Robert Klitzman, M.D.

"A person waiting is a person suffering," a doctor told me recently. "I never realized that -- until I became a patient myself. The difference between being a doctor and not being a doctor is the timing."

The word "patient" has two meanings - referring to a person with illness,...

"I told a woman I share a little office with," a woman at risk of Huntington's Disease recently told me. This woman's father had this disease, caused by a lethal mutation; and she feared she had it, too.

"Somehow, it just spilled out," she added. "Then I felt, 'Oh...

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in 1927. He thus ruled that 18-year-old Carrie Buck should be sterilized against her will. In many ways, we have come a long way since then. Clearly, no one advocates forced sterilization for patients.

"I always knew I shouldn't have stayed in that job and that apartment," a social worker with breast cancer and a mutation for the disease recently told me.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"Because that's why I got the cancer."

"But you have the mutation," I reminded her.

"Yes,...

"I live with knowledge of my own death," she told me. "I found out I have the Alpha mutation, and that it will eventually kill me."

Individuals who learn they have a genetic mutation often feel this way. They may struggle to cope with this sense of fate, and frequently...

"I'm going to be in the New England Journal of Medicine," a patient once told me proudly. "Not me exactly, but my X-rays." It was the happiest I had ever seen him. He was the first AIDS patient I had ever treated. Fevers raged through his body, pneumonias wracked his...

Ten years ago, my sister died at the World Trade Center. That day, the world changed -- as did my life, and that of my family.

Every year since, on the anniversary of that day, my family and I debate whether to go to ground zero, whether to read the...

"I just saw a married couple who don't want to tell their daughter that she was created from another man's sperm," a psychologist who worked with infertile couples recently told me. "I don't know what to do. What do you think?"

The recent award of the 2010 Nobel Prize in...

By Robert Klitzman, M.D. & Ross Frommer, J.D.

The U.S. District Court's injunction on August 23, 2010 against President Obama's Executive Order expanding the use of federal funds for stem cell research sets back research that can potentially help millions of Americans and sets dangerous precedents that -- despite recent...

Log onto any website for plane tickets, theater tickets, or books and invariably you'll get the screen: "Scroll down to read the terms, and click 'I accept.'"

We all get it, and most of us end up blindly accepting, rather than wading through screenfuls of legalese.

But what do we...

"I suppose I should get a living will," a physician with metastatic cancer told me a few years ago. "But I haven't." Sadly, he died a few weeks later, never having signed one.

"If I keep working as hard as I can," another doctor with a serious disease recently...

"My patients used to ask me to pray for them," an elderly doctor told me a few years ago. "Yeah, sure," he would tell them dismissively as he walked out of the room. He "pooh-poohed" their requests. Then, he developed cancer himself. "Now," he sighed, "I realize how important religion...