Sarah Densmore

Ah, spring. The trees bud, the flowers bloom and the grasses flourish. But for 60 million Americans, our beautiful, burgeoning landscