On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Diana Levine in her lawsuit against Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. The victory means that Ms. Levine, a professional guitarist whose lower arm had to be amputated after a Wyeth drug was improperly administered is now entitled to receive the… Read full post »

Tuesday, March 3, was Square Root Day.  That's because the 3rd day of the month multiplied by the 3rd month of the year equals the 9th year of the century (3/3/09). Either the month or the day is the square root of the year.

I know about things like Square Root… Read full post »

Evidently I’ve been living under a rock, because I only recently learned about the latest internet craze, web sites for married people looking to have an affair with other married people. AshleyMadison.com, the premier site of its kind, garnered a massive amount of free publicity when… Read full post »

Rihanna has inadvertently shined the spotlight on a taboo subject. No, not domestic violence; discussions about domestic violence have become commonplace. Rihanna has highlighted the problem that no one wants to talk about, the role of women in sustaining abusive relationships.

The sad s… Read full post »

Every now and then a scholarly paper comes along that is truly ground breaking. The brilliance of the paper is manifest in the synthesis of trends that we have all observed but never connected to each other.

Mary Eberstadt’s piece in the current issue of policy… Read full post »

Hundreds of newspapers and websites around the country have been buzzing with the news that sexually degrading song lyrics are linked to early sexual activity. The newspapers slavishly copied the press release issued by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine:

… Brian A. Primack,… Read full post »

Are corporate murderers evil, stupid or both? How could any corporate executive deliberately release contaminated products into the market and expect to get away with it?

Yesterday, two corporate executives in North Carolina were each sentenced for 4 ½ years in prison for delibera… Read full post »

Judging by their behavior, American women appear to think that fathers are optional. According to the recently published birth statistics (Births: Final Data for 2006), the proportion of births to unmarried women has reached 38.5%, the highest rate ever recorded.

… [T]he proportio… Read full post »

Mention reproductive conflict and many people will nod knowingly. It is not unusual to find differences in the sexual needs of men and women. Conflict may arise over frequency of intercourse and length of foreplay, not to mention the differing proclivities of partners. Yet that’s… Read full post »

Salon approvingly highlights the speech of author Haruki Murakami on Israel and the Palestinians. Murakami gave the speech on accepting a literary award in Israel. After detailing why he accepted the award (simply to defy those who told him he shouldn’t) Murakami utters what he co/… Read full post »

Waterbirth has been touted as an alternative form of pain relief in childbirth. Indeed, it is often recommended as the method of choice for pain relief  in "natural" childbirth. It's hardly natural, though. In fact, it is completely unnatural. No primates give birth in water, because pr… Read full post »

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not funny at all. The world, including the US, is being flooded with counterfeit Viagra and other erectile dysfunction medications; the consequences include serious injury or even death.

A report in this week’s issue of the New… Read full post »

Let’s be honest. Thin people feel superior to people who are overweight. The prejudice is so deep seated that it has affected the practice of medicine. Rarely a week goes by without some scientific paper claiming to link obesity with various dreadful health problems; yet most are shodd… Read full post »

 For years I have bemoaned the fact that there is no accountability for doctors in the way that they treat patients. Make patients wait for 2 hours for a scheduled appointment? Who cares? Offer only clipped, curt answers to questions? Why not? Rush patients through as if they were… Read full post »

Like any Jewish child, I learned about anti-Semitism when I was small. It wasn’t that hard to recognize it, since anti-Semites were generally quite open about their feeling. Swastikas scrawled on synagogues, prejudice against Soviet Jews, efforts to annihilate the Jews of Israel were v… Read full post »

My two middle sons have always shared a special relationship. The way that Jeffrey (at four months) looked at David (at 2 ½) is the way that he still feels about him almost 17 years later, as both are approaching 6 feet in height. David has always been Jeffrey’s… Read full post »

With yesterday’s rulings of the Vaccine Court, the vaccine-autism link can be thrown onto the historical pile of discredited claims made by vaccine rejectionists extending back more than 200 years to the discovery of vaccination itself. For anyone keeping score, that’s vaccines 1… Read full post »

Kidney transplantation was pioneered in Boston, at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. The first transplants were performed only on identical twins because immunosuppression treatment had not yet been discovered. The donor and the recipient had to be literally identical in order for the transpl… Read full post »

Our country may be fractured along political and economic lines, but we can all agree on one thing: we’re mad at Nadya Suleman, the mother of the newborn octuplets.

Ann Curry, who recently interviewed Suleman on the Today Show, referred to her as the “most… Read full post »

 Over the last two millennia, religion has opposed science on many different occasions. And every time religion has opposed science, regardless of the topic, religion has been spectacularly wrong, every single time. Evolution is no different.

There is no one who is more completely c… Read full post »

Moms, do you dread “school projects” like I do?

I spent more than 6 hours yesterday helping my child with a school project. You’d think those days would be long gone for me; my four children are teens and young adults. The only thing that has changed,… Read full post »

 I’ll admit it right up front. I fell for it.

I was standing in line at the drugstore when I noticed the cover of the March issue of Cosmo. The bottom right hand corner declared, “An Orgasm Almost Killed Her.” I’m a gynecologist, and I… Read full post »

Our daughter recently gave us a very fine compliment. Discussing her day over dinner one night, she reported that her high school “Issues” class was studying marriage. The teacher had told the students that a successful marriage has three elements: friendship, intimacy and passio… Read full post »

I have been working on the internet as a freelance writer since before the advent of the World Wide Web. I had one of my most interesting jobs in 2000. That year I went to work for a new start-up called iEmily.com, a health website for teenage girls. I… Read full post »

Progressives are so busy congratulating themselves on self-righteously making government off limits to anyone with questionable income tax returns that they have failed to consider what they have really done. In torpedoing the nomination of Tom Daschle, they have set back a far more importan… Read full post »