Smoking is a major cause of heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, and lung cancer. Smoking rates have steadily declined in the U.S. in the last 50 years, but about a fifth of U.S. adults still smoke. Helping them quit would make a major contribution to their health. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine […]

Life is all about beginnings and endings. One of the biggest draws of obstetrics as a medical specialty is the fascination with the birth process as the beginning of life. The other extreme … well, let’s say in this particular place and time in history, it’s still something that catches people unaware. Too often filled […]

Loitering in the hallway of my son’s school awaiting his parent-teacher conference, I completely forgot that the woman introducing herself and shaking my hand was an alcoholic.  I forgot that she had visited me in the office a decade prior for a consultation.  I forgot all of it. What I remembered is that we had […]