Can you imagine having breast cancer, having lost your sister, mother and other relatives to the disease, and having doctors with no clue as to why the disease is devastating your family?

It should not be that hard to imagine. It was entirely commonplace only 25 years ago until geneticist...

The news that 24-year-old Allyn Rose, Miss District of Columbia in this year's Miss America competition, is planning to have both of her breasts removed in the near future is the latest case of what we might call "extreme breast cancer prevention." Rose's mother died of breast cancer, but she...

Can we stop National Football League players from continuing to drive drunk and killing people?

I ask this question in light of the news that Dallas Cowboys nose tackle Josh Brent has been arrested for intoxication manslaughter after allegedly causing the tragic death of his teammate and...

It is not surprising that a woman with breast cancer has recently inspired the passage of laws across the country mandating clinics to discuss one of the pitfalls of mammography. Breast cancer survivors have been remarkably successful in using personal stories to place important medical issues on the...

Fifty years ago this November, when Eleanor Roosevelt's doctor told her that her very debilitating disease was tuberculosis, and potentially curable, he expected her to be thrilled. But she instead uttered "I want to die" three times.

As the Affordable Health Care Act goes into effect, much attention is being...

Do we need another memoir about a loved one with dementia? Not really. If one goes to Amazon.com and enters the words "memoir" and "Alzheimer," dozens of books appear.

But there is an interesting fact about these memoirs: the vast majority of them have an average customer rating of five...

As the author of When Illness Goes Public, a book on celebrity patients, I strongly doubt that Good Morning America television co-host Robin Roberts' ongoing discussion of her myelodysplastic syndrome is, as one Internet commentator has written, a "self-serving ratings grab."

Being severely ill is a painful physical and mental...

At 4 a.m. on Monday, May 27, a drunk 21-year-old woman drove her car through a house on New York's Long Island. Yes, actually through the house. Amazingly, there were only minor injuries.

There is no chance that Sophia Anderson did not get lectured in her high school...

My annual month of teaching internal medicine on the wards has always given me a yearly reminder of the changes in inpatient medicine: the increasing presence of "hospitalist" physicians, the proliferation of shift work among doctors-in-training, and a growing emphasis on quick discharge of patients.

But this year's experience has...

Walk through almost any medical intensive care unit in the country and you will encounter patients with terminal diseases who received CPR despite having had no chance of meaningful recovery from their conditions.

Alarmed at this situation, a group of end-of-life specialists wants to transform how physicians approach the issue...

The last thing that Paul Lukac thought he had when he developed periods of confusion during his second year of medical school was a brain tumor. After all, he was studying neuropathology, abnormal brain tissue, and that would have been too great a coincidence.

But Paul, known as P.J., had...

It was instructive to be reading Golden Holocaust, Robert N. Proctor's new history of the tobacco industry, during the recent debates over Mitt Romney's leadership of Bain Capital.

Bain made some of its money by closing unprofitable companies that it had bought, often firing hundreds of people...