Dr. Jon LaPook

How long does it take for Congress to pass potentially life-saving legislation that has widespread support and no obvious opposition? We are now at fifteen months and counting.

Since 2005, the number of medications in short supply -- including cancer drugs -- has more than tripled. The reasons are complex...

On April 8th, 2010, I watched helplessly as the only oxygen machine in a poorly equipped Haitian clinic was taken from a premature baby and given to a woman struggling in labor. The woman gave birth to a healthy girl named Rodsandy. The premature baby died; he had no name....

When I was a boy, my sisters and I tried stringing two paper cups together to see if we could talk to each other through the vibrating, taut string. We were only about 10 feet apart and it was hard to tell if we were hearing each other through the...

This post originally appeared on CBSnews.com.

CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook remembers Laura Ziskin, producer of the "Spider-Man" film franchise and co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, who died on Sunday evening after a seven-year battle with breast cancer. She was 61.

Laura...

An estimated 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. For every one of them, there are three unpaid caregivers: about 15 million people providing 17 billion hours of unpaid care each year. William Thies, Ph.D. -- the Chief Medical and Scientific Officer of the Alzheimer's Assocation -- told me that way...

My wife and two sons are flying from New York to Los Angeles this morning but I'm not worried about the so-called "radioactive plume" coming from the crippled Japanese nuclear reactors. In fact, I hate the term "radioactive plume" -- now appearing widely in the media -- because...

A study out yesterday in The Lancet by Moffitt Cancer Center researcher Anna Giuliano, Ph.D., and her colleagues finds that 50 percent of men ages 18 to 70 in Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S. have genital infection with human papillomavirus, or HPV. HPV is the virus...

An important new study out yesterday should lead to far fewer prostate biopsies.

First, some background. A lot more men will get prostate cancer than will die from it. On autopsy studies of men who die from OTHER causes at age 70, about 40 percent have microscopic evidence...

On Saturday afternoon we visited St. Nicolas Hospital in St. Marc, the current center of the cholera outbreak.

It was awful.

I spoke to a middle-aged man, Robert Raphael, whose family lives between St. Marc and Gonaives. Over the past week he has lost a brother, niece, nephew, and "five...

We landed in Port-Au-Prince about three hours ago to reports of the first cases of cholera in Port-Au-Prince itself. We drove straight to Parc Jean Marie St. Vincent, the largest tent camp in Port-Au-Prince.

When I visited this camp last April, I spoke to Dr. Dubique Kobel, a Haitian-born, Cuban...

Dr. Mehmet Oz just might be the last person on earth people would expect to get a colon polyp.

He's physically fit (he left me in the dust the last time we ran together), he eats a healthy diet, he doesn't smoke, and he has no family history of colorectal cancer...

My mother was very proud of the fact that none of her four children ever became sick from her cooking. While it's true she may have erred on the side of overcooking the turkey, being spared food poisoning is yet another in the long list of gifts from my mom.

Imagine throwing a lifesaving treatment in the garbage. That's exactly what happens in the United States over ten thousand times a day because we do not routinely offer to collect precious umbilical cord blood at the time of birth. Thousands of Americans --
many of them children --...

Twenty-five years ago, Jennifer Dunning wrote in the New York Times, "DANCE doesn't seem to take much stock of its wise elders. Among those veterans is Mary Anthony, one of the city's most highly respected modern dance teachers." I'm a big fan of wise elders. It's how I...

Craig Venter and his team of scientists recently announced that they had created the first "synthetic cell" -- a bacterium controlled by genetic material that they had designed on a computer and concocted from four bottles of chemicals. This is the closest thing to creating life that has...

Last year -- despite the recession -- there were about ten million cosmetic procedures in the United States. According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, over 90 percent were in women and about 1.5 million were surgical.

The top five surgical procedures...

Watch Glenn Close's brilliant PSA. I'm referring to her absolutely stunning public service announcement about the stigmatization of mental illness. My wife saw it at a symposium sponsored by Fountain House, was blown away, and couldn't wait to show it to me. The segment -- made...

The pill that ushered in the sexual revolution may have also thrown cold water on women's libido. Fifty years ago, on May 9th, 1960, the FDA announced the approval of oral contraception. The birth control pill allowed women to control their reproductive cycle, delay childbearing, and develop careers. But it...

The guy is Henry House, the title character of my friend Lisa Grunwald's latest novel, The Irresistible Henry House, and in addition to the fact that he's fictional, he's not a good bet. Henry knows how to please women -- how to talk to them, react to them,...