Health

A mother who gave birth to a severely handicapped child has sued her obstetrician for not providing data that would have allowed her to abort the fetus. Elizabeth Weil wrote about the case in The New York Times Magazine.

A middle-aged woman awakens one morning to a sense of dread, a malaise so deep that she studiously analyzes her life — both past and present — to uncover its source. So begins Hilma Wolitzer's new book, The Doctor's Daughter.

Fear and paranoia often take hold when a disease threatens to become an epidemic. Dr. Marc K. Siegel is the author of the new book Bird Flu: Everything You Need to Know About the Next Pandemic.

For 100 years, sufferers of leprosy were banished to Molokai, an untamed Hawaiian island. A new book chronicles how paranoia forced thousands of people to live in exile.

Geriatrician Dr. Christine Cassel says physicians and their patients are still adapting to the federal plan to use Medicare to pay for prescription drugs.

The new Medicare prescription drug plan is complex, confusing, and irrational, according to health policy expert Jonathan Oberlander. A month after the rollout of the new Medicare prescription drug plan, many seniors are finding it difficult to get the drugs they need.

Dr. Sandra Horning and Dr. David Johnson are both oncologists. Horning is the current president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the largest group of cancer-treatment specialists. Johnson was president before her. Both of them are cancer survivors — the first to lead the 41-year-old society. Horning practices and does research on lymphomas at Stanford. She is also co-chairman of the oncology society's task force on cancer survivorship. Johnson is deputy director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn.

Political scientist Jonathan Oberlander is an expert on health politics and policy. He is an associate professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of the book The Political Life of Medicare. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in Health Affairs, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times.

Peter D. Kramer's new book is Against Depression. In it, the author of Listening to Prozac puts forth an understanding of depression as a modern scourge. Kramer argues that depression should be considered a disease — and treated as such. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University.

Musa Mayer is a breast cancer survivor and is the author of several books about breast cancer, including Advanced Breast Cancer: A Guide to Living with Metastatic Disease and After Breast Cancer: Answers to the Questions You're Afraid to Ask. She has also written Examining Myself: One Woman's Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery.