It happens to every medical student sooner or later. You get a cough that persists for a while or feel a funny pain in the stomach or notice a tiny lump under the skin. Ordinarily, you would just ignore it — but now, armed with your rapidly growing store of medical knowledge, you can't help worrying. The cough could mean just a cold, but it could also be a sign of lung cancer. A ...

In my work as a cardiovascular surgeon, I use the most sophisticated tools of modern medicine to separate patients from their diseased hearts and replace these organs with healthy ones. While my training was in the science of the Western world, I also rely heavily on an ancient Eastern technique--meditation--to help my patients prepare for surgery and to steer them gently toward recovery. Why? Because it works. Every patient who comes to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York ...

An e-mail has been making the rounds among some of my physician colleagues. "I am shocked that information about the prescriptions I write for my patients is being sold to drug companies for marketing purposes," begins the missive. "This is a violation of my privacy as a physician and an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship!" The note implores doctors to support laws that restrict the sale of physician-prescribing information to drug companies and to sign up ...

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 ...

Maybe it's because I was born a couple of months after Woodstock and wasn't around when marijuana was as common as iPods are today, but I'm constantly amazed that after all these years--and all the wars on drugs and all the public-service announcements--nearly 15 million Americans still use marijuana at least once a month. California and 10 other states have already decriminalized marijuana for medical use. Now two of those states--Colorado and Nevada--are considering ballot initiatives that would legalize up ...

Correction Appended: May 29, 2010 Three years ago, James Lansberry faced the kind of health care crisis that has become all too common in the U.S. Less than two weeks after his wife Theresa gave birth to their sixth child, she had to rush back to the hospital to have her appendix removed before it burst. Her medical bills eventually totaled more than $23,000. It would have been a stressful time for any family — but especially for those who, like ...

Happily married for 10 years, Richard Sharrard, a dance instructor, and Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and writer, blend in nicely enough with their neighbors in the middle-class community of Long Beach, Calif. But the couple's life-style is far from ordinary: Sharrard and Tessina are openly and unapologetically bisexual. During their unusually flexible marriage, Sharrard has enjoyed liaisons with half a dozen men, while Tessina has taken two female lovers. "It's the best of both worlds," declares Sharrard, who thinks nothing ...

Shocked but not surprised. That might be the best way to sum up India's reaction to the revelation this week that a black market organ transplant ring had been harvesting kidneys from poor Indian laborers, sometimes against their wishes, and using them in foreigners desperate for transplants. Police who busted the ring last week say doctors paid as little as $1000 for the kidneys and then sold them for as much as $37,500. The racket, based ...

Is it legally permissible and medically ethical to abort a woman for "psychiatric reasons"? In Britain, as in most countries, physicians and surgeons have addressed themselves diligently to this problem. Though far from unanimous in details, they have arrived at a clear consensus on the main point. The consensus: such an operation is very rarely justified.In Britain, abortion is legal only if performed to save the life of the mother, though by court interpretation this has been given a broad construction: "If pregnancy is likely to make ...

Roe v. Wade. Sometimes those seem like the most contentious words in American law. Short and unassuming though they are, they connote other, more explosive terms: abortion and murder, morality and privacy, the right to life and the right to choose. Attached to those words are some of the most intractable passions in American life. Writing about medical advances that improve the chances for a fetus to survive outside the womb, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor once declared ...