General Medicine

Click Date to read brief description	Click Short Title to read column
12/31/02	Our Columnist Goes Under the Knife
12/03/02	Rating the Folks who Rate the Hospitals
11/19/02	A New Heart Disease Test That Could Save Your Life
11/05/02	What Street Drugs Do to Your Brain
10/22/02	No Drug Cure in Sight for Obesity
09/10/02	Bilingualism is Great for the Brain
08/27/02	New Hope for Vertebral Fractures
07/30/02	New Treatments for Vocal Problems
06/18/02	When Drinking Too Much Water Means Disaster
06/04/02	SOME Sun is Good For You
05/21/02	The Short Version of Long Term Care Insurance
05/07/02	Coated Stents Show Huge Promise
04/23/02	Learning Day from Night…
04/09/02	New Drug for Narcolepsy
03/26/02	The Biological Roots of Violence
02/26/02	New Hope for Vision Loss
01/15/02	New Hope for Migraines ?
01/01/02	Brain Pacemakers Offer New Hope for Parkinson's Disease Patients

I was very scared, shivering as much from fear as from the chilly room temperature. I was waiting on a gurney at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to be wheeled in for a catheter ablation, an invasive cardiac "procedure." (Ah, the euphemisms.) In a totally bizarre twist of fate, I had several weeks earlier interviewed Dr. Laurence Epstein, chief of the cardiac arrhythmia service, in preparation for a column I was working on about new treatments for arrhythmias.

Suppose you are one of the 350,000 Americans whose doctor will declare this year that your arteries are so clogged you need bypass surgery, a highly invasive operation. You consent, then wonder: How many bypass surgeries does this hospital do, anyway?

A new test called high sensitivity CRP, catapulted into the headlines last week by a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, appears to be better than cholesterol at predicting the risk of heart attack and stroke. The test measures levels of an inflammatory substance, C-reactive protein that plays a role in cardiovascular disease.

“George,” is 17, tall, good looking, quiet - and a prime example of how much kids do and don’t know about how illegal drugs act on the brain. The son of a friend of mine, George knows a lot –and I mean, a LOT – about drugs.

Three very fat Turkish people, all cousins, got very lucky this year, when they spent a few months in Los Angeles getting injections of leptin, the “satiety” hormone discovered in 1994 and immediately hailed as the long-awaited magic bullet to cure obesity.

The most striking thing about today’s emotional debate about bilingual education is how little of it is informed by science. Neuroscientists still don’t understand why some bilingual adults who have strokes can speak in one language afterwards, but not the other.

Dorothy Griffin, 84, was in agony, the broken vertebrae in her back making it virtually impossible to get out of bed, despite painkilling medications. For most of last year, all she could do was lie there, recalls her husband of 61 years, Cecil, 83, who suffered right along with her in their Westborough home: "She was having such pain all the time."

It was a lovely, late spring evening. The other 100 or so members of my singing group, the Back Bay Chorale, opened their mouths in unison. Out came the exquisite opening chords of the Brahms’ Requiem. I, too, opened my mouth. But nothing came out, or more precisely, nothing beautiful, nothing tunable, nothing remotely resembling what a singer is supposed to sound like.

Kelly Hall, 34, was in fantastic shape, routinely biking 100 to 200 miles a week in preparation for last year’s AIDS Ride from Boston to New York. Usually, she trained with other riders, who made it a point to take food and hydration breaks. But one day last June, Hall, a strategic planner at Partners Community Health Care in Needham, decided to ride alone, despite the 95 degree heat.

Remember how good it used to feel, hanging out in the sun, letting your face acquire that nice, ruddy glow? Then came all those depressing public health messages telling us that the sun was dangerous, that we should feel guilty about even the slightest tan

You can skip this column – and the whole messy business of long term care insurance - if you’re relatively poor, making, say, $30,000 a year or less. That’s because, if you ever need to be in a nursing home, the government, ie. Medicaid, will pick up the cost you can’t cover. So why worry? Have a nice walk.

Vice President Dick Cheney made the problem famous, but thousands of Americans each year need a new round of treatment to fix a heart problem they thought was already solved.

For more than 25 years now, Debra Brandon has been looking for better ways to take care of preemies - babies born weeks or even months before they are ready to leave the safety of the womb. In her early days as a nurse, recalls Brandon, it was standard practice to leave bright lights on all the time in NICUs, or neonatal intensive care units, the better to attend to the preemies' urgent medical needs.

Mary Rourke, a 55-year old teacher from Salem, N.H., used to nod off all the time as a child, but people just shrugged and said, “Oh, she must be very tired,” she recalls. Then, as an adult, she began having attacks in which her muscles would lose tone and she’d fall– every time she laughed or felt any strong emotion. “I was constantly falling,” she says. “If you told me a joke, I’d flip. I couldn’t be around people.”

In January, Thomas Junta was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. In February, two teenagers, Robert Tulloch and James Parker, had a clear robbery-murder plan in mind before they stabbed to death two Dartmouth professors. This month, Andrea Pia Yates, was convicted of drowning her kids in the bathtub, and David Westerfield was charged with the abduction and murder of 7-year old Danielle van Dam. Every time one human being kills another, the rest of us are left to wonder why.

It’s impressive enough that, at age 75, L.B. (“Pat”) Patrick is still designing aircraft systems at the Dukes, Inc. facility in Northridge, CA., where he is vice president for engineering. Even more remarkable is the fact that Patrick does this visually-demanding work despite having macular degeneration, the leading cause of legal blindness in the developed world.

Sheila Rouine, a 51-year old nurse from Billerica, began getting migraines at 17, usually just before her periods, and has had them ever since, except for two, blissfully headache-free pregnancies.

Brain pacemakers. Deep brain stimulation and encouraging new data on how it works for Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor and other conditions. Sidebar on what this promising technique DOESN’T work for, specifically a Parkinson’s-like brain disease called MSA, for multiple system atrophy. (pretty depressing.)