Word: painful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Young doctors spend a lot of time solving medical mysteries, and one of the more memorable ones I encountered occurred in the 1990s, when I was a resident in neurosurgery at the University of Michigan. A woman in her mid-60s came to our clinic complaining of severe back pain that wrapped around to her chest. That sounded a lot like a herniated disk, and her primary-care physician wanted me to examine her to determine if surgery was called...
...began telling me what she was experiencing, it became clear that this might be something other than spinal woes. For one thing, she had had a fever a few days earlier and was feeling run-down. She also remembered having severe itchiness in the areas where she now had pain. Her other doctors initially worried that she was having a heart attack or that she had an ulcer, though antacids brought no relief. I asked her to describe the pain. "Stabbing," she said. The clincher was a band of reddened skin - extending from the middle of her back around...
...most cases, the shingles rash and blisters go away in a few weeks or months, but in some cases the pain can last for years. Antiviral medications can help, and in 2006 the Food and Drug Administration approved a shingles vaccine, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends for all adults 60 and older. The vaccine isn't perfect, but it seems to decrease the target group's risk approximately 50%. Still, it may not be for you. If you have ever had a serious allergic reaction to gelatin or the antibiotic neomycin, you should...
...depth," which is to say they didn't pretend to be miserable. Instead, like pop performers from an earlier age, they pretended to be happy. Their music did too. The lyrics to the song Mamma Mia confess to erotic obsession and serial masochism, but the perky melody puts the pain at an ironic distance. It was heartache you could disco to. That's why millions of people, not all of them idiots, felt better listening to Abba's music. Hearing it now, people still...
...than in the North. Urologists even talk about a "kidney stone belt," a high-risk zone through the South where populations are more likely to develop stones - crystallized chemicals (usually calcium, phosphates and oxalates from an ordinary diet) that form in the urinary tract, and often cause sharp, intense pain when they pass. The Texas researchers used regional data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to predict how this belt might grow, publishing their report this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By 2050, the research suggests, 56% of Americans will live in regions...