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Sorting out the benefits, risks of HRT
It’s never been easy sorting out the pros and cons of taking estrogen supplements at menopause. Women have always had to weigh the many benefits — reduced hot flashes, lower risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, colon cancer, and perhaps Alzheimer’s — against the modest but distressing risks, notably an increased chance of breast cancer and…
Orphan diseases leave patients on their own
Doctors have a saying: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras, which means: if you’re stumped by a diagnosis, think of the most likely cause, not the rarest or most exotic. But for 20 to 25 million Americans, the problem really does turn out to be zebras, that is, one of more than 6,000…
Clues but no answers on schizophrenia
As a high school kid, Moe Armstrong had lots going for him. ”We were poor people,” he says, but he was captain of the football team in Bushnell, Ill., and with his high hopes for a military career, was clearly his parents’ ”dream.” While serving in Vietnam, however, Armstrong, now 55 and living in Cambridge,…
A visit most men would rather not make
Melvin Small, a 36-year-old Dorchester man who works as a parking lot cashier, has your basic guy-thing about going to the doctor. “I’m not really into doctors and stuff like that,” he says. When he finally does go, he asks no questions because he doesn’t want to hear anything bad. “I let him tell me,”…
Cancer treatment needs emotional rescue
Last week, Harvard researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that 28 percent of newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients turn to complementary therapies such as massage, herbs, relaxation techniques, and self-help groups – even though they had never used so-called alternative medicine before. In fact, the women most likely to turn to such therapies,…
Instant grief therapy may be no quick fix
Boston University psychiatrist and trauma specialist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk likes to tell the story of his trip to Puerto Rico 10 years ago after Hurricane Hugo. The place was humming. ”Everybody was rebuilding houses. I came into this devastated island scene of human resiliency,” he says. Then the feds swooped in, telling people…
Some just say yes to novel detox program
For Monica Cianci, a 38-year-old housewife in Cranston, R.I., hell began five years ago — and getting cancer was just the beginning. Before her cancer surgery, she’d had “no trouble with drugs.” But afterward, she wound up addicted to prescription painkillers, opiate drugs like Vicodin and Percocet. To combat that, doctors switched her to the…
Drugs could eradicate a fatal cancer
For years now, the incidence of some types of lymphoma – the cancer that killed former US Sen. Paul Tsongas, Jackie Onassis and Jordan’s King Hussein – has been among the fastest rising of all cancers, and no one is quite sure why. The death rate has been increasing, too. This year, 64,000 Americans will…
Is there a doctor in the hospital
Several months ago, when Lloyd A. Coombs, 61, a retired machinist from Springfield, was rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure, he was surprised to find the person in charge of his care would not be his primary doctor but one he’d never heard of with a title he’d never come across: hospitalist. Actually,…
Beating anger
Blame it on Aristotle, who believed that watching tragic plays led to a healthy catharsis of emotions like pity and fear. Or on Freud, who, at least in his early days, also took the hydraulic view — that pent-up feelings, like steam in a pressure cooker, need release lest they cause hysteria or phobia. Or…
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