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My Latest
Column
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A week from today, 10,375 women - and 14,737 men - are expected to
run in the Boston Marathon. The presence of so many women - the most
ever entered in the historic race - is a sure sign of how far women
have come in athletics. So is this: In 1972, before Title IX, the
law that spurred women's athletics, fewer than 300,000 high school
girls played sports, according to the National Federation of State
High School Associations. Now it's more than 3 million.
My Last Five Columns
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After years of suffering from chronically inflamed and infected
sinuses, I finally decided I'd had enough. I chose to do what
500,000 other Americans do every year - have sinus surgery. It
wasn't an easy decision. I had to balance my need for a fix against
my fear of surgery and research that raised questions about the
procedure.
02/18/08
Weight-loss surgery increasingly seen as
treatment for diabetes
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Elizabeth Soto used to say no when her husband suggested they go
dancing. "I didn't want to go," she said. "I felt tired and ugly."
She also was carrying 314 pounds on her 5-foot-7-inch frame and had
diabetes. She had gastric bypass surgery last June and now, at 235
pounds, the 38-year-old Chelsea resident said she feels "energetic
and beautiful. I want to go out every weekend." Even more
astonishing, her blood sugar, which goes awry in diabetes,
normalized within days of her surgery. A delighted Soto now
proclaims: "My diabetes is gone."
01/21/08 The
unsung benefits of lifting weights
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I'm an exercise junkie - and proud of it. I swim, I run, I bike.
But, like many other people, I'm a disaster when it comes to lifting
weights, also called strength, or resistance, training. The closest
I come is lifting a few tiny dumbbells at home in front of the TV.
And that's only when the Red Sox are on. This is about to change,
and not just because of lingering New Year's resolutions.
12/24/07
Book on fertility and diet stirs buzz,
skepticism
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Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have created a
buzz with their new - and controversial - book, "The Fertility
Diet." The book doesn't actually come right out and claim that the
new Harvard diet is a cure for infertility. But that's the message
desperate couples could be forgiven for getting, given its title,
some of the authors' public statements, the intense media hype, and,
of course, the clout of almost anything with the Harvard imprimatur.
That's why some critics are upset.
11/26/07
A searing account of life with
schizophrenia
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Most of us
have never had to live inside our heads as all hell is breaking
loose. We've never faced the terror of falling apart, of totally
losing our grip on reality. We've never experienced the horror of
hearing strange voices tell us to do terrible things. Most of us, in
other words, have never had schizophrenia, one of the most common
and most severe forms of mental illness. Elyn Saks has.
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