One of the great blessings of my life is that my 91-year-old father, who I dearly love, lives in the apartment building next door. After sixty-six years of marriage, he's been living alone since my mother's death last March. He is still sharp as a tack, as he might say....

The recent recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women should no longer routinely start getting screening for mammograms at age 40 is the latest example of a time-honored tradition of doctors changing their minds. While frustrating for patients, that tradition is a good thing.

A recent...

Should You Get a Mammogram or Not?

The new breast cancer screening guidelines announced November 16th by the U.S Preventive Services Task Force have sparked widespread anger and confusion. The debate centers on the relative risks and benefits of various methods of trying to pick up breast...

President Obama has stressed the importance of "bending the cost curve" in order to put the brakes on galloping health care expenses that total 2.5 trillion dollars a year and are increasing at 6% a year. The fastest way to do this is shockingly simple: carefully explain to...

As health care reform heads into the next phase, Congress will miss the boat if it ends up perpetuating a system that reacts to illness rather than preventing it. Chronic diseases such as obesity, hypertension, and diabetes wreck our quality of life and cost a fortune. For obesity alone, according...

According to a recent study, about one in five teenagers have electronically distributed provocative pictures of themselves that could land them in jail. A joint survey by Cosmogirl.com and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy found that 19% of teenagers answered "yes" when asked if they...

Susie Essman, aka Susie Greene of Larry David's HBO program, Curb Your Enthusiasm, has written a hilarious book (and yes, I actually read it) called What Would Susie Say?: Bullsh*t Wisdom About Love, Life and Comedy. For this week's CBS Doc Dot Com, I talked to Susie about some...

Over the past several months, the face of health care reform has increasingly belonged to pundits, lobbyists, and members of Congress. After the Senate Finance committee's approval of health care reform legislation yesterday, the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal featured prominent pictures of...

Several years ago I was urgently paged by a patient who had discovered a lump at the bottom of his chest. He came straight over to my office, fairly certain he had cancer. The lump turned out to be a normal part of his sternum (breastbone), a small piece of...

Celiac Disease: A Diagnosis Often Missed

There's a disease that American doctors are absolutely terrible at diagnosing. It's estimated that three million Americans have celiac disease and only a small percentage of them know it. In celiac disease, a component of wheat, rye, and barley called gluten...

If you're from a Western country, there's a 10-20 percent chance that you suffer from classic symptoms of acid reflux: chronic heartburn and/or acid regurgitation.

But if you don't have those classic symptoms you may still have acid bubbling up from the stomach into the esophagus, a condition...

We have been inundated with so much information about the 2009 H1N1 that it's hard to keep it all straight. Here's my top ten list of what's most important to know, much of it coming from the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has done a...

Last night, President Obama made a pitch for preventive care in his address to a joint session of Congress on health care:

And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies - because there's no reason we...

At a time when two thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, health officials are correctly warning that most of us need to lose weight. But we may be setting ourselves up for a surge in eating disorders.

The two main types of eating disorders...

For years my friends and patients have told me how surprisingly shocking the death of an elderly parent can be. We know it's inevitable, yet the finality is jarring. But knowing and knowing are two different things. So her son the doctor reacted just like so many others when my...

Senator Ted Kennedy's death from brain cancer underscores the urgent need for more funding of basic cancer research. Despite the best efforts of a team of top doctors, Kennedy died 15 months after the diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor called glioblastoma. Over the past ten years, some progress has...

Last weekend I was in Vermont on vacation when I heard that Senator Bernie Sanders was hosting a town meeting on health care. On Saturday, August 15th, I grabbed my video camera and went to the afternoon meeting of an estimated 450 people in the small town of Arlington. Their...

This week's CBS Doc Dot Com features 42-year-old Dara Torres, who has been in five Olympics and won every kind of medal a swimmer can win. She juggles motherhood (her 3-year-old daughter, Tessa, is a gold medalist in being cute), a career, and philanthropy. And to top it off, as...

For this week's episode of CBS Doc Dot Com, I went back to camp. OK, it wasn't my camp -- that would be Camp Algonquin in Argyle, New York, now defunct, where I spent many an idyllic summer growing up. It was Camp Shane in Ferndale, New York, listed...

About a quarter of all Americans are obese. This week the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that obesity-related diseases account for an estimated 147 billion dollars in medical costs annually in the United States. That's 9.1 percent of all medical spending, up from 6.5 percent in 1998.

If...