12/23/96 - Eat, drink and be miserable

• First you have the eggnog. Then the turkey and stuffing and the puddles of gravy, or maybe a huge slab of roast beef surrounded by a sea of mashed potatoes. Then the rolls, with butter, of course. Maybe a veggie or two for color. And wine, naturally, the more the merrier.

12/16/96 - In estrogen replacement therapy, less may be better

• 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.

12/09/96 - The hottest thing in the cold war is zinc

• It remains to be seen whether the latest remedy for the common cold is really any better than chicken soup, a hot toddy by the fire and a few days off, but enthusiasts are seizing on the latest evidence that zinc lozenges may reduce cold misery this sneezing season. There have been eight studies so far on whether zinc can shorten the duration of colds, and the score stands at 4-4.

12/02/96 Drugs seem to help hair loss and a "baldness cure" may yet be found

• Beth Stein, a 39-year-old New Jersey advertising copywriter, began losing her hair at 19 - presumably because of the same bad genes that affect everyone in her family, male and female. At first, her part just seemed to be getting wider. Soon, whenever she shampooed her hair, she'd wind up with 15 or 20 strands in her hands. Eventually, her hair became so thin it was hard to style it in a way that covered her head.

11/25/96 - There's no cure in sight for Lupus, but outlook's much better

• 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.

11/11/96 - Anxiety it's not just a state of mind

• Jake McDowell, now 10 years old and a budding author, no less, was only eight when he began to think he was going crazy. It started when he heard that one of his Waltham classmates had an infection in his heart and needed a heart transplant.

10/28/96 - Who should you call

• After 14 years of the terrifying asthma attacks that have plagued her son since infancy, Patricia Wooten, 31, of Dorchester has become a pro at triage - the fine art of distinguishing between life-and-death emergencies and scary, but less urgent, medical problems.

10/21/96 - Sob story: why we cry, and how

• The scene: New Zealand, a wilderness area along the coast. The protagonist: A wet, half-naked Las Vegas psychologist named Jeffrey A. Kottler who was near death from hypothermia, having just waded across an icy bay, his clothes and pack on his head, during a solo trek that rangers said should be safe.

10/14/96 Getting your shots is not kids' stuff

• "Here's what got me thinking," says Anne White of Lexington, who is 63. "I've reached the age where I turn to the obits first. And I keep seeing articles about people who die unexpectedly in the hospital."

10/07/96 Caregiving from afar isn't easy

• For the last five years, Joyce Antler, a Brandeis University historian in her early 50s, has been living what she calls "a terrible nightmare." Antler lives in Brookline and is trying to manage the care of her increasingly demented, 84-year-old mother - long distance.

09/23/96 - Women shouldn't feel bad about feeling bad

• 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 those tips and stress-reduction tapes, things turn out quite differently, says Domar, a psychologist at Deaconess Hospital.

09/16/96 - Don't take privacy for granted at infirmary

• You break up with your girlfriend, blow an exam, start drinking every night, then come to your senses: Your friends are right -- you're depressed and should see the campus shrink. But you're freaked: Can the records of a few sessions with a college counselor today come back to haunt you years from now, like when you've just been nominated partner in a law firm?

09/09/96 - Follow the `rule of 3's' on back pain

• Annie Baehr, who works at the Berklee College of Music, figures she has struggled with back pain for nearly 40 of her 55 years. For a while, the Winchester woman says, she trudged to orthopedic specialists, but ``nobody gave me any relief.'' Last year, when the back pain evolved into daily headaches, she turned to prescription painkillers, but they didn't help either. The pills ``covered up the pain,'' she says, but made things worse when she stopped.

08/19/96 - Sometimes they need help, often they just need to talk

• Suddenly, it seemed as if that old "I've fallen and I can't get up" TV ad had sprung to life. Louise Macnair, a widow who is now 93, crashed to the floor in the living room of her Cambridge home and thought, "This is the occasion. I've got to push that button."

08/12/96 - When a teen-ager's parent is facing death

• Miranda Worthen, now 17 and a senior at Newton North High School, was nine when her mother told her she had breast cancer. Miranda had listened for years to her mother's stories about her own mother, who died before Miranda was born. Now, as her mother put her to bed that night eight years ago, Miranda went straight to the heart of the matter.

