Additional Writing Samples

Taking Care of Yourself

In the chaos and intensity that surrounds a new cancer diagnosis, everyone tends to focus all of their care and concern on the patient. Too often, medical staff and relatives forget to stop and ask the family caregiver how they are doing. Read More

Running on Empty

After his fourth cycle of chemotherapy for lung cancer, retired Marine Everett VanderVere, 73, who describes himself as a “tough bird,” had to go to the hospital with fever and severe weakness. Read More

A Direct Hit

Five years ago, Alvaro Martinez, MD, a radiation oncologist at Beaumont Hospitals in Royal Oak, Michigan, was attending a medical conference in Dearborn when he happened to wander into the wrong conference room. Read More

Fish on Drugs

Back in the 1990s, Theo Colborn, then-senior scientist with the World Wildlife Fund, sounded the first alarms about endocrine disrupters. Read More

Auto Exposure

Do Immune System Diseases Have an Environmental Cause?

Nearly 20 years ago, as a young graduate student, Canadian wildlife biologist Peter Ross investigated a massive die-off of harbor seals in the Baltic Sea. The problem, it turned out, was their immune systems. Read More

Prempro users, lawyers resort to legal remedy

About two years after she started taking the hormone replacement therapy drug Prempro, Gayle Lewers went in for a routine mammogram. "A couple of days later, I got a call from my doctor," Lewers recalls. "He said I had a tumor." Read More

Pop divas are paying lip service to PMS

"My lower back is achin' and my clothes don't fit," sings Mary J. Blige on her latest album, "No More Drama." "This is the worst part of being a woman. Give me a break cause I'm PMS-ing." Read More

Hip pads may give elderly a cushion against injuries

Convincing women to add inches to their hips is never easy. But when you consider the statistics--243,000 American women 65 and older fall and break their hips each year, and 20 percent will die within a year of such a fall--wearing protective hip pads doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Read More

Congenital Heart Disease

Congenital heart disease, or congenital heart defect, includes a variety of structural problems of the heart or its major blood vessels, which are present at birth. Read More

For Rural Clinicians, a Virtual Consult

“They are really going the extra mile to get good data and good labs,” Ruge says of the specialists at the other end of the program. Read More

When Taking Medication Pays (Literally)

What You Can Do Now
While the results of these studies won’t be available for several years, Kimmel argues that clinicians can still take certain steps right now in their own practice settings, even if they work in a small medical office or a rural town. All it takes is good communication, he says. Read More

Trends: On the Road to Health

Setting the Wheels in Motion
Friedman and DeGroot say working onboard a mobile health clinic is one of the most satisfying types of medicine to practice. For those who want to consider a career in this area, or who might want to start up a new mobile clinic, they offer a few words of wisdom. Read More