You want to get healthy. You know you need to exercise more. You may have even jump-started your New Year's resolutions by joining a gym. But if you're not ready to squeeze into shorts or a leotard and grunt through an hour of Spinning or Jazzercize or kickboxing, don't despair. There's growing agreement among exercise researchers that the intense physical activities offered by most health clubs is not the only--or even necessarily the best--path to better health. In fact, the ...

At 4:30, when most of Wall Street is winding down, Walter Zimmermann begins a high-stakes, high-wire act conducted live before a paying audience. About 200 institutional investors—including airlines and oil companies—shell out up to $3,000 a month to catch his daily webcast on the volatile energy markets, a performance that can move hundreds of millions of dollars. "I'm not paid to be wrong—I can tell you that," Zimmermann says. But as he clicks through dozens of screens and graphics on ...

Imagine you're having a heart attack. Your co-workers call 911, and the medics arrive. Under lights and sirens, traffic cleaves as the path clears to the hospital where doctors and nurses are waiting to administer lifesaving treatment. Now imagine that instead of going to the ER down the street, the medics are forced to take you to another hospital on the other side of town 20 minutes away. You are clutching your chest and dripping with sweat, ...

TRANSPLANTS Four little girls, bright-eyed and decked out in their best dresses, met the press last week at Colorado General Hospital in Denver. Ranging in age from 16 months to two years, all four were gravely ill, and the University of Colorado doctors who described their cases were guarded in discussing the children's prospects for recovery. But merely by being alive, all were making medical history. They had survived a complete liver transplant for periods ranging from 45 to 122 ...

Pardon the personal question, but have you ever had a sexual fantasy involving the use of a nonliving object--Anna Kournikova's tennis outfit, say, or Tom Cruise's Risky Business skivvies? Actually, don't answer that--we really don't want to know--and you should probably think twice before telling your therapist. She might diagnose you with fetishism, which is listed along with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in a curious but extremely influential book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM ...

Since Kindergarten, they had been known as "the crew." Still a close-knit group in high school, the five Henderson, Nev., boys were all delighted when Sean Larimer turned 16 and in 2003 became the first to get his driver's license. Sean's mom, Susan Larimer, a hospital nurse who was in the midst of a divorce, was happy about it too. "I thought I needed him to drive," she recalls. So Susan gave her son permission to drive around with the crew ...

Here's a tale for our times. Last week Ali Abbas, the 13-year-old Iraqi boy who lost his arms during an air raid on Baghdad, continued his recuperation in a hospital in Kuwait, wearing a T shirt emblazoned with a picture of his hero, an English soccer star who was about to start a promotional tour of Japan after having just been traded to a Spanish club in a deal--vital to the fortunes of a German shoe company--that merited an editorial ...

Legless women excited Nathaniel Ingersoll Bowditch to pity. In 1860 he gave $5,000 to the Massachusetts General Hospital for the purchase of wooden legs. Meticulous, he specified: "I should desire that female patients should be preferred to males." For 69 years the hospital has been obeying his instructions, but the need has been dwindling. Rare is it now that amputations must be made. Hence the hospital recently asked a Massachusetts probate court, and last week was granted, permission to ...

THE last thing that Valada Penny wanted was a baby. At 22, the beautiful black woman already had one child by a teen-age marriage. While separated from her husband and living with her parents in Brooklyn, working and trying to plan her future, she again became pregnant. She considered having the child. Then, when she was more than four months along, she decided instead to have an abortion. The late procedure, which involved induced labor, was painful. "I was like ...

Prescription pads, clipboards and patient charts are so 20th century. In the era of CT scans, gene-splicing and stem-cell breakthroughs, handwritten record-keeping feels about as outmoded as the fluoroscope. It's more than just strangely retro; it's fantastically expensive. Health care in the U.S. costs a jaw-dropping $2 trillion annually, or more than $6,600 for every man, woman and child in the country. Streamlining the industry by eliminating medical errors, labor costs and general clunkiness caused by paperwork alone ...