Cleveland Clinic

It seems like the pinnacle of medical science: For just a few hundred dollars, you can walk into just about any hospital in Southern California and ask a doctor to check your arteries for buildup of heart-attack-inducing calcium plaque. Most of the time, what goes on inside our bodies is a mystery, but there's something satisfying in the thought that a sophisticated piece of equipment can measure just how clogged our arteries really are (and how much more junk food we can afford, or not afford, to eat)

Gastric bypass surgery -- a treatment for obesity that is already known to reduce heart disease and diabetes -- decreases the incidence of cancer by 80% over the five years following the procedure, Canadian researchers reported Wednesday. The incidence of two of the most common tumors, breast and colon, was reduced by 85% and 70%, respectively, Dr. Nicolas Christou of McGill University in Montreal said.

In the next few weeks, five men and seven women will secretly visit the Cleveland Clinic to interview for the chance to have a radical operation that's never been tried. They will smile, raise their eyebrows, close their eyes, open their mouths. Dr. Maria Siemionow will study their cheekbones, lips and noses. She will ask what they hope to gain and what they most fear. Then she will ask, "Are you afraid that you will look like another person?"

Americans tend to like their fats saturated, their grains processed, their protein grown on legs and their sugar added anywhere their sweet tooth decides it would like some. As for fiber, they're all for it - in, say, their French fries or the pickles on their burger. In a related development, nutrition experts tend to be bummed out by the typical American diet. In fact, many wish we'd trade it in for a diet that's pretty much the opposite, namely, the Mediterranean diet, which favors monounsaturated fat, whole (unprocessed)

"Grey's Anatomy" 9 p.m. Jan. 5, ABC Episode: "Suddenly" The premise Dr. Teddy Altman (Kim Raver) is operating on a patient who came to the hospital for spinal fusion surgery but now is having heart problems. It turns out that a screw came loose and traveled to her heart, where it sliced the muscle in several places. Teddy tries to sew the heart back together, but she can't get good access to the mitral valve because of scarring. When a suture falls off, she decides to remove the entire heart from the patient's chest, repair it in a bowl of ice and then sew it back in. Teddy doesn't yet realize that her husband, Henry Burton (Scott Foley)

I have taken pain relievers for years for arthritis pain in my knees and hips and plantar fasciitis in my foot. My rheumatologist prescribed Celebrex, but my kidney enzymes soared, and I was told no more NSAIDs, ever. My pain has not gone away. What can I take? Many people get pain relief with over-the-counter NSAIDs such as ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) or naproxen (Aleve). Others do well on prescriptions such as Celebrex, diclofenac, meloxicam or nabumetone.

In findings that promise radical changes in the care of the 20 million U.S. patients with Type 2 diabetes, two new clinical trials have shown that weight-loss surgery brings about dramatically greater improvement of blood sugar control in obese diabetics than standard diabetes care. In both studies, even rigorously supervised regimens of diet, exercise and medications failed to bring blood sugar under good control after a year or more. In contrast, two teams of researchers - one in Italy, the other in the United States - reported that surgical procedures to reduce the size and sometimes the placement of the stomach often allowed subjects to discontinue diabetes medications within weeks.

For the second time in a month, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a prescription weight-loss medication for the nation's 78 million obese adults after maintaining for years that the measly benefits of the pills did not outweigh their significant costs. Qsymia, a combination of two drugs already approved to treat other conditions, "provides another option for the chronic weight management of Americans" who are obese or who are overweight and suffer a related condition such as Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure or worrisome cholesterol readings, said Dr. Janet Woodcock, the FDA's chief of drug evaluation, on Tuesday.

From a purely biomechanical point of view, the design of the human penis has its pros and cons. Thanks to clever hydraulics and some very stretchy material, the organ is capable of eyebrow-raising changes in size and shape. But indestructible it is not. "It's too bad men aren't issued an owner's manual for their penis. They don't realize it's possible to injure it during sex," says Dr. Drogo Montague, director of the center for genitourinary reconstruction at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

Former President Bill Clinton is speaking out about his plant-based, heart-healthy diet, saying that he believes the vegan regimen is helping to reverse the damage to his heart and blood vessels caused by cardiovascular disease.   "It's turning a ship around before it hits the iceberg, but I think we're beginning to turn it around," he told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta. It's not the first time Clinton has changed his famously Krispy Kreme-oriented eating habits to improve his health.