08/05/96 - Menstrual cycles and rhythm of disease

• 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 or yeast infections or systemic lupus erythematosus, that also seem to wax and wane along with the menstrual cycle?

07/29/96 - Working with the body's rhythms

• The night belongs to asthma. If you're one of America's 10 million asthmatics, you may find that your symptoms vary like, well, night and day, with the odds of an attack vastly greater in the wee hours -- about 4 a.m.-- than in daylight.

07/22/96 - A common sense heat-survival guide

• Last summer, a record-setting, five-day heat wave scorched Chicago, making headlines nationwide not just because of the sizzling temperatures - as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit - but because older people died by the hundreds.

07/08/96 - Painkillers often take toll on stomach

• Gabriel Belt, 66, a retired Brookline accountant, figured he was doing the smart thing by taking an aspirin every other day. Both his father and brother had died of cardiovascular problems in their sixties and he knew aspirin could reduce his own risk. He also figured that if he took the aspirin only every other day and took a type that was enteric-coated to protect his stomach, he should have no problems.

07/01/96 - Don't be afraid of . . . your dentist

• Michele DerVartanian , a 25-year-old student in Medford, says she was 10 when she learned to fear the dentist. She had a very sore, abscessed tooth, and ``I had to have it pulled immediately,'' she recalls. The whole family had plane tickets to Florida that they would have had to cancel unless her tooth was treated right away, she says.

06/24/96 The other heart attack risks - anger - grief - fear

• But just as you can protect against physical triggers, you can protect against the dangers of emotional stress. Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate

06/10/96 - Getting a fix on the thyroid 

• Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate. This suggested, at least to Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos, that mental stress had triggered the increased deaths, most of them from heart attacks.

06/03/96 - Disease Du Jour

• You're convinced you have chronic fatigue syndrome, though you can't get your doctor to believe you. Or maybe you think you've got multiple chemical sensitivity because you seem to be allergic to everything from fabric softener to perfume. Or perhaps it's some kind of chronic Lyme disease - after all, ticks are everywhere and you haven't felt right in years.

05/06/96 - From biotech to bees, new answers to MS

• Kelly Ames, a staff assistant at Harvard Business School, is only 28 years old. But in the six years that she's had MS, a neurological disease that causes loss of coordination, partial blindness, even paralysis, she's tried nearly every remedy in sight.

04/29/96 - It helps to prepare for surgery

• In late December, Ellen Wolk, a 36-year old Arlington woman, lay on a gurney amid the other patients awaiting surgery at Deaconess Hospital, getting more anxious by the minute. Her doctors weren't sure, but they were worried that she had cancer of the thyroid, a plum-sized gland in the neck that makes a hormone critical to normal metabolism.

04/22/96 - Loneliness can be the death of us

• A little over 100 years ago, a small band of Italians left Roseto Val Fortore, a village in the foothills of the Apennines, in hopes of a better life amid the slate quarries of eastern Pennsylvania. Naming their new village Roseto, the group soon recreated the strong community ties they had nurtured in Italy. They lived in three-generation households, centered their lives on family and built their houses so close together that all it took to have

04/15/96 - Winners

• Heaven knows that every one of the 38,500 official entrants (and even the 10,000 "bandits") in today's Boston Marathon should get some kind of a medal just for getting out there and doing what the rest of us can't - or won't. But for many on the sidelines, it's the athletes with handicaps - 106 in wheelchairs, 31 who are visually impaired and three with organ transplants this year - who elicit the biggest lumps in the throat.

04/08/96 - A battle plan for surviving the repetitive strain wars

• Jeff Del Papa's hands and forearms gave out five years ago, after 15 years of pounding keyboards as a computer programmer for a company in Wilmington. Today, Del Papa, a 38-year-old Watertown man who once played medieval musical instruments and opened jars with a flick of the wrist, is back working as a programmer, only now he has to dictate every thought into a voice-activated computer

04/01/96 - Trying everything, more and more cancer patients seek out ancient Chinese remedies to augment modern medicine

• For Ingrid Schorr, 36, an actor and writer who lives in Arlington, the bomb dropped last September: a totally unexpected diagnosis of breast cancer. The diagnosis was traumatic enough, she says, but she also felt ``desperate and sad'' about having to undergo chemotherapy. She knew it would leave her weak and drained.

03/25/96 - All vision problems are not equal

• After 33 years in the rough and tumble of Cambridge politics, including several stints as mayor, Walter Sullivan, 73, has developed a new - albeit unwanted - preoccupation during retirement: eye troubles. In fact, there are four major vision problems that often plague older people - cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy - and Sullivan has them all.

03/18/96 - We may be putting too much stress on stress

• You spend months, maybe years, trying to get pregnant, watching in despair as friend after friend accomplishes this most elemental of biological tasks with apparent ease. Sooner or later, one of these blissfully fertile souls will look you in the eye and, with the best of intentions, diagnose your problem: Stress

03/11/96 - The guru does lunch: hold the fat -- all of it

• Dr. Dean Ornish, the California guru whose radical approach to diet has been shown to reverse heart disease, settles in at the corner table at the Ritz cafe, facing Temptation. Temptation, his luncheon partner one recent winter day, points to the lobster bisque, the special Ritz cheeseburger with aged cheddar, the Boston cream pie.

02/26/96 Wax, pluck, zap. Hair today, gone tomorrow

• Middle age is a time of many ironies - like increasing wisdom amid shrinking job options - but one of the most medically bizarre is this: At midlife, we start losing hair where we want it and start growing it where we don't. Many men, especially those with genetic bad luck, start growing hair on noses and ears just as they lose it on top.

02/19/96 - In medical laboratories, garlic is coming up roses

• Garlic, the "stinking rose" beloved by gourmets and health gurus for nearly 4,000 years now, is finally getting respect from the mainstream medical establishment. First mentioned in 1550 B.C. in an Egyptian medical papyrus, then given a whiff of credibility in 1858, when Louis Pasteur discovered that its juice kills bacteria, garlic is now one of the hottest phytochemicals -- plant compounds -- in medical research.

 02/12/96 - Fear of aids is no reason to avoid dentist

• At 2:30 on a Monday afternoon in the summer of 1989, James Sharpe, a convenience store owner from Northampton, settled back in the dentist's chair to have three teeth extracted. AIDS was, presumably, the last thing on his mind, and he certainly had no risk factors for the disease

01/29/96 - The agony of the feet

• Catherine Wright, 61, a retired telephone operator from Quincy who cheerfully admits she wore "fancy high heels" for years, sat propped up, admiring her podiatrist's handiwork. On her right foot, where a mish-mash of hammertoes and a nasty bunion had been, Wright had a long incision and a string of neat, black stitches from her big toe halfway along the top of her foot. Her other newly-straightened toes sported smaller incisions -- and steel pins to keep them aligned as they healed.

01/22/96 - Fine-tuning the pap smear with technology

• The humble Pap test, a screening test so good that American women now die of cervical cancer at only one-fifth the rate of 50 years ago, is one of the best tools in modern medicine. Unlike mammograms, which detect breast cancers at an early stage, Pap tests spot abnormalities in cervical cells even before they become cancer. But...

01/15/96 - High-fat diet helping many with epilepsy

• Jason Simon, now 15 and an 8th grader in Sandwich, was only 9 on the day when, as he recalls, he "woke up one morning with a bunch of men standing around to take me to the hospital." He had no idea what was going on, but his family was terrified. During the night, his sister had heard him making "gurgling noises," the first sign Jason was having seizures.

01/08/96 - Drink up - or not? studies in women are at odds on alcohol's risks and benefits

• Last May, a huge Harvard study of more than 85,000 women showed that moderate drinking -- about one drink a day -- lowers the overall risk of death, without apparently raising the odds of dying from breast cancer. Six weeks later, another big study -- of more than 16,000 women -- came to a more sobering conclusion: Over a lifetime, even one drink a day may slightly raise breast cancer risk.

01/01/96 - Exercise appears to boost immune system - to a point

• You head out the door, virtue personified, for the first run, or at least brisk walk, of the year. You know -- who doesn't by now? -- that regular exercise is great for your heart, your muscles, your mental health.