12/26/05 How to Leave the Hospital

• Modern American medicine does many things exceedingly well, but helping patients leave the hospital is still not one of them. They're sent home still groggy from drugs and in need of assistance -- though they don't always have it.

12/12/05 Hormones Given Through the Skin are Worth a Look

• True confession time again: Just when I thought I had made peace with the Great Post-Menopausal Hormone Decision -- in my case, sticking with very low dose oral hormones, despite the risks revealed in a 2002 study -- I have plunged into the murk again.

11/28/05 A Web of Information Untangled

• We are drowning today in medical information -- and, by and large, that’s a wonderful thing. It was only a generation or so ago that it was considered radical when a bunch of Boston feminists dug out the kind of information we feel entitled to today and published the first "Our Bodies, Ourselves," a nitty-gritty, user-friendly medical guide for women.

11/14/05 Snoring Not Just a Nuisance; It's a Danger Sign

• Some people first suspect they have obstructive sleep apnea when their significant other complains about excessive snoring, or tells them they stop breathing many times during the night. Others figure it out when their daytime sleepiness gets so bad they fall asleep at meetings or have a car accident.

10/31/05 Antiaging Drug Falls Short of Hype  

• The claims on “anti-aging” websites promise that human growth hormone will give aging adults everything from better memory to better skin tone, better waistlines to a better sex drive. Not surprisingly, though, the benefits of the hormone -- whose US sales far exceeded $700 million last year -- are much more limited

10/17/05 Home, Sweet Home Dialysis

• To take over for her failing kidneys, Madeleine Therrien, 63, of Merrimack, N.H., tried a home dialysis system that involved flushing her abdomen with fluids several times a day. But, as often happens with this kind of treatment, known as peritoneal dialysis, she wound up in the hospital with a painful abdominal infection.

10/03/05 You're Getting Sleepy; Could That Stop Cancer?

• Melatonin, long known to insomniac Americans as an over-the-counter sleep aid, is now being studied as a way to prevent and treat breast and other cancers. Dubbed the "hormone of darkness," melatonin is a hormone that is made by the brain's pineal gland at nighttime. This summer, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital led by pidemiologist Dr. Eva Schernhammer showed that women who produced the lowest levels of melatonin had a 70 percent higher chance of getting breast cancer than those with the highest levels.

09/19/05 A Visit to the Doctor

• A visit to the doctor these days is a sprint, not a marathon. With luck, you’ve got about 22 minutes from start to finish, maybe a couple more if your doctor is a woman. You begin with a disadvantage – you’re sitting down, half-naked, sick and scared. The doctor is vertical, dressed, presumably healthy, definitely the top dog. This event is winnable – but winning means finishing together, with a health plan you come up with jointly.

09/05/05 Biology of Chronic Fatigue Gains Focus

• For years, many doctors and others dismissed people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome as depressed, lazy, or just plain whiny. Now, a slew of research -- more than 2,000 scientific papers by some counts -- is suggesting that chronic fatigue is not a psychiatric illness, but a nasty mix of immunological, neurological, and hormonal abnormalities.

08/22/05 A Diagnosis Of Cancer Is Trying For Any Marriage

• Cancer can be very tough on a marriage just ask Sandro Segalini, 64, of Falmouth. His first wife died of breast cancer 14 years ago. His second wife, Marcia Woltjer, 59, left him earlier this year, three years after her own diagnosis with breast cancer. Segalini, a retired businessman, had been totally willing to take control of things and help Woltjer the way he had helped his first wife to be, as he put it, "chief cook, bottle washer, bandage changer, and jester."

08/08/05 Hysterectomy Performed Too Often

• Last week, California researchers dropped a bombshell when they reported that the routine practice of taking out a woman’s ovaries during surgery to remove the uterus not only has no clear health benefit, but actually raises the risk of death from heart disease and hip fracture.

07/25/05 Know Risks Before Saying OK to Surgery

• Diana Paolitto, a Cambridge psychologist, was lying on a gurney late last year, all prepped for surgery to remove a major vein in her leg. In her 50s, she was alone, nervous, starting to feel the effects of the drugs she was getting through an intravenous tube and unable to see properly without the reading glasses she had handed to her husband for safekeeping.

07/11/05 Mindful Eating

• CONCORD, MA -----So there we sat, 28 of us, on a recent summer evening, munching ever so slowly on, and paying exquisite attention to, the surprisingly complex tastes and textures of gorp, that mixture of dried fruit and nuts so popular with hikers. “Notice whether you’re already salivating,” prompted the workshop instructor, Jean Fain, a psychotherapist and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School, as we held our chosen dried cranberries, cashews or almonds in our fingers. “Slowly, very slowly, begin to notice the taste, the texture. Allow yourself to feel pleasure as you chew.”

06/28/05 Why Can't People Hospitals be More Like Those for Animals

• After decades of writing about medicine, I finally found the (nearly) perfect hospital. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon last month. My little guy couldn’t tell me what was wrong, but his breathing was labored, he wouldn’t eat and he could barely walk.

06/14/05 Microwaved Meal Under Plastic is Generally Safe

• Priscilla Ellis, 61, a  Jamaica Plain psychologist and mediator, was suspicious the minute she opened the mass email. And with good reason. It was an old e-rumor that has picked up steam recently, alleging that microwaving food in plastic containers releases dioxin, a carcinogen, or cancer-causing agent. The email noted that the warning about dioxin had been sent out in a newsletter from Johns Hopkins, the esteemed medical institution in Baltimore, MD, and that similar information was “being circulated” at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. . The email added that freezing water in plastic bottles also releases dioxin.

05/31/05 Saliva May Replace Blood as Test for Disease

• Within two years, you may be able to go for a regular dental visit, spit into a cup and, before your appointment is over, find out from an analysis of your saliva whether you’re at risk for oral cancer. Currently, dentists have to do a thorough mouth exam to probe for oral cancer, which will strike more than 28,000 Americans and kill more than 7,000.

05/17/05 Be Cautious About Medications Offered for Bone Thinning

• Millions of American women are being diagnosed with osteopenia, which is not truly a disease, and many are told to take medication they may not need to prevent broken bones they might never get. At the same time, millions of others are never properly diagnosed - or treated – for osteoporosis, a serious condition that can lead to potentially devastating fractures.

05/03/05 Aching Spine

• For decades, people with low back pain were often told there was only one real solution to their misery: Spinal fusion, in which two or more bony vertebrae are surgically “welded” together in hopes of reducing pain and stabilizing the back.

04/19/05 Water and Safety

• In the sparkling sunshine yesterday, runners at the finish line of the Boston Marathon said they had taken very much to heart the new warnings about drinking too much water during a race. ''I was conscious of not taking huge amounts of water," said Ian Bloomfield, 52, of England, who pronounced himself ''quite pleased" with his time of 2 hours 45 minutes. ''I was very aware of hyponatremia," the potentially fatal result of overhydration.

04/05/05  Face it: Cosmetic Safety in Doubt

• For decades now, the cosmetics industry -- a whopping $35 billion-a-year business -- has been humming along happily with relatively little oversight from the US Food and Drug Administration, which by law is supposed to regulate food, drugs, and cosmetics.

03/22/05  Acupuncture Has Won Medical Acceptance

• I lie down on the table at Wellspace, Inc. in Cambridge, sighing in grateful anticipation as my longtime acupuncturist, Jen Forrest Evans, goes to work. Some days, she gently pokes needles into my chronically tight lower back. Other days, she focuses on my pesky sinuses. Still other days - the best ones - the goal is a general tune-up of my Qi (pronounced "chee"), the Chinese term for vital (and sometimes, not vital enough) energy.

03/08/05  Eat Fish, Be Happy

• Feeling depressed? Ask not what your parents did or didn’t do when you were a child. Ask yourself what you had for dinner last night, and the night before, and the night before that. For half a dozen years now, the evidence has been growing that omega-3 fatty acids, the kind found in fatty fish like salmon, sardines and tuna, can help prevent and treat depression.

02/22/05  High Medical Bills Don't Have to Lead to Bankruptcy

• It’s bad enough to have to fight a serious illness. But more and more Americans are finding that, just when they are at their physical and emotional lowest, they must also fight the system to get help paying their medical bills. Sometimes, that’s because they have no health insurance at all. Marcia Soule, 59, of  Carver, MA, for instance, was diagnosed with breast cancer late in 2003 and quickly ran up $25,000 worth of medical debt that she had no way of paying.

02/08/05   The Horror of Awakening During Surgery

• Seven years ago, Carol Weihrer, a flutist and office administrator, had her right eye removed. Weihrer had been living in pain from a severely scratched cornea for years and had already undergone 17 surgeries to try to fix it. Just before she was given general anesthesia, she remembers feeling relieved that her trauma would soon be over. Suddenly, she woke up hearing disco music and thinking, "I must be done."

01/25/05 A Commitment to Exercise

This column is for everyone who hates to exercise, or would like to exercise, sort of, but really, truly, deeply believes they don’t have enough time or just can’t do it. First, if you’re in this category, take heart: You’re not alone. Two-thirds of Americans are now overweight or obese, according to government figures, and more than half do not get enough physical activity – and that’s according to the old, wimpier guidelines.

01/11/05  Bladder Problems are Far-reaching

• Bladder problems, long considered a nuisance and source of embarrassment to millions of Americans, are now being recognized as a problem with serious medical consequences as well. An estimated 33 million Americans – 17 percent of the population – have “overactive bladder,” a strong urge to urinate with or without actual leakage.