Getting by is hard enough in middle school. It's harder still when you've got other things on your mind--and Andrea Okeson, 13, had plenty to distract her. There were the constant stomach pains to consider; there was the nervousness, the distractibility, the overwhelming need to be alone. And, of course, there was the business of repeatedly checking the locks on the doors. All these things grew, inexplicably, to consume Andrea, until by the time she was through with the eighth ...

A woman uses a vibrator so intensely that she ends up in an emergency room. A priest steals money from his church's collection box so that he can pay for prostitutes. A young father of three small children sneaks out at night for anonymous sex in public bathrooms. He contracts AIDS and infects his wife. Both of them are dying. Why do otherwise normal men and women do such things? Why do they let their sexual desires destroy their families, ...

It is an irony not lost on the Chinese public that the Year of the Tiger has not been good for the big cats. On Tuesday, state media reported that dozens of tigers and other endangered animals had died of malnutrition over the past two years at the Northern Forest Zoo in the Chinese city of Harbin. Workers, who later leaked the story to the media, buried their bodies in a 3-meter pit to hide the animals ...

There's no such thing as the Car or the Shoe or the Laundry Soap. But everyone knows the Pill, whose FDA approval 50 years ago rearranged the furniture of human relations in ways that we've argued about ever since. Consider the contradictions: It was the first medicine ever designed to be taken regularly by people who were not sick. Its main inventor was a conservative Catholic who was looking for a treatment for infertility and instead found a ...

Treating cancer is a bit like shooting in the dark. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. There's no way to predict. That's because while scientists have some crude ideas about how to disable cancer cells, the inner workings of cancer are a mystery for the most part. Perhaps not for long. Researchers have just sequenced the entire DNA code of one type of breast-cancer tumor. The team, led by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine, began the project using ...

Updated: Aug. 10, 2010. On a still road in Penestanan Village in Bali's central foothills, a dull, blue-stained signboard points toward the house of the medicine man. Ketut Liyer is a ninth generation healer of undecided age — "maybe 90?" he shrugs — who has never been off the Indonesian island. But the dozen or so women who crowd his compound this afternoon, their chatter in competition with the peeping of caged birds suspended from clay-roofed pavilions, have ...

Dr. Vincent Felitti, founder of Kaiser Permanente's Department of Preventive Medicine and director of its obesity-treatment program, was seeing some good results. His patients were losing 50, 80, even hundreds of pounds. He might have considered the program a success, if not for the fact that the participants who were doing the best — those who were both the most obese and losing the most weight — kept dropping out. Felitti was baffled. Why, invariably, did so many ...

What kind of doctors would agree to intentionally shorten and sterilize a disabled six-year-old girl to make it easier for her parents to take care of her? The question has had message boards steaming for days, but the answers are in no way easy. Dr. Daniel Gunther and Dr. Douglas Diekema, who first revealed the details of "The Ashley Case" in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, think that many of their critics don't understand the nature ...

Some families, alas, are fatter than others. But for dieters continually at war with their genes, there's good news in a study published in this week's PLoS Medicine: they can burn off 40% of their genetic predisposition to obesity by exercising. Led by Dr. Ruth Loos from the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge, U.K., the study evaluated more than 20,000 Britons aged 39 to 79, asking about their exercise habits and surveying their genes. Researchers focused ...

WANTED JESUS CHRIST ALIAS: THE MESSIAH, THE SON OF GOD, KING OF KINGS, LORD OF LORDS, PRINCE OF PEACE, ETC. > Notorious leader of an underground liberation movement >Wanted for the following charges: —Practicing medicine, winemaking and food distribution without a license. —Interfering with businessmen in the temple. —Associating with known criminals, radicals, subversives, prostitutes and street people. —Claiming to have the authority to make people into God's children. APPEARANCE: ...