12/19/00 - Is Moderate Drinking the Answer 

• Until four months ago, Paul Robert, a hardworking 42 year -old Connecticut businessman, would get home from work and knock back six drinks a night - 45 drinks a week. Sometimes wine, sometimes beer, sometimes the hard stuff.  

12/05/00 - A Fair Portrait of the Transgender Issue

• Until seven years ago,  Nancy Nangeroni, 47, a leading figure in the transgender movement and the host of  the GenderTalk radio show,  lived as a man, which was not all that surprising given that she was born, as she puts it, with standard male "plumbing."   

11/21/00 - Ties That Bind Help Stroke Patients

• Fred Kemp, 38, a former restaurant manager in Atlanta, Ga., had one simple goal: To open a refrigerator door with his left hand five years ago, Kemp was watching TV when he dozed off, then woke up to go to the bathroom.

11/07/00 - NUTS

• Let’s face it: we were brainwashed. For years, nutritional gurus strummed a one-note samba all fats are bad and many of us played along, giving up some of our favorite foods. Like nuts.

10/24/00 - Stressed out

• Burned by lawsuits and low pay, radiologists are quitting, making women wait longer to find if they have breast cancer for or years, breast cancer specialists have quite rightly touted mammograms as the best way to detect tumors while they're small and highly treatable.

10/10/00 - Overlooked benefits of RU-486

• Doris Laird, a humanities professor at Florida A&M, believes RU-486, the controversial abortion pill that won government approval late last month, will be a lifesaver. She should know. The 69-year-old Laird has been taking the drug for seven years, not to induce abortion but to control a slow-growing, benign brain tumor called meningioma that once threatened her vision and her life.

09/26/00 -  When drugs are the only choice for a mother-to-be

• Jennifer Peterson was 35 and barely one week pregnant when she noticed a lump the size of half a banana in her breast. A few weeks later, tests showed she had invasive breast cancer. The irony was mind-numbing: A potential new life beginning inside her, her own life threatened

09/12/00 - Better strategies for coping with vertigo and dizziness

• Ann Bloom of Watertown remembers the exact moment of her first vertigo attack. The 68-year-old retired real estate agent was at a 50th camp reunion in the Adirondacks, sleeping with old friends on a screened-in porch. Suddenly, she awoke in the middle of the night to find the whole world revolving. The walls and floor were tilting so crazily she had to crawl to the bathroom on her hands and knees. Alarmed, friends made a bed for her in the back seat of their car and rushed her to a hospital in Burlington, VT

05/09/00 - Ambiguous losses leave survivors in limbo

• This is a love story - but one with the kind of anguished twist that millions of Americans must grapple with. "Betsy, Betsy, Betsy, I love you," Frederick "Pete" Peterson, now 84 and living in an assisted-living facility in Peabody, used to say, before Alzheimer's disease slowly stole his brain.

04/25/00 - Treatments for manic depression are improving

• Michael Penney, 53, of Holliston used to have, as he puts it, "a charmed life." Marriage. A son. A master's degree in marine economics and law, and good jobs, including an eight-year stint at the state office of Coastal Zone Management. But his charmed life came to an end five years ago when he worked for an employer who humiliated him in meetings. One day, Penney erupted in a rage that stunned him as much as his colleagues. He was hustled away when he couldn't stop sobbing.

04/11/00 - Treatment Offers Some Relief For Incontinence

• Maria Dube is a 37-year-old Burlington woman with two young sons who has a problem that's often hushed up, though it's shared by 20 million Americans, two-thirds of them women. The wear and tear of childbirth left Dube, a telephone service representative for a Boston bank, with stress incontinence, which meant that every time she sneezed, laughed, jumped or chased her kids, she leaked urine. Asthma made things even worse. "I coughed so frequently, I had to use a pad all the time," she said.

04/04/00 - Surviving when the liver has failed

• It is not a pretty way to die. Every year, 2,000 Americans wind up in the emergency room hovering near death because their livers suddenly quit working.

03/28/00 - Should We Worry About Altered Foods?

• In the early 1990s, while almost nobody was looking, the biotech industry pulled off quite a coup. Led by industry giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis and Aventis, genetic engineers began commercializing an idea they'd worked on for years - tinkering with genes to make crops more resistant to insects and herbicides.

03/21/00 - Domestic Abuse

• When the young woman's mother came to visit her in New York, she was astounded at all the rice her daughter kept in the cupboard. When the mother asked why, the daughter shrugged. Her husband, she explained, always complained that she ``didn't make rice as fluffy as his mother did.'' So she'd keep trying over and over. ``There's nothing wrong with the way you make rice,'' gasped the mother. What was wrong, both women realized, was that the daughter was caught in an abusive relationship.

03/14/00 - Thyroid, cholesterol are linked

• Most Americans know by now that eating a diet high in saturated fat can raise cholesterol, a major risk factor for heart disease, which kills nearly 500,000 people a year and is the leading cause of death for both men and women. But what many people don't know is that an underactive thyroid - the butterfly-shaped gland in the neck that produces a crucial hormone that regulates metabolism - may also contribute to high cholesterol.

03/07/00 - Calculating The Risk Of Hormone Therapy

• It takes a village, or so they say, to raise a child. Well, it's beginning to take a whole village - and a high-tech one at that - to sort out the risks and benefits of hormone-replacement therapy.

02/29/00 - On fever: sweat it out or treat it?

• When a lizard is injected with live bacteria, it crawls to a warm spot in the sun (or under a heat lamp in a lab) to raise its body temperature, not unlike someone with the flu burrowing under the covers. In fact, lizards that are prevented from raising their body temperature are more likely to die than those who toast themselves, probably because the higher temperature - in essence, a fever - revs up the immune system to fight infection more aggressively.

02/22/00 - HPV Test Is Urged By Some

• The Pap smear, used to detect cervical cancer, is done 50 million times each year in the United States and remains one of the best cancer-detection tools doctors have. In the 50 years since it was introduced in the United States, the death rate from cervical cancer has dropped by 70 percent. In poor countries that don't yet do Pap screening, cervical cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in women.

02/15/00.1 - The Saga Of Soy

• Consumers believe soy is good food, and research shows they're partly right. Americans have fallen in love with the humble soybean. Convinced that in its many incarnations - tofu, soy milk, dietary supplements - soy can prevent everything from heart disease to hot flashes to cancer, consumers have sent soy sales soaring. In the 12 months ending in October 1999, supermarket sales of soy foods were up 45 percent over the previous year, to nearly $419 million, according to Spins, a San Francisco market research company.

02/15/00.2 - Estrogen study raises concerns

• Americans have fallen in love with the humble soybean. Convinced that in its many incarnations - tofu, soy milk, dietary supplements - soy can prevent everything from heart disease to hot flashes to cancer; consumers have sent soy sales soaring. In the 12 months ending in October 1999, supermarket sales of soy foods were up 45 percent over the previous year, to nearly $419 million, according to Spins, a San Francisco market research company.   

02/08/00 - Facial Workouts Don't, In Fact, Really Work At All

• I sat there glued to the TV, trying to imitate the model on the video, who was cheerily flexing her zygomaticus muscles - which run from the cheekbone to the corners of the lips - and keeping the rest of her face relaxed. Not so easy. Then she worked her levator labii superioris, raising her lips up into a sneer. Then she attacked her chin, working the depressor labialise.

01/10/00.1 - Special report: St. John's Wort: Less than meets the eye

• We thought it would be easy. After all, we had just two seemingly simple questions: Does St. John's wort, the popular herbal adtidepressant on which Americans spend $250 million a year, work - at least on rat brain cells in a test tube? And do the product labels accurately reflect what's inside the tablets? The path toward answers proved tortuous indeed.

01/10/00.2 - Go the medical route if herb doesn't relieve depression

• So, you're depressed. Given that the Globe's analysis showed that, at least in lab tests, there is considerable variation among St. John's wort brands, should you take it at all?

01/10/00.3 - How the Globe did its testing

• Here's how we tested some of the leading brands of St. John's wort, the popular herbal antidepressant. We went to a CVS store in Cambridge, Mass., and bought the following products: CVS' house brand; Natrol; NatureMade; Nature's Resource; Quanterra; and YourLife. In addition, we obtained a bottle of Herbalife, which is sold privately through distributors.

01/10/00.4 - FDA loosens reins

• The US Food and Drug Administration once had the power to force manufacturers of over-the-counter dietary supplements, including herbal remedies, to prove those products were safe, if the agency felt such a pre-market review was warranted.