Who hasn't experienced that sinking feeling during a visit to the pharmacy , or the face-reddening trauma of a teenage trip to the dermatologist ? If a new law is successful, those excruciating moments are a thing of the past. As of April 14th, we're all protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — a law designed to shield medical information from the prying eyes of individuals and companies. It sounds like a ...

It's only natural, I suppose, for a $625 five-volume, epochal publishing event like Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine to polarize the food world. After all, this is the book the whole culinary world has been waiting for: "the cookbook to end all cookbooks," as David Chang called it. I witnessed Myhrvold's impatience with old-fashioned ways of thinking when I visited the eccentric millionaire last fall, and so last week's dustup with superstar food writer Michael Ruhlman wasn't unexpected. ...

The pharmaceutical industry is one of the few sectors around that appears to be weathering these difficult times with relative ease. On Friday the European Commission suggested why that might be: it claims Big Pharma systematically rigged the market to squeeze out copycat medicines. By using patent lawsuits and other delaying tactics to prevent cheaper generic medicines from entering the market, the drug majors cost European consumers up to $4 billion over an eight-year period until 2007, ...

The rise in cesarean-section deliveries in recent years has been characterized by some as a key indication of the overmedicalization of childbirth. While the procedure undoubtedly saves lives and leads to better health outcomes for mothers and infants who face problems during pregnancy and labor, many experts say the procedure is being performed too often, and in many cases for nonmedical reasons, putting healthy women and babies at undue risk of complications of major surgery. The rate ...

"Remember the 1990s" retrospective lists always include Nirvana, Monica Lewinsky and Wayne's World, but leave out another major product that defined American life in the '90s: the health maintenance organization, or HMO — that nefarious health-insurance plan that seemed expressly designed to prevent you from seeing the doctor of your choice or receiving the treatments recommended by doctors, all under the guise of lowering costs and "improving" medical care. Of course HMOs are still around, but they ...

I never smoked pot in junior high because I was convinced it would shrivel my incipient manhood. This was the 1980s, and those stark this-is-your-brain-on-drugs ads already had me vaguely worried about memory loss and psychosis. But when other boys said pot might affect our southern regions, I was truly terrified. I didn't smoke a joint for the first time until I was 21. By 12th grade, about half of young Americans have tried marijuana, which put me in the ...

PRO Absolutely. Government has no business interfering with what you eat By RADLEY BALKO Nutrition activists are agitating for a panoply of initiatives that would bring the government between you and your waistline. President Bush earmarked $125 million in his budget for the encouragement of healthy lifestyles. State legislatures and school boards have begun banning snacks and soda from school campuses and vending machines. Several state legislators and Oakland, Calif., Mayor Jerry Brown, among others, have called for a ...

They are miniscule, measuring at most 2 mm to 3 mm long, yet few things induce more panic or fear among parents than head lice. But while an infestation of head lice on a child can be uncomfortable, the critters do not pose enough of a contagious hazard to justify the strict policies that many schools use to keep infected children out of class, according to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics . In the ...

For the estimated 1% of the population with celiac disease, gluten is a kryptonite that can trigger digestive distress and cause long-term health problems.

Heard the one about the common shampoo ingredient that causes cancer? Or how about the epidemic of blindness among toddlers who accidentally get waterproof sunscreen in their eyes? These absurd fictions used to be the stock-in-trade of ninth-graders bent on frightening the younger kids. But now such tall tales are appearing on the Internet, and many adults are taking them seriously. Consider the latest electronic health scare: about the artificial sweetener aspartame, which is found in everything from Equal to ...