Therapy

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

State Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) is right to be offended by "conversion therapy," the pseudo-psychiatric treatment that purports to talk patients out of being gay and into being straight. There's no medical basis for the treatment, and there's some evidence that it causes harm while failing to do any good. As is so often the case, Lieu and his colleagues in the Legislature reacted to a perceived problem by proposing a bill. Lieu's legislation, SB 1172, which would make it illegal for California psychologists to attempt to convert gay minors, has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and is working its way through the statehouse.

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."

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.

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.

"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...

The hospital was built in the years after World War II. Its ceilings are low, corridors long and corners sharp — all possible stress triggers for those who have been in combat. Not to mention that a hospital waiting room can make anyone edgy. But the Veterans Affairs hospital in Fresno has found a way to make the experience easier: live music. A musician playing amid the hustle and bustle is familiar to anyone who has ever sat at a cafe with entertainment or taken the subway.

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.

A drug used for the treatment of depression seems to have a remarkable effect on some people who take it: When they yawn, they have an orgasm. Yes, men and women alike. Yes, really. The "yawngasm" effect is no doubt quite a boost to the antidepressant qualities of the drug, clomipramine (marketed under the brand name Anafranil by its manufacturer, Ciba Pharmaceuticals).

The group therapy session at Afghanistan's flagship mental health hospital began, as many do, with sharing. Foruzan, 28, a slight woman in a black and silver head scarf, told the psychologist she was possessed by an evil spirit, or jinn. She sought help at a shrine, she said, and thought she was healed. But then the heartburn returned. Beside her, Parvin, 20, a rosy-cheeked student, who like other patients at the hospital asked that only her first name be used, said she suffers intense headaches and needs medication to think clearly at school.

As if Dr. Paul Offit hasn't made enough enemies  already by insisting (correctly) that parents put their kids' health at risk when they refuse to get them vaccinated, now the infectious disease expert appears to be picking a fight with those who believe in alternative therapies like prayer healing and acupuncture. In an essay to be published in Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., Offit questions the way the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine doles out its $130-million annual budget.

Surgical intervention is grossly underutilized in epilepsy patients who do not receive relief from drug treatment, UC San Francisco researchers reported Tuesday. By failing to offer the treatment to most patients, doctors are condemning them to continued disabling seizures and perhaps to even an earlier death, the researchers say. Whereas hundreds of thousands of the 2 million Americans who suffer from epilepsy could benefit from the surgical procedures, only a few hundred receive them each year, according to Dr. Edward Chang, of the UCSF Epilepsy Center.

Researchers have found a way to classify breast cancer tumors into 10 distinct categories ranging from very treatable to extremely aggressive, a major step on the way to the long-sought goal of precisely targeting therapies for patients. The new categories, described in a study released Wednesday, should help scientists devise fresh approaches to treat some of the cancers and could spare many women the risks and pain of unnecessarily toxic treatments, oncologists said. "If you belong to one group you'll need one therapy, and if you're in another you'll need another," said Dr. Carlos Caldas, a breast cancer geneticist at the University of Cambridge in England who helped oversee the research.

During Nirbhay Singh's eight years as lead consultant for California's psychiatric hospitals, state officials hired his relatives, then urged the facilities to use a little-known therapy and psychological questionnaire they had devised, state records and interviews show. To fill out Singh's consulting team, the Department of Mental Health in 2006 hired his wife, Judy Singh, whose background is in reading comprehension and adult literacy. Over 41/2 years, she earned more than $340,000, primarily training staff members in a therapy she helped develop, state records show.

Lindsay Lohan will not be appearing in court anymore if she continues to obey the law, a Los Angeles judge told her Thursday after ending the actress' supervised probation on shoplifting and drunk-driving convictions. The hearing put an end to Lohan's five years of criminal court appearances that saw the actress bounce in and out of rehab and jail for violating her probation. L.A. County Superior Court Judge Stephanie Sautner declared "she did it," in announcing Lohan had completed 480 hours of community service at the county morgue and undergone dozens of therapy sessions.

"We obviously believe that this technology is nothing short of life-changing," boosts Ran Zilca, chief scientist of bLife, a Los Angeles-based company that markets the Live Happy app. But is there really any evidence that using a mood app helps? There aren't a whole bunch of studies yet. One, by UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of "The How of Happiness," found that mood and happiness ratings went up when 327 participants used Live Happy over the course of three to 14 days - and the more the app was used, the more the ratings rose.

It was 9:15 on the night of May 27, and Cara Vanni was chatting with a friend on the phone, just like any number of San Clemente teen-agers. Suddenly the line went dead. A minute later, strangers appeared in her bedroom doorway. "My parents brought these three people into my room," Cara, 16, recalled. "At first I thought they were old friends of the family who were about to say they knew me when I was 4. They weren't."

It's 1 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, and Heidi Kling is reading in an all-white room. She's shoeless, but socks protect her feet from the 6 inches of salt that cake the floor. The only objects in the windowless room are four chaise longues and hand-molded plaster icicles that hang from the ceiling. If there were a Yeti in the room, you would swear you were on the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Normally, Kling would be at work or running errands, but today her allergies, which cause her ears to ring, have brought her to this monochrome sanctuary.

Your smartphone: It's not just for texting, tweeting, waging war against little green pigs and - oh, right - calling people. It's also for making yourself a happier, less stressed-out, more self-aware person. Really, there's an app for that. Any number of apps. They come with names like Mood Swing and CBTReferee and BrainFreqz, and at their best, they offer users "'treatment' in the palm of their hand," says Dr. John Luo, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA.

Perhaps if there were other really effective medications to treat menopausal symptoms people wouldn't care so much about the safety of hormone replacement therapy. But there aren't medications that work as well as estrogen alone (for women who have hysterectomies) or estrogen plus progestin (for those with a uterus) to stop hot flashes, night sweats, sleep problems, foggy thinking, vaginal dryness, mood swings and other problems that crop up for some women during the menopausal transition.