Oral sex can get most men's attention. The topic becomes considerably more relevant, however, when coupled with a new study linking the human papillomavirus to an increased risk of a kind of oral cancer more often seen in men. The study, which appears in this week's New England Journal of Medicine , shows that men and women who reported having six or more oral-sex partners during their lifetime had a nearly ninefold increased risk of ...

Most private hospitals can only dream of the futuristic medicine Dr. Divya Shroff practices today. Outside an elderly patient's room, the attending physician gathers her residents around a wireless laptop propped on a mobile cart. Shroff accesses the patient's entire medical history--a stack of paper in most private hospitals. And instead of trekking to the radiology lab to view the latest X-ray, she brings it up on her computer screen. While Shroff is visiting the patient, a resident types ...

Although his parents urged him to study medicine, Jimmy Weiskopf dropped out of college and in the 1970s moved to Colombia, where he eventually began to focus on a different kind of elixir. The New York City native became an early advocate for the hallucinogenic plant mixture ayahuasca. For centuries, Amazonian Indians have been drinking ayahuasca, also known as yaje — a combination of the ayahuasca vine, tree bark and other plants — to achieve a ...

Leslie Elder's eyelids fluttered open, and through the fog of pain medication, she saw the emergency room doctors pull back the curtain in her room. She could tell that the news was bad. "They didn't have to say a word. I knew from their faces that something wasn't right," said Elder, 60, who hours earlier had stumbled into the ER with a stabbing pain in her abdomen. "Then one doctor said, 'Your right kidney ... it's breaking apart. You have ...

It's Nobel Prize announcement week, and if you had Carol W. Greider, Elizabeth Blackburn, or Jack Szostak in your office pool, you're off to a good start (the trio will share this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine). As we await news of the rest of the winners, here are some stories about past Nobel laureates. 1. Robert Lucas, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the theory of "rational expectations," split his $1 million prize ...

As Dr. Jennifer Lickteig examines patients at the Linn Community Care Health Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she's also earning money from a second career that has nothing to do with medicine. Lickteig runs a clothing store on eBay, where she's a "Gold PowerSeller," ranking among the top 1 percent of merchants on the online marketplace. The 35-year-old family practitioner says she earned $120,000 last year on eBay, more than she did practicing medicine. "It's just kind of ...

German writer Herta Mueller, whose work has dealt with the hardships and humiliations of life in an oppressive dictatorship, was awarded the Nobel prize in literature Thursday. The Romanian-born Mueller, 56, was recognized by the Swedish Academy as a writer who "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." She became only the 12th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1901. Mueller made her writing debut at 29 after ...

Two Americans and an Israeli were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for painstakingly mapping out the thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome -- work that paves the way for new antibiotics. Inside all animals, plants and bacteria are DNA molecules that contain the blueprint for life. Ribosomes are an organism's protein factories. They use the information in the DNA to make the tens of thousands of proteins that enable the organism to function properly. These ...

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for two breakthroughs that led to two major underpinnings of the digital age -- fiber optics and digital photography, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Charles K. Kao, a British and U.S. citizen, won for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication." Willard S. Boyle, a Canadian and U.S. citizen, and George E. Smith, a U.S. citizen, "invented the first successful imaging technology using ...

Most of us have experienced those maddening midnight moments when, no matter how tired we are, we either can't fall asleep, can't stay asleep or our sleep is of such poor quality it feels as if we were awake. For anyone who has tossed and turned at night, here's some expert advice for solving nine sleep problems. The night waker Her challenge: After a stressful breakup two years ago, Meredith Crowell, 40, a single real estate property manager ...