12/30/03 - Keeping Your Nose Clean

• Okay. So your daily attempt at perfection already includes brushing and flossing, exercising, meditating, eating fruits and veggies, and overall clean, healthy living. Here’s one more health habit you might consider. (Or not.) In lay terms, i t’s called keeping your nose clean. In fancier language, it’s nasal lavage – also known as nasal irrigation or sinus rinsing.

12/16/03 - New Treatments for Epilepsy

• Chelsea Henrie first knew something was wrong when, at age 16, she poured cereal into her shoe. “I also stuck my hand in the toaster once,” recalls Henrie, now 20 and a student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. “That was the worst thing that happened.” 

12/02/03 - The Biological Basis for Homosexuality

• Is there a biological basis for homosexuality? With gay marriage now supported by Massachusetts' highest court and homosexuality likely to be a hot button issue in the presidential campaign, the question of whether sexual orientation is an innate or acquired trait is an increasingly urgent one. Since at least 1991, some scientific research has suggested a biological basis to homosexuality -- meaning sexual orientation is probably at least partly natural destiny, not a choice. But that point is open to political and scientific debate, and our understanding of how biology may drive sexual orientation is still fuzzy.

11/18/03 - The Science of Pain This is the second of  a two part column on pain. 

• Dr. Darlyne Johnson, 46, an obstetrician-gynecologist at South Shore Hospital in S. Weymouth, MA. is no stranger to pain – and not just the pain of other women having babies. Over the years, Johnson has had surgery, and each time, wound up with such terrible nausea and vomiting from painkillers that she had to stay in the hospital overnight. Not surprisingly, when she found out three years ago that she needed hernia surgery, she balked. “I knew what was going to happen – I’d get sick.”

11/04/03  -  The Politics of Pain This is the first of  a two part column on pain.

• America is seriously schizophrenic about controlling chronic pain, which afflicts more than 50 million people and costs the country $100 billion a year. So on the one hand, we grossly under-treat it: Management of chronic pain and the pain of dying patients is arguably the most egregiously neglected field of medicine. On the other hand, as a society, we have become obsessed with the war on drugs.

10/21/03  - Sepsis is a Leading Killer - in Hospitals

• It was the second semester of freshman year at Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I., and John Kach, then 18, and a member of the basketball team, was in great shape. Until one night, when he developed a fever of 104 to 105 Fahrenheit and flu-like symptoms. His girlfriend wanted to take him to the hospital, but he said no.

10/07/03  -  The Impact of Obesity on Hospitals

• The patient was so obese – more than 700 pounds - that it took seven nurses to turn him over. Three nurses at the New England hospital where he was in intensive care went out on workman’s compensation after injuring their shoulders and backs trying to move him.

09/23/03  - Parents Fight for Experimental Drugs

• Two and a half years ago, several months before she died, Abigail Burroughs, a 21-year old senior at the University of Virginia, sat with her father as chemotherapy dripped, once again, into her body. Together, they mapped out a plan they hoped would save Abigail’s life, and the lives of other desperately-ill people.

09/07/03 - These Legs Just Keep on Kicking

• So the patient goes to a neurologist. Every night, he tells the doctor, he gets these creepy, crawly feelings in his legs as he starts to drift off to sleep. It’s not pain, exactly, but an irresistible urge to move his legs. He gets up, does a few deep knee bends. That helps. The neurologist listens, riveted.

08/26/03 - Joy of Fitness

• There we stood in our color-coded bathing caps, 1336 women -- nervous, excited and all lined up in “waves” on a recent summer Sunday morning on the shores of (I kid you not) Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in Webster, MA.

08/12/03 - Sorting out the Hype and Hope of Targeted Therapies

• Dean Gordanier is a tax lawyer, fitness buff, father of three and, at age 54, a veteran of the roller-coaster ride of hope and despair that is becoming a way of life for growing numbers of people with cancer, thanks to the promise, and the heartbreak, of a new generation of cancer drugs.

07/29/03 - Empathy - Nature’s Glue?

• A small baby who sees his father burst into tears suddenly starts crying himself, his sad little face the very picture of misery. Is this empathy? Or is it, as psychologist Andrew Meltzoff, co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Learning at the University of Washington in Seattle, thinks, something less exalted, like emotional “contagion?”

07/15/03 - Beauty Triumphs Health

• Put yourself in “Bob’s” shoes. He’s a 43 year old man who lives in Milton, MA, works in investment management and has had HIV for six years. He asked that his real name not be printed. Bob is a savvy, health-conscious guy, a gay man who takes his body and his physical appearance seriously.

07/01/03 - "Chemo Brain" Leaves Patients at a Loss

• She had been, she says,  “a smart cookie,” a university grad who had built up a successful business in Toronto as a marketing consultant. But several years ago, when she was 38, she had chemotherapy for breast cancer and wound up with a bad case of “chemo brain” --- cognitive problems such as trouble with thinking and memory that many cancer patients, and a growing number of doctors, believe may be related to chemotherapy.

06/17/03  - When Mitochondria, the Cell's Energy Producers, Get Sick

• In retrospect, it was clear from the moment Samantha Fargo was born six years ago that something was very wrong - and very strange. At first, she was too weak to breast feed. By five weeks, she could drink from a bottle, but had such bad reflux (in which food backs up the esophagus from the stomach) that her parents, Justine and Bill Fargo of Medford, had to keep her semi-upright all the time. She didn’t walk until she was a year and a half old. Worse yet, the poor kid never seemed to have much energy.

06/03/03  - Brain Scanning and OCD

• The sophisticated science of brain scanning may be on the brink of revolutionizing the intuitive art of psychiatry, one of the few domains left in medicine in which a doctor’s educated guess is still the most cmmon way to figure out what’s wrong. Sure, brain scanning is still too young a science to be used for routine diagnosis of the most common psychiatric ills. But it is already proving invaluable in understanding the underlying abnormalities in a wide range of psychiatric disorders including obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, anxiety and depression.

05/20/03  - Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

• Three years ago, Doris Rheaume, a retired addiction counselor who lives in Needham, could barely breathe. “I was on oxygen 24 hours a day,” she says. “If I turned my head without it, I huffed and puffed.” People with C hronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) have chronic bronchitis (inflammation of bronchial tubes), emphysema, destruction of the tiny air sacs in the lungs, or both.

05/06/03 - "Cutting" - Understanding Self-Mutilation…

• Years ago, Boston University psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk tried a simple experiment to understand one of the most disturbing, and bizarre, of all psychiatric disorders: self-mutilation, or more simply, cutting. He asked his cutters, mostly young women, to come see him when they felt the urge to scratch, slash or burn themselves. When they came, he asked them to put their hands in ice water. They were able to keep their arms buried in ice much longer than normal people, he found, because they didn’t feel the pain.

04/22/03 - Meditation and the Brain ....?

• For decades, open-minded Westerners - patients and doctors alike - have been touting the medical benefits of meditation, an ancient Eastern practice that comes in hundreds if not thousands of different flavors but consists basically of quieting the mind through moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness.

03/11/03 - Blood Pressure Drugs - Confusing but Crucial 

• In December, a study of more than 42,000 white and black Americans found that old-fashioned, cheap diuretics – “water pills” – work at least as well and sometimes better than more expensive drugs to treat high blood pressure and certain heart problems.  The study, dubbed ALLHAT, was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association

02/25/03 - How would you like to email your doctor?

• Patients are clamoring for it. Many doctors hate the idea. But the smart money is on the patients to win this one, and it’s a biggie: E-mail contact with doctors. E-mail, to state the obvious, has become part of life: 61 percent of US adults now use the Internet, and more than half use e-mail on any given day, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Survey. A Harris Interactive survey last spring showed that nearly 90 percent of wired folks want to communicate with their physicians online to ask questions, set up appointments, refill prescriptions, and get test results.  

02/11/03 - The Glycemic Index - Should You Worry?

• On the surface, the glycemic index is a simple concept – a way to measure how much blood sugar goes up in the two hours after eating carbohydrates. Carbohydrates with a high glycemic rating, like cake with icing, trigger huge, rapid spikes in blood sugar, followed by steep spikes in insulin, the hormone that escorts sugar into cells. Carbohydrates with low glycemic ratings, like whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables, trigger more modest, slower rises.

01/14/03 - New Trial to Detect Early Lung Cancer

• Sadly enough, it often seems to take a celebrity patient to get the rest of us to sit up and take notice of certain diseases, especially diseases  in which the patient’s own behavior contributes to the risk. This time, the celebrity is an active, young mother, Kara Kennedy , 42, the daughter of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). And the disease is lung cancer – the biggest cancer killer in the country, whose primary cause is smoking - an addiction, to be sure, but a potentially modifiable behavior as well.