Columns
Is there a “hidden epidemic” of male depression?
Alan Schlingenbaum, a 43-year-old computer consultant in Wellesley, was a regular guy. Which is to say, he got his work done and acted “the way a male acts on the world,” he says. What he “wasn’t so good at” was intimacy — with his wife, his friends and himself. His wife — now his ex-wife…
Midlife women finding Estrogen alternatives
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…
Effects of a child’s illness on siblings aren’t all bad
“There’s not much that Nicholas can’t do,” his mom, Patti Capano, 36, says brightly. Except walk, swallow, and breathe. Born with spina bifida, a condition in which the spinal cord is not enclosed within the backbone, Nicholas, 9, a third grader in Lynn, needs a weelchair to get around, a ventilator to breathe and tubes…
Sometimes a patient just says no
It’s hard to imagine anyone better equipped to make a complex medical decision than Dr. Mary Catherine Raugust Howell. Howell, a pediatrician, was associate dean for student affairs at Harvard Medical School in the early 1970s, the first woman to hold such a post there. She was also a psychologist and a lawyer, earning a…
New tissue uses reopen circumcision debate
If a government advisory panel gives the high sign, an unusual product may soon hit the medical marketplace: skin-like tissue made from human foreskins. The tissue, donated by mothers who had already decided to have their babies circumcised, could be a boon to people with unhealed wounds such as skin ulcers caused by damaged leg…
Dental lasers – are they the safest way to fill your cavity?
They might fix your phobia but are they the safest way to fill your cavity? Until recently, Glenn Gustafson, a 56-year-old Boston man who manages a Weston country club, was your basic dental phobic. It used to take him weeks to make an appointment, says Gustafson, whose fear of needles and drills mirrors that of…
Making a place for nursing mothers
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 —…
Making it through the holidays
Too much to do, too little time. Too many people to buy holiday gifts for, too little money. Too much food and alcohol, too little will power. And sometimes most important, too little companionship for those who live alone or have lost loved ones, and too much for others suddenly plunged back into chaotic or…
If you get sick, friendly skies turn scary
t was May 1996, somewhere over Nebraska. The 38-year-old woman, six months pregnant, had begun her trip in Cairo, changed planes in New York and was on her way to Los Angeles. Suddenly, she began bleeding profusely and could no longer feel her baby moving. A doctor who happened to be on board felt she…
Grapefruit’s unexpected side effect
About six years ago, Canadian researchers discovered quite by accident that people who sloshed down their high blood pressure medicine with a glass of grapefruit juice got an extra kick: The drug became much more effective, apparently because it was absorbed better by the body. So much more effective, in fact, that some doctors now…
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