12/18/01 - How to Retain Control While in the Hospital

• Jacqueline Lazare – 26-year old travel agent, breast cancer patient and generally feisty soul – was sitting up in her hospital bed in Boston one morning several years ago, getting chemotherapy and chatting with her dad, Dr. Aaron Lazare, chancellor and dean of the University of Massachusetts Medical School

12/02/01- Doctor's Probe Afgan Women's Many Ills

• Just days before Thanksgiving, Dr. Lynn Amowitz, 37, a physician from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, huddled with Afghan women who had fled their homes in the embattled Kunduz region for the relative safety of an internal refugee camp. “The Taliban came and shot my husband in front of me,” one 35-year old widow told Amowitz, a fellow with Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Prize winning human rights group based in Washington and Boston

11/20/01 - Smallpox: What would happen if....

• Let’s say that I’m your basic, harried, working mom with a husband, two kids in day care and a 9-to-5 job selling cosmetics in a big shopping mall. As I rush out on a Monday evening to pick the kids up, I breathe in a few virions of smallpox virus released into the mall’s ventilation system.  Until the recent anthrax incidents, a bioterrorist attack with smallpox was considered unlikely. Now, who knows?

11/06/01 - What Blood Types Really Mean for Health

• A spate of popular books contends that the old blood groups (A, B, AB and O) dictate personality ("You Are Your Blood Type") and diet ("Eat Right 4 Your Type"). This is nonsense, but there IS a growing body of evidence suggesting that blood markers do have a lot more medical significance than once thought (beyond their use in blood transfusions) and that many of the antigens on blood cells evolved to protect against specific infectious diseases. (Cool stuff!)

09/11/01 - College Health Sense

• If you’re one of the nearly 15 million young men and women heading to – or back to - college this month, congrats!  Chances are, your years in academe will be among the happiest and healthiest of your life. 

08/28/01 - Cochlear Implant Sense

• Jamie Weinstein-Delahunt, a deaf toddler from Jamaica Plain, is a born communicator – and a symbol of the profound changes now sweeping the world of the deaf.

08/14/01 - The Lesson Of Old Geniuses

• Grandma Moses first picked up a paintbrush at 78, reportedly after arthritis forced her to give up the embroidery for which she was already well-known. She went on to paint for more than 20 years, finishing her last big canvas at 101.

07/03/01 - Men Have A Biological Clock, Too

• For years, many prospective parents – and doctors, as well – have blithely assumed that if birth defects occur when an older couple has a baby, it’s most likely because of the woman’s advancing age, but men have a biological clock too.

05/22/01 - First Rule: Don't Hesitate To Get Second Opinion

• Heart patients in Grand Junction, Colo., are four times more likely to undergo invasive coronary bypass surgery than their counterparts in Joliet, Ill. Women over the age of 70 are more than three times as likely to have their uteruses surgically removed in one part of Maine than in another part of the same state.

05/08/01 - When Stopping To Smell Is A Problem

• Barbara Giurlando's troubles began several years ago after her office was remodeled and she was suddenly surrounded by new printers, faxes and copiers that gave off a weird odor that she now thinks was ozone, and all at once she couldn't even read newspapers without feeling queasy from the ink smell.  

04/24/01- A `Cure' For Osteoporosis May Be Near

• Scientists normally shy away from words like “cure” or “breakthrough,” but those superlatives – and others ­– are bursting these days from the lips of researchers who say they are on the verge of what could be a revolution in the treatment of osteoporosis.

03/27/01 - Drug Hunters Can't See Rainforest For The Medicines

• In the rain forest, Tortuguero National Park, Costa Rica ---- Carlos Bettancurt cuts the motor and we glide soundlessly toward the bank of the Parismina lagoon, part of the vast network of rivers and canals that crisscross this wildlife sanctuary. We are not hunting on this sweltering January afternoon for the elusive jaguar that prowl this nature preserve, nor for the huge crocodiles we spotted earlier along the riverbank, but for something more modest, though potentially more useful – medicinal plants, which grow in abundance in this rainforest, as they do all over the world in similar habitats.

03/13/01 - A New Kind Of Organ Donation Raises A Hard Question:
When Does Life Truly End?

• Twenty-eight year old Kerrie Harrington of Somerville recalls that Friday evening last October in haunting detail. Kerrie and her mother, Paula were going shopping. Paula was driving. Suddenly, she lost control of the car and it slammed into the guard rail four times. Kerrie was unscathed, but her mother suffered a devastating head injury.

02/13/01 - Americans Strive To Live With Chronic Illnesses

• At 68, Helen Freeman, all by herself, has more chronic diseases than many of us will face in a lifetime. First, she has great trouble breathing, then there’s the diabetes, for which she needs daily medication. Glaucoma also is no picnic. Also, she's had melanoma and breast cancer.

01/16/01  - When Yesterday's Art Is Today's Embarrassment

• Nearly a decade ago, Todd P., now 30 and a painter who works at Massachusetts General Hospital, gave himself an unforgettable 21^st birthday present: a tattoo on his left shoulder.