February 3, 2012, 3:08 pmKale for Everyone! By TARA PARKER-POPEAndrew Scrivani for The New York TimesOrecchiette With Tomato Sauce and KaleIn this week’s Recipes for Health, Martha Rose Shulman found inspiration at the farmers’ market.On a recent Thursday at my neighborhood farmers’ market, one farmer had three different varieties of kale on offer – black kale (also known as cavolo nero, dinosaur kale, dragon tongue, lacinato or Tuscan kale), curly gray-green kale and red Russian kale, another ruffled variety that has red veins and a purplish color. I bought all three and had a lot of fun turning them into dinners over the next six days.These greens are hearty, and they maintain about 50 percent of their volume when you cook them, unlike spinach, which ... Continue reading →

On Thursday, we challenged Well readers to really think like a doctor — an E.R. doctor, to be exact — to figure out why a perfectly healthy and active 43-year-old woman had fallen asleep and couldn’t be awakened.More than 400 readers wrote in with possible diagnoses and suggested tests to confirm the diagnosis.The correct diagnosis is…Bilateral stroke of the reticular activating system, which supports the brain’s sleep and wake cycle, related to an unusual blood vessel variant called the artery of Percheron.Dr. Mark Goldberg, a neurologist from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, was the first to suggest this diagnosis and requested an M.R.I., which was then posted. When I asked Dr. Goldberg how he made this diagnosis, he responded: “I can ... Continue reading →

Karsten Moran for The New York TimesCould a coach bring back the intellectual vibrancy from medical-school days for doctors?Last week in my cello lesson, I spent an hour and a half on a single line of music. It was a snarly line, and I botched it heroically for 90 solid minutes. My teacher was patient, but uncompromising; I was met with blunt feedback at every step and left feeling wholly dispirited.At home I plowed through that line for the next week, painstakingly dissecting each infuriating dotted-sixteenth note and every nasty double-sharp. On my teacher’s advice, I recorded each attempt, then listened back to repair my errors. It was excruciating for me (to say nothing of the suffering of innocent household bystanders).There was no eureka moment, ... Continue reading →

February 2, 2012, 11:10 amNew Vaccine Recommendations: HPV for Boys, Hepatitis B for Diabetics By HAD O'CONNORJoe Raedle/Getty ImagesA look at the new vaccine recommendations for adults.Federal health experts now recommend that all boys be routinely vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV. The vaccine has been recommended for girls and young women since 2006 largely to prevent cervical cancer. But it can also protect against genital warts in men and women, and lower the risk of developing head, neck and anal cancers.Health authorities never expressly encouraged the vaccine for young boys, saying only that they “could” receive it. But in releasing a new immunization schedule on Thursday — published in the Annals of Internal Medicine — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used much ... Continue reading →

Illustration by O.O.P.S.This column appears in the Feb. 5 issue of The New York Times Magazine.Every few years, parents find new reasons to worry about their teenagers. And while there is no question that some kids continue to experiment with sex and substance abuse, the latest data points to something perhaps more surprising: the current generation is, well, a bit boring when it comes to bad behavior.By several noteworthy measures, today’s teenagers are growing increasingly conservative. While marijuana use has recently had an uptick, teenagers are smoking far less pot than their parents did at the same age. In 1980, about 60 percent of high-school seniors had tried marijuana and 9 percent smoked it daily. Among seniors today, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring ... Continue reading →

The Challenge: Can you solve a medical mystery involving a 43-year-old woman who suddenly falls asleep and can’t be awakened?The Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine regularly asks Well readers to sift through a difficult medical case and solve a diagnostic riddle. This month’s puzzle is a two-part challenge that will require you to really think like a doctor. That’s because, just like the doctors who were involved in this case, you’ll need to consider a wide range of diagnoses and decide what tests should be ordered based on this patient’s presentation.I’ll give you all the information that was available when the patient first presented to the emergency room. I’ll also give you the history and physical exam obtained by the E.R. physician. ... Continue reading →

Kris HankeWhen ticking off the benefits of physical activity, few of us would include intercellular housecleaning. But a new study suggests that the ability of exercise to speed the removal of garbage from inside our body’s cells may be one of its most valuable, if least visible, effects.In the new research, which was published last month in Nature, scientists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas gathered two groups of mice. One set was normal, with a finely tuned cellular scrubbing system. The other had been bred to have a blunted cleaning system.It’s long been known that cells accumulate flotsam from the wear and tear of everyday living. Broken or misshapen proteins, shreds of cellular membranes, invasive viruses or bacteria, and worn-out, ... Continue reading →

Brian StaufferI didn’t know much about the patient — just that he’d showed up on my floor the previous evening after some confusion about whether his room was ready. When I went into his room that morning, he was still asleep. I gently roused him while his doctor, who had followed me in, explained that he needed to do a physical exam.The patient, suddenly fully awake, challenged him: “Are you going to examine me or are you just going to stand there and talk about it?”He was aggressive, confrontational. But more than that, his voice had an edge to it that, I’ll reluctantly admit, scared me, especially when he quickly got up out of the bed and started yelling at the doctor and me. He ... Continue reading →

Christopher T. MartinACTIVE ANTIDOTE Atlanta transformed an old rail corridor into a trail network that encourages walking and biking.Developers in the last half-century called it progress when they built homes and shopping malls far from city centers throughout the country, sounding the death knell for many downtowns. But now an alarmed cadre of public health experts say these expanded metropolitan areas have had a far more serious impact on the people who live there by creating vehicle-dependent environments that foster obesity, poor health, social isolation, excessive stress and depression.As a result, these experts say, our “built environment” — where we live, work, play and shop — has become a leading cause of disability and death in the 21st century. Physical activity has been disappearing from ... Continue reading →

January 30, 2012, 2:00 pmThe Changing Meaning of Heterosexuality By ANAHAD O'CONNORPatricia Wall/The New York TimesIn today’s Science Times, Abigail Zuger takes a look at “Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality,” a book by Hanne Blank, an expert on the history of sexuality. In “Straight,” Ms. Blank delves into the history of heterosexuality – a history that in at least one sense is surprisingly short. She notes, for example, that the word “heterosexual” only came into use a little over a century ago. As Ms. Zuger writes:In fact, it was coined in Germany only in the second half of the 19th century and was first used in English several decades later with the classical sense of “hetero” (“other, different”), making it initially a term ... Continue reading →