Columns
Alternative to estrogen may get OK
For more than 50 years now, there has been only one drug around to combat the immediate and longer-term effects of menopause: estrogen. The plusses of estrogen are extraordinary — reduced hot flashes, less vaginal dryness, lower levels of “bad” and higher levels of “good” cholsterol, reduced risk of osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and maybe even…
Implants? chew on this first
Last Friday, Ed Pearson, a 45-year-old computer programmer from Charlestown, climbed into the dentist’s chair for what has become almost routine for him: dental implant surgery. At roughly $2,000 per implant, not counting the crown that goes on top, Pearson wasn’t thrilled – who would be? But he was upbeat. The two implants he’s had…
Team hopes to unearth 1918 flu virus
Three weeks ago, an international team of scientists, armed with radar and a somewhat grisly plan, huddled in front of seven grave markers near a church in the tiny Norwegian coal mining village of Longyearbyen, population 1,400. The light was winter dim, as it always is this time of year in the archipelago that Americans…
Brain tumor – a dreaded diagnosis, but methods are improving
It is still perhaps the most dreaded diagnosis but methods of treating it are improving. Jordan Fieldman was a 23-year-old first year student at Harvard Medical School when he was told that a brain tumor would probably kill him before the year was out. For five years, he’d had “horrendous headaches” that were written off…
It is a tangled medical web they weave on Internet
A few weeks ago, a 35-year-old Connecticut man was stunned by his diagnosis – scleroderma – and even more surprised by his doctor’s advice: Whatever you do, don’t check the Internet. “It’s not just that there’s misinformation out there,” Dr. Ann Semolic an internist in Willimantic, says she told the frightened young man. “It’s that…
A question of timing – Does it matter when in your cycle you have a mammogram or breast surgery?
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…
Hypochondriacs need help, too
Things should have been blissful for Carla Cantor, a New Jersey freelance writer who had just had her second child. But soon after her son’s birth in 1990, Cantor, now 42, began experiencing bad pains in her wrist. Doctors suggested cortisone shots, wrist splints, not nursing the baby. Nothing helped. As her pain spiraled out…
Bad timing acne flares as fall starts
Brian Dube was 14 when severe acne first struck. “It was pretty bad,” says Dube of his initiation into the blotchy hell that virtually all teenagers experience to some degree just before and during puberty. But a five-month course of the potent drug Accutane worked miracles. “My face was very, very clear” for years, says…
Migraine – New drugs offer the best hope yet
It was June, 1996 and Dr. Michael Cutrer, head of the headache unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, was hard at work as usual in his sixth floor lab in Charlestown. Suddenly, he’d look at somebody “and part of the face wouldn’t be there, just a shimmering blind spot” that grew “until half of the vision…
Help on way for those with bowel disease
Joel Cutler was 8 or 9 when he came down with Crohn’s disease, a “brutal” illness, as he puts it now, that causes incapacitating diarrhea and painful abdominal cramps. When he was 12, he lived for a year with an ostomy, an artificial opening in the abdomen through which fecal matter empties into a bag….
Categories
Aging
Alcohol
Allergies
Alternative Medicine
Anxiety
Breast Cancer
Cancer
Dental
Depression
Exercise/Fitness
General Medicine
Heart Disease
Hormone replacement
Loneliness/Loss
Nutrition
Pain
Sleep Problems
Women's issues