke Patients
Fred Kemp, 38, a former restaurant manager in Atlanta, Ga., has one simple goal: To open a refrigerator door with his left hand. Five years ago, Kemp suffered a stroke as he dozed in front of his TV. When he woke up, he recalled, “I couldn’t get up. I tried again and again. I couldn’t…
NUTS
Let’s face it: We were brainwashed. For years, nutritional gurus strummed a one-note samba: All fats are bad. And many of us played along, giving up some of our favorite foods. Like nuts. “Eighty to 90 percent of calories [in nuts] are from fat. So they were labeled as a high-fat food,” said Frank Hu,…
Stressed Out
BURNED BY LAWSUITS AND LOW PAY, RADIOLOGISTS ARE QUITTING, MAKING WOMEN WAIT LONGER TO FIND OUT IF THEY HAVE BREAST CANCER. For years, breast cancer specialists have quite rightly touted mammograms as the best way to detect tumors while they’re small and highly treatable Indeed, if a tumor is caught early – while it’s 1…
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…
Ambiguous Losses Leave Survivors In Limbo
This is a love story – but one with the kind of anguished twist that millions of Americans must grapple with. “Betsy, Betsy, Betsy, I love you,” Frederick “Pete” Peterson, now 84 and living in an assisted-living facility in Peabody, used to say, before Alzheimer’s disease slowly stole his brain. Betsy and Pete Peterson met…
Treatments For Manic Depression Are Improving
Michael Penney, 53, of Holliston used to have, as he puts it, “a charmed life.” Marriage. A son. A master’s degree in marine economics and law, and good jobs, including an eight-year stint at the state office of Coastal Zone Management. But his charmed life came to an end five years ago when he worked…
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…
Should We Worry About Altered Foods?
In the early 1990s, while almost nobody was looking, the biotech industry pulled off quite a coup. Led by industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis and Aventis, genetic engineers began commercializing an idea they’d worked on for years – tinkering with genes to make crops more resistant to insects and herbicides. The basic idea was…
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…
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