Glenn D. Braunstein, M.D.

As a canvas for self-expression, the human body has few limits: Just walk into any coffee house or hip lounge and you will see patrons with tongues adorned with metal studs, earlobes "gauged" (plugged) with holes the size of quarters, maybe even a neck or temple bedazzled with microdermal anchors....

Are you a male who suffers from tiredness, moodiness, weakness, low libido and failure-to-thrive? Is your stomach getting flabby and are the crow's feet around your eyes getting more pronounced? If so, perhaps you suffer from Manopause due to a combination of your testes' failure to make adequate amounts of...

If you're a trend-watcher, there's an intriguing statistical uptick that's worth a second glance and it involves women, their health and where they're giving birth.

Before I dive into this topic more fully, let's take a brief detour into history as to why human females need help birthing their babies....

The good news is you kept that New Year's resolution and have hit the gym five days a week for 30 minutes of exercise, just as the experts recommend. Unfortunately, you're also spending much of your day sitting -- stuck in traffic, slumped before a computer screen or...

If you're admitted to a hospital, the last thing you should need to worry about is developing an infection linked to your care. Sadly, it occurs too often.

And consider startling numbers about the consequences: About 1 of every 20 patients gets an infection while hospitalized and up...

Call it the wages of sin, the price so many Americans pay for their love affair with high-fat foods. Sure, there's a genetic component to dangerously high cholesterol levels, but it's love of butter, ice cream and well-marbled meat that puts so many at increased risk of clogged arteries that...

Patients often believe, falsely, that when it comes to medical care, more is better. So last week, when nine medical specialty societies representing about 375,000 doctors listed 45 tests and procedures that they say are done too often, it may have caused confusion and anxiety among some Americans. This anxiety...

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the United States and the main cause of cervical cancer, which kills more than 4,000 women a year. HPV also can lead to anal cancer and genital warts, in both women and men,...

For most of us, a cough is nothing more than the usual seasonal bout with a cold. But for 25 million Americans, including 7 million children, with asthma, that cough alerts the asthma sufferer or parent to pull out an inhaler to avert potential tragedy. An

Americans spend a lot of money on yoga: $5.7 billion a year on yoga classes, equipment, clothing, vacations and things like DVDs, books and magazines, according to a survey by Yoga Journal. Why do so many people spend all that time and money learning to put themselves in...

Now that the federal government has sought to get schools across the country to make healthier lunches, there's another tough question for us all: Will kids eat them? As an early culinary revamp dished out for students in Los Angeles schools already has shown, swapping corn dogs for...

It's yet another of the fancy, shiny and pricey purchases or gifts parked on the kitchen counter. It may have gotten a good run just after the holidays when it got into the house and members of the whole family -- just as the infomercials, some celebrities and even a...

It's an incontrovertible fact of life: We all die. I do not believe there is such a thing as a "good" or a "bad" death. I know, however, there is a spectrum in the process of dying. It ranges from unbearable suffering for patients and their families to a reasonable...

In Boston, a construction worker, ravaged by burns, successfully underwent a total face transplant. In San Antonio, surgeons have injected a glue-like substance that hardens and prevented the bursting of a woman's brain aneurysm. And in my own institution, researchers have shown that stem cells from...

Valentine's Day has become a holiday that single people have reason to dread: Will I have a date, or will I be forced to buy my own box of chocolates? Couples, too, have reason for trepidation: Will I meet my partner's expectations for flowers, dinner reservations and romance?

It's easy to understand why millions of patients with cancer, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, infections, heart disease, central nervous system conditions and pain get riled up when they learn there are shortages of drugs for what ails them.

It's more complicated to understand why this occurs -- and the precise...

Brad Pitt made headlines when he arrived at the Palm Springs International Film Festival early this year, walking the red carpet with a cane. It turns out the actor had suffered a knee injury, taking a tumble on the ski slopes.

So maybe he is just a regular guy. As...

Preliminary figures from the Centers for Disease control include a promising bit of news for women's health: for the first time in a decade, the rate of cesarean section births dropped. The dip was exceedingly modest, with C-sections declining to 32.8 percent of all births in 2010 from...

As partisans wrangle over fiscal matters like entitlements and taxes, what is getting overlooked is the more real and basic need to reform a huge and inefficient driver of America's economy: our health care delivery system. We spend far more than any other country on health care. Yet our citizens...

As an allopathic practitioner, a.k.a. "regular" Western medicine doctor, I'll tread gingerly (no pun intended) on the topic of common medicinal herbs and remedies. There is certainly a wealth of research backing up the connections between nutrition and good health. And science keeps digging deeper into foods, beyond the "essential...