1997 General Medicine



 
Click Date
 to read brief description		 Click Short Title to read column
12/15/97 Making it through the holidays
12/08/97 If you get sick, friendly skies turn scary
12/01/97 Grapefruit's unexpected side effect
11/17/97 Alternative to estrogen may get OK
11/10/97 Implants? Chew on this first
11/03/97 Team hopes to unearth 1918 flu virus
10/27/97 Brain Tumor
10/13/97 It is a tangled medical web they weave on internet
10/06/97 A question of timing - Does it matter when in your cycle you have a mammogram or breast surgery?
09/29/97 Hypochondriacs need help, too
09/22/97 Bad timing acne flares as fall starts
09/08/97 Migraine: For over 16 million sufferers, new drugs offer the best hope
08/11/97 Crohn's disease: Help on the way for those with bowel disease
08/04/97 Diabetes a `big bad ugly disease'
07/28/97 Latex allergies can cause misery
07/14/97 So, you're stuck in sleep-loss hell
07/07/97 Home tests useful, but some caveats
06/30/97 Cutting through the baloney in high-protein diets
06/23/97 Chiropractic makes gains vs. skeptics
06/16/97 Dealt a bad hand, black males can beat the odds
06/09/97 Pets - the good, the bad and the bites
05/26/97 Medical steroids raise risk of once-rare condition
05/19/97 Lyme disease: it's frustrating, mystifying and very sneaky
05/12/97 The Long Road Back
05/05/97 For many with cancer the problem is fatigue
04/28/97 Herb found to aid mild depression
04/28/97 Kava Root is Hot Herb for Anxiety
04/21/97 Don't wait for allergy to hit; strike first
04/14/97 How music tunes our mental strings
04/07/97 People, and pets, touting arthritis remedy
03/24/97 Should you take that test?
03/17/97 The rush is now on to echinacea
03/10/97 Lymphedema finally getting some attention
02/24/97 It's enough to make you crazy
02/10/97 Testicular cancer: Scary but almost curable
02/03/97 Gingseng $ 350 million for not much
01/27/97 Pill Mills
01/20/97 Tempest in a juice box
01/13/97 The downside for female athletes

12/15/97 - 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 abusive families.

12/08/97 - If you get sick, friendly skies turn scary

  • It 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.

12/01/97 - 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 worry that people who usually use water to take certain calcium channel blockers may wind up lowering their blood pressure too steeply if they suddenly switch to grapefruit juice.

11/17/97 - 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 Alzheimer's. Not to mention better mood and intellectual function, at least for some women.

11/10/97 - 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 before caused little pain, except to the wallet, and look good - "like having real teeth again."

11/03/97 - 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 call Spitsbergen, less than 800 miles from the North Pole.

10/27/97 - Brain Tumor

  • 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 as stress, he says. He'd also had trouble seeing what was on the blackboard since his undergraduate days as a neuroscience major at Harvard.

10/13/97 - 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 there are 100 different ways any disease can play out, but you will just have one. Let's not worry about the other 99."

10/06/97 - 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 have used hormones such as birth control pills. And because there is so little other research on the question, the finding could turn out to be a statistical fluke.

09/29/97 - 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.

09/22/97 - 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.

09/08/97 - Migraine - For more than 16 million sufferers, 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 in both eyes was sparkling and shimmering,'' he recalls.

08/11/97 - Crohn's disease: Help on the 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. At 15, he spent three months at Children's Hospital, living solely on intravenous feedings to give his tortured gut a rest and his body a chance to grow.

08/04/97 - A `big bad ugly disease' - As incidence of diabetes rises, a major effort is launched to head off costly and debilitating illness

  • Chances are, you think of diabetes as a problem of sheer bad luck -- either you get it or you don't. But preliminary studies have suggested that, far from being inevitable, diabetes may actually be preventable, even if you're among the 21 million Americans at higher-than-normal risk.

07/28/97 - Latex allergies can cause misery

  • Lise C. Borel, now 42, had been happily practicing dentistry for 10 years when she began noticing welts on her neck whenever she touched herself after removing her latex gloves. Several weeks later, she suddenly found she couldn't breathe within three minutes of donning her gloves.

07/14/97 - So, you're stuck in sleep-loss hell

  • Doctors say it may not ruin your life but it can make your life miserable. For years now, Allan Rechtschaffen, a psychology professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, has been watching what happens when he totally deprives rats of sleep.

07/07/97 - Home tests useful, but some caveats

  • For decades, home pregnancy tests have allowed the worried and the hopeful to find out - in private - whether a baby is on the way. For years, people with diabetes have been able to monitor blood sugar levels, with increasingly sophisticated test kits, and adjust their insulin accordingly.

06/30/97 - Cutting through the baloney in high-protein diets

  • High-protein diets, America's latest food fad, are like an overstuffed deli sandwich - some healthy nuggets here and there surrounded by a fair amount of unhealthful baloney. That, at least, is the view of mainstream nutritionists, many of whom feel that Americans hooked on books like "The Zone," by Barry Sears, "Protein Power," by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, and "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution" are being fed a mixture of truths, half-truths and totally unproven assertions.

06/23/97 - Chiropractic makes gains vs. skeptics

  • Arthur Borneman, a 74-year-old Quincy man, had a pain in the neck. He tried painkillers, months of therapy at a rehab hospital, massage, exercise, even a dental specialist in case the problem was jaw pain. To his surprise, the dentist urged him to see a chiropractor, but Borneman said he "had no faith in chiropractors.'' Still, figuring he had nothing to lose, Borneman went to Barry Freedman, a Quincy chiropractor who practices with his daughter, Gabrielle. Four weeks after his first visit, Borneman says, "I am much better. I feel like living again."

06/16/97 - Dealt a bad hand, black males can beat the odds

  • They were captured, marched to the coast, kept in pens, then chained in the holds of slave ships, often deprived of life's basics: salt and water. Many of them died. Those who survived - the genetic ancestors of today's African Americans - may have been the ones most able to conserve salt in their bodies, speculates Dr. Clarence Grim, a high blood pressure specialist at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

06/09/97 - Pets - the good, the bad and the bites

  • Don't let your dog lick the baby's mouth. Don't splash around in a pool of water where some critter may have just peed.  And whatever you do, don't pick an aggressive dog as a pal for your kids. Beyond that - and a few other common sense things like washing your hands a lot - it's fairly easy to live in domestic bliss, and health, with most pets, despite the more than 200 so-called zoonotic diseases, illnesses that animals can pass on to humans.

05/26/97 - Medical steroids raise risk of once-rare condition

  • Louise Pace was a happy, 42-year-old commercial real estate broker in Florida when her body began going bananas. Bruises popped up on her legs, so she went to her doctor, who suspected leukemia. It wasn't, so the doctor suspected abuse.

05/19/97 - Lyme disease: it's frustrating, mystifying and very sneaky

  • Lyme disease is one of the most insidious illnesses around. It gets you while you're doing something pleasant -- like walking in the woods on a summer day. The tick that carries it is so tiny -- the size of the period at the end of this sentence -- that you can barely see it. And seeing it is important, because if you pick it off with tweezers within 24 to 48 hours, chances are you won't get sick.

05/12/97 - The Long Road Back

  • Burns, emotional scars linger long after the body has healed. It was late, almost midnight, a few nights before Thanksgiving. Heather Whiles, then 20, home for the holiday from Columbia University, was cruising down Route 125 on her way from North Andover to Boston to see a friend. She was sober, but tired, and fell asleep at the wheel

05/05/97 - For many with cancer the problem is fatigue

  • You might think, to hear about Dr. Wendy S. Harpham's life, that it's perfectly obvious why she's always exhausted. For one thing, she and her husband run a very busy household in Dallas with three kids, ages 8, 10, and 12.

04/28/97a - Herb found to aid mild depression

  • Karin Taylor, 58, a tax accountant in Toronto, was stumped. She had a good  marriage, two "wonderful kids," and a job she loved. “I had no reason whatsoever to feel depressed," she says. "Yet there it  was."

04/28/97b - Kava Root is Hot Herb for Anxiety

  • Traditionally, whenever the people of the South Pacific islands wanted to welcome a visitor or provide a social lubricant for communal rituals, they drank a potent potion made from the roots of an intoxicating pepper plant, kava. The jaw-breaking job of turning the tough root of the piper methysticum into homemade brew fell to young virgins -- male or female, depending on the island -- who spent hours chewing the root, then spitting out the masticated mush into a communal pot, where it was left to mature for several hours before being quaffed.

04/21/97 - Don't wait for allergy to hit; strike first

  • There may still be patches of snow smothering your crocuses, but believe it or not, springtime allergy season is only about 10 days away - and for some poor souls it's already begun. But you may be able to head off trouble before it starts.

04/17/97 - People, and pets, touting arthritis remedy

  • Dr. Margaret Slater, a veterinarian and epidemiologist at Texas A & M University, gives the stuff to all her loved ones, two-footed and four-footed, who suffer from arthritis. "My dog, my horse, my mother and her dog are all benefitting from it," she says with a chuckle.

04/14/97 - How music tunes our mental strings

  • Music fills the days at the John Eliot Elementary School in Needham. When recess is over a teacher may put something soothing on the classroom CD or tape player, perhaps a Baroque piece whose steady rhythm evokes the 60 beats a minute of a heart at peace.

03/24/97 - Should you take that test?

  • For people with no symptoms routine screening can have a downside. A little over a week ago, a group of cancer gurus, having pondered 40 studies on the potential value of screening men for prostate cancer, ended up much like a hung jury. The preponderance of the evidence, they concluded, simply did not show, as many had hoped, that the benefits of testing every man over 50 for prostate cancer outweighed the risks.

03/17/07 - The rush is now on to echinacea

  • The Cheyenne used it for sore gums, the Comanches, for toothaches and sore throats. Other Native Americans kept it on hand for snakebites or syphilis. Modern Americans seem to love the stuff, too, even if we can't pronounce it. In fact, echinacea - that's eck-in-EH-shia - is now the top selling herbal remedy in health food stores, though garlic and ginseng claim top honors in overall sales.

03/10/97 - Lymphedema finally getting some attention

  • Marianne Lynnworth, 66, a writer and former geographer, isn't sure why she got lymphedema, though she thinks a case of frostbite when she was a teenager probably touched off a hereditary tendency to the disease. But she sure does know what a struggle it's been for the last 52 years.

02/24/97 - It's enough to make you crazy

  • Maybe your boss is driving you crazy. Or it's dawning on you that your husband is acting just like your alcoholic father. Maybe you can't find a mate, or can't commit when you do. Maybe you hear voices, or think about suicide. Or get so scared you can't leave home. Or so depressed you can't get out of bed.

02/10/97 - Testicular cancer: Scary but almost curable

  • David Cohan, a 34-year-old senior analyst at a Boston real estate investment trust company, says he "never wanted to be the poster child for testicular cancer." "But if it will help to save some lives and turn my experience into something much more positive, I'd like to do this," says Cohan.

02/03/97 - Gingseng $ 350 million for not much

  • Ginseng has become the tonic of choice for tired Americans. Thinking it will make us better athletes or reduce our stress or just get us through the night shift, we now spend $ 350-to-$ 400 million a year on the stuff, making ginseng second only to garlic as the nation's most sought-after herbal remedy.

01/27/97 - Pill Mills

  • Weight loss center pinning hopes for fat profits on diet drugs - and doctors hired to prescribe them on demand. So. You're determined to lose those 20 pounds this year. Okay, maybe a little more. Really. Once and for all. You go to your friendly family doctor, who's been badgering you for years to gets those pounds off with diet and exercise.

01/20/97 - Tempest in a juice box
  • It was a moment that 14-year-old Meaghan O'Connor of Dover, N.H., says may stay with her for the rest of her life. She was charging for the ball in the midst of a heated basketball game last summer. Suddenly, another girl's knee smashed into hers.

01/13/97 - The downside for female athletes

  • It was a moment that 14-year-old Meaghan O'Connor of Dover, N.H., says may stay with her for the rest of her life. She was charging for the ball in the midst of a heated basketball game last summer. Suddenly, another girl's knee smashed into hers.