Arrival of the Fittest
Nice-guy bodybuilder Larry North has muscled his way into Dallas’ power circles.
Reporting and analysis about the innovation, trends, and business of medicine and health care
Nice-guy bodybuilder Larry North has muscled his way into Dallas’ power circles.
His unconventional regimen—and his media savvy—have made him the latest of the Texas celebrity heart doctors.
Drug treatment seldom works: at many centers, greedy entrepreneurs prey on frightened parents and troubled kids. But one teenager’s parents decided to take one last, desperate step: they sent their son to the toughest program in Texas.
Codependency leaders preach that we are the victims of a psychological plague. It remains to be seen whether they are selling us a valuable insight or merely a bill of goods.
It was the hardest decision I ever had to make. Had the time come to put my father in a nursing home?
After learning that he had cancer, the author began a search for a cure that took him far beyond medical expertise.
For Ted Segal of Waco, the problem wasn’t getting a heart transplant; it was finding a donor. The delay was killing him.
From the look on my doctor’s face, I knew the results of the biopsy. The lump in my breast was cancer.
For some entrepreneurs, the dark cloud of AIDS has proved to have a silver lining
In Texas, survivors of this life-and-death operation wear their scars like medals of honor.
I was curious when I found that three of my friends had delved into the mysteries of psychic surgery. After three “bloody operations” of my own, I knew what it was all about. About $30 a minute.
Houston is famous for medical cures. But when British rock star Ronnie Lane came to town with a crippling disease and $1 million for research, all he got was crippling legal problems.
I smoked marijuana all day every day for several years. It took me almost a year to quit—and now I wonder if I’ll ever get straight.
When cedars start to mate, Texans start to suffer.
Age is a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Like any disease, alcoholism has specific symptoms. Like many religions, drying-out programs require abstinence, blind faith, and confession.
It may be hard to believe that you can drink two fifths a day and not only function but function well. But I did it. For a while.
New parents, beware! The only thing I got out of my six Lamaze classes was permission to enter the delivery room with my wife.
Are eye surgeons miraculously changing the lives of folks with glasses as thick as Coke-bottle bottoms, or are they just making themselves rich ?
The three-to-eleven evening shift, Bexar County Hospital, San Antonio: nurse Genene Jones was on duty in the pediatric intensive care unit, and for months babies kept having mysterious—sometimes fatal—emergencies. Why?
To a plastic surgeon, your face is just the beginning.
Now is the time to unlearn everything you’ve ever heard about snakebite.
Without embalming you can have a simple, inexpensive funeral. That’s just what Texas morticians don’t want.
In the southeast corner of Texas, more people get cancer than anywhere else in the state. Why?
In her darkest, final hours, a young mother turns to a new kind of medical care for help.
Being autistic nearly ruined Michael Shipley’s life, but his parents sent him to a state mental hospital. Then Michael’s life was ruined for good.
As a doctor, Tony Seidenberg has become accustomed to death. Only this time it is different: he is the one who is dying.
You learn one clear and not so very grim lesson by looking death in the face.
My friend, you have come to the right place.
At Houston’s Jefferson Davis Hospital, the wonders of modern medicine collide with the raw realities of birth, poverty, neglect and hope.
You can always spot a smoker. He fiddles with matches, his shirt pocket bulges in a tiny rectangle, and fumes emerge from his mouth and nose. But what should we do about him?
A husband and wife decide sterilization is the best answer for birth control; the question is-who does it?
Doctors are busy every minute. But what exactly are they up to ?
At the Texas Medical Center the best hospitals, doctors, researchers, and medical technology anywhere in the world have combined to transform doctors from healers into superstars.
We will all grow old; but, as Maurice Chevalier says, “That’s not so bad when you consider the alternative.”
Some kids may fail at school and it’s not their fault.
You don’t have to move to Arizona to cure your allergies, but you may have to get rid of your cat.
A child with Down’s syndrome is neither Mongolian nor an idiot.
Burning a candle a day keeps the hexes away.
Every night at Ben Taub Hospital’s emergency room is a night of the living dead.
Everybody makes mistakes, but mistakes in the medical profession leave scars on everybody.
A schizophrenic’s own story of his tour through asylums from Bellevue to Texas.
The Greenhouse is where the rich and the chic go to play I spa.
How a doctor got hooked on drugs, and how he got off.
Is doing what comes naturally good enough these days?
How the Texas heat can sap your energy, dull your intelligence, send you to an early grave, and make you sweat.
If you have to be critically injured in Texas, be sure to pick the right place.
Great ambulance drivers are made, not born.
Alpha waves, past lives, and other explorations of the subconscious.
Staying alive day by day . . . by day.