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 ...

Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine , preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year. To address the problem—and give the push for electronic ...

For the doctors and nurses at the south London hospice it had been a wrenching weekend. Twelve patients had died between Friday and Sunday nights, and by Monday morning death's wide swath had left the staff physically and emotionally exhausted. It was time for a tall, somewhat stout, white-haired woman to provide the reassurance of her presence: standing in a stairwell, in the path of grief-bruised nurses and doctors, greeting each with a jovial smile and concerned questions: "How was ...

For geneticists the fascinating fact about the Old Order Amish, one of the sects of the Pennsylvania Dutch country's "Plain People," is that they all are descended from about 200 immigrants of 200 years ago. A few Amish leave the ancestral acres and simple way of life, but virtually no new blood has been introduced to create genetic confusion. For such a group, to survive is to inbreed, and the Amish have more than survived; they now number 44,000. ...

"Gifted" researcher is punished for faking data "Dr. Darsee is clearly one of the most remarkable young men in American medicine. It is not extravagant to say that he became a legendary figure during his year as chief resident in medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital." With that exuberant commendation, Cardiologist Paul Walter of Emory University endorsed the selection of his former colleague John Darsee for one of the biggest plums in academic medicine: an appointment to the Harvard Medical School ...

Remember the childhood thrill of twirling in circles until the world spun wildly and you couldn't stand on your feet? That's how many of my former patients described their disorienting bouts with dizziness--especially the elderly ones. As many as 38% of older Americans struggle to keep their world stationary, trying to avoid dangerous falls and potentially life-threatening injuries. Dizziness is so common among seniors that patients and their doctors tend to write it off as an inevitable consequence of aging. ...

As most parents of small children will reluctantly admit, nothing can occupy a child quite like television. Unfortunately, the scientific evidence suggests that using the boob tube as a babysitter has its price: the more time babies spend sitting in front of the screen, the more their social, cognitive and language development may suffer. Recent studies show that TV-viewing tends to decrease babies' likelihood of learning new words, talking, playing and otherwise interacting with others. A new study ...

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 ...

The orbiting Kepler telescope is all about the numbers. How many stars have planets? How many have multiple planets? What sizes do they come in? How many of these planets are about the same size as Earth, and how many of those are in orbits that could permit life to exist? Kepler will answer all of these questions and more. But while numbers are the bread and butter of science, they're more like medicine for most of us ...