Doctors

Asthma sufferers have long relied on inhalers for relief from wheezing or coughing attacks. But as of Dec. 31, Primatene Mist -- the only available over-the-counter asthma inhaler -- was taken off shelves because of its adverse effect on the environment. Other inhalers are available, but these require a doctor's prescription. Some people with asthma aren't happy about the change, but lung doctors and asthma specialists agree that Primatene Mist wasn't the best option for patients anyway.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Pakistani doctor who led a phony vaccination campaign aimed at helping the CIA pinpoint Osama bin Laden's whereabouts was convicted of treason Wednesday and sentenced to 33 years in prison, a decision that is likely to further fray Washington's fragile relations with Islamabad. U.S. officials have been seeking the release of Shakeel Afridi since his arrest by Pakistani authorities after the secret American commando raid that killed the Al Qaeda leader in his sprawling compound in the garrison city of Abbottabad a year ago. In January, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told CBS' "60 Minutes" that Afridi had provided intelligence that assisted the raid and criticized Pakistan's arrest of someone involved in helping track down the world's most wanted man. From the start, however, Pakistani authorities have regarded Afridi as a traitor and have ignored Washington's calls for his release.

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

Is the routine PSA test to screen for prostate cancer going to fade away now that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended against it for men of all ages? The signs are maybe not, according to a survey of primary care physicians done by Dr. Craig E. Pollack and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The survey was done in November, after the task force's draft recommendations had been released but before the final ones were published earlier this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine . In the survey, 125 primary care physicians and nurse practitioners affiliated with Johns Hopkins responded to a questionnaire about their approach to PSA screening.

The PSA test should be abandoned as a prostate cancer screening tool, a government advisory panel has concluded after determining that the side effects from needless biopsies and treatments hurt many more men than are potentially helped by early detection of cancers. At best, one life will be saved for every 1,000 men screened over a 10-year period, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. But 100 to 120 men will have suspicious results when there is no cancer, triggering biopsies that can carry complications such as pain, fever, bleeding, infection and hospitalization.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

WASHINGTON - An experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis has caused death, strokes, nerve damage and abdominal bleeding and has no proven benefits for sufferers of the disease, the Food and Drug Administration warned Thursday. Known as liberation therapy, the treatment targets chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency - or CCSVI - a narrowing of the veins in the head and neck. It involves inserting balloons or stents into veins to widen them in an attempt to relieve the symptoms of MS. The FDA received reports in 2011 of a patient who died from bleeding in the brain after undergoing the treatment and another who was left permanently paralyzed by a stroke.

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

So how many omega-3 fatty acids are enough — and how should you get them? That likely depends on your age and your specific health concerns. The United States does not yet have guidelines for DHA or EPA, and consensus among nutrition experts is elusive. But specialty groups, some governmental agencies and individual experts have started to take a stand. For healthy adults without major medical issues, the European Food Safety Agency recommends a daily dose of 250 milligrams of combined EPA and DHA, while the National Heart Foundation of Australia suggests 500 milligrams.

Vertigo. For most people, the word summons images of Jimmy Stewart dangling from high places in Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller by the same name. It means something else, however, to hundreds of thousands of people who experience the strange, dizzying affliction. The most common cause of vertigo, known as benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, usually can be treated with one visit to the doctor.

The PSA test should not be a routine screen for men of any age, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force declared earlier this week. The assessment wasn't about saving money but was based on a review of the science on PSA screening -- what were the benefits and what were the harms? To recap: The task force concluded from two large studies that over a period of 10 years, one prostate cancer death at most was saved from PSA screening for every 1,000 men screened. The test finds many cancers that are not life-threatening, and treatment causes side effects from surgery and radiation such as impotence and urinary incontinence.

The PSA test should be abandoned as a prostate cancer screening tool, a government advisory panel has concluded after determining that the side effects from needless biopsies and treatments hurt many more men than are potentially helped by early detection of cancers. At best, one life will be saved for every 1,000 men screened over a 10-year period, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. But 100 to 120 men will have suspicious results when there is no cancer, triggering biopsies that can carry complications such as pain, fever, bleeding, infection and hospitalization.

Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly said Sunday that the team doctor told him second baseman Mark Ellis was within several hours of possibly having his left leg amputated if Ellis hadn't had emergency surgery. "That was scary," Mattingly said of the injury, which is expected to keep Ellis out of action for six weeks. "I didn't realize how bad that was. " Ellis, 34, suffered the injury Friday when he was upended by the St. Louis Cardinals' Tyler Greene to break up a double play.

I had a routine physical exam a couple of weeks ago and paid a $40 co-pay. I thought it was strange, so I called my insurance company. They said I should not have had to pay a co-pay for a routine physical exam. I called the doctor's office and they referred me to their billing department, who refused to refund me the co-pay until my insurer reimburses them for the full amount of the physical. This doesn't sound correct to me. They collected a co-pay that they should not have collected.

A polite comedy about a potentially rude subject,"Hysteria"takes its title from the medical condition diagnosed to women in Victorian England for any number of unrelated symptoms. As a treatment, doctors would stimulate a woman to orgasm, referred to as "manual massage to paroxysm," leading one beleaguered physician, essentially as a labor-saving device, to invent the vibrator. In the film, which opens in Los Angeles on May 18, the progressive young doctor Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy)

A controversial proposal to allow some nurses, midwives and physician assistants to perform certain early abortions was withdrawn by its author Friday because it lacked enough votes to pass a key legislative committee. The bill had the backing of the leaders of both houses of the Legislature and of Planned Parenthood but was opposed by an influential nurses union and by foes of abortion rights. Proponents argued that the measure would make it easier for women who live far from urban areas with plenty of abortion providers to get safer, less intrusive procedures.

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

IF it's been a year or two since you've shopped for a mattress, you're in for some surprises. That memory foam bed that once seemed so novel? It's now decidedly mainstream. Latex is the hot material of choice. And that's not all that's changed. Choices are multiplying -- especially on the luxury end -- and prices are too.

Did you hear that a doctor has found the G spot?  Turns out it's in Poland. OK, wait, that's not quite right:  It's the doctor who was in Poland.  The G spot is where it's always been -- meaning, somewhere men can't find it. (Honestly, this is why I don't believe in intelligent design.  Would any intelligent designer put something so important in such a hard-to-find location?) Anyway, The Times' Melissa Healy reported Wednesday on Dr. Adam Ostrzenski, a “semi-retired Florida doctor [who]

Like so many explorers before him, Dr. Adam Ostrzenski has long dreamed of finding a piece of elusive territory with a reputation for near-mythic powers. Ostrzenski's quarry is the G spot, the long-conjectured trigger for enhancing female orgasm. And in an article published Wednesday by the Journal of Sexual Medicine, the semi-retired Florida gynecologist declared that he had found it. To do so, Ostrzenski conducted a postmortem examination of an 83-year-old woman in Warsaw Medical University's Department of Forensic Medicine.