Mark Turek In “Love Alone,” Anne Scurria, left, plays Helen, a woman struggling to understand the sudden death of her partner during a routine operation. Leah Anderson is Clementine, her daughter.Few plays or movies capture the complex emotional and professional aftermath of a medical error. So often, the characterizations and story lines are as facile as a cartoon, with careless and negligent doctors, irrational and vengeful patients and families, and soulless, ambulance-chasing lawyers.“Love Alone,” a new play about a devastating medical mistake and its consequences at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., breaks this mold.Dr. Pauline Chen on medical care.Written by Deborah Salem Smith, Trinity’s current playwright-in-residence, and directed by Ms. Smith and Tyler Dobrowsky, the company’s associate artistic director, the lucid, deeply nuanced ... Continue reading →

Calcium supplements, long recommended for stronger bones, may be bad for the heart, a large new study confirms. The study found that taking extra calcium may raise the risk of a heart attack.In recent years, some health authorities had hoped that calcium supplements, in addition to building bones, might also provide consumers with cardiovascular and other benefits. Some research, for example, has shown that people with higher levels of the mineral in their diet tend to have lower rates of hypertension, obesity and Type 2 diabetes.But while higher levels of calcium from food intake may yet prove to be good for the heart, research suggests that the same does not hold true for calcium purchased over the counter. A study from 2010, for example, a ... Continue reading →

Music, as the saying commonly goes, can soothe even the savage beast. What about the frail beast? The sad one?My parents started me on the piano at the age of 4, but it wasn’t until the fourth grade that I chose music for myself. The music teacher at Lake Avenue Elementary School stood in front of the class with a dozen stringed instruments lined up at the front of the room. Choose your instrument, she invited us.The thought that I could choose my instrument was a revelation. Violins, violas and cellos were the hot items — and there were more of them than any other instruments — but I was curious about the big wooden object at the end of the row, leaning up against ... Continue reading →

Mike and Sharon Misik feed their dogs a diet of entirely raw foods.For years, raw food enthusiasts have touted the health benefits of uncooked food for humans. Now, some veterinarians and pet owners believe that a raw meat diet is best for pets.Sharon Misik, an actress who adopted two Siberian huskies in 2008 from a pet rescue organization, is a believer. After adopting the animals, Ms. Misik and her husband, who live in Bradbury, Calif., spent thousands of dollars on specialized diets and trips to veterinarians to treat a mysterious illness that plagued their dogs, which had trouble eating and severe diarrhea and seemed perpetually sick.When nothing else worked, she decided to try a raw food diet, even though several veterinarians discouraged it, saying it ... Continue reading →

Kevin Law/Getty Images When do marathons kill?When word circulates that a runner has died of a heart attack, as the inexhaustible ultramarathoner Micah True did last month during a solo wilderness trail run, many people begin to wonder about the healthiness of prolonged strenuous activity. Could marathon training and racing perhaps have damaged the heart muscle of the 58-year-old Mr. True, a lead character in the book “Born to Run”? And, conversely, shouldn’t marathon training have made him — and, by extension, all runners — immune to heart disease?Those questions, familiar to any scientist or physician who works with endurance athletes, inspired several recently published studies of the relative risks of marathon running. The science suggests that, over all, distance running and racing are extremely ... Continue reading →

Patients aren’t the only ones interested in alternative and complementary medicine. In an occasional series, Well talks to doctors around the country to find out what nontraditional medicines or therapies they sometimes recommend or use themselves.David McNew/Getty Images Can this device help reduce your stress?Physician: Dr. Lawrence D. Rosen, chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Integrative Medicine, and a pediatrician at the Whole Child Center in Oradell, N.J.Recommended Remedy: Biofeedback devices for stressWhat the Doctor Says:Biofeedback devices typically weigh only a couple of ounces and look something like an iPod. Pressing your thumb to sensors on the devices allows them to take your pulse and measure changes in your heart rate. The devices then use audible cues, flashing lights and graphics to ... Continue reading →

In a controversial finding that will affect at least 44 million American men, a government task force published its final recommendations against regular prostate cancer screening, concluding that the harms of the simple blood test far outweigh any potential benefit.The recommendations, from the United States Preventive Services Task Force, offer the most detailed breakdown to date of the potential risks and benefits of the prostate specific antigen blood test, commonly known as the P.S.A. test. Most important, the task force found that, at best, one man in every 1,000 given the P.S.A. test may avoid death as a result of the screening, while another man for every 3,000 tested will die prematurely as a result of complications from prostate cancer treatment and dozens more will ... Continue reading →

Giving the flu vaccine to pregnant women may bring significant benefits to their babies even before birth, a new study has found.Canadian researchers studied the records of 55,570 mothers of singletons, of whom 23,340 were vaccinated during pregnancy from November 2009 through April 2010. Compared with unvaccinated mothers, women who got the shot during the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic had fewer preterm births and stillbirths, and fewer undersize infants, the researchers found.After adjusting for maternal age, smoking, hypertension and other factors, vaccinated mothers had a 27 percent decreased risk of delivering a baby before 32 weeks gestation, for example, and a 34 percent decreased risk of stillbirth.The report, published in the June issue of The American Journal of Public Health, noted that during the H1N1 epidemic, ... Continue reading →

Yvetta Fedorova The definition of an optimist:Someone, like me, who plans to get more done than time permits.Having failed to achieve the impossible, someone, like me, who is sure everything will somehow get done anyway.A more classical definition from the Mayo Clinic: “Optimism is the belief that good things will happen to you and that negative events are temporary setbacks to be overcome.”In one study, adults shown to be pessimists based on psychological tests had higher death rates over a 30-year period than those who were shown optimistic. No doubt, the optimists were healthier because they were more inclined to take good care of themselves.Unlike Voltaire’s Candide, I’ve yet to be stripped of my optimism, though there are clearly forces in this country and the ... Continue reading →

Some studies have linked dietary fat to the development of dementia later in life. A new study suggests that the risk may depend on the type of fat consumed.Scientists studied 6,183 women over age 65, tracking their fat consumption and changes in their mental abilities over four years. The women completed a food questionnaire at the start of the study, then periodically took tests of mental ability.The researchers assigned a “change score” to each volunteer, summarizing changes in memory and abstract thinking over time — the lower the score, the greater the decline. The study appeared online Thursday in the journal Annals of Neurology.After controlling for many health and socioeconomic factors, the researchers found that women who consumed the most saturated fat were 60 percent ... Continue reading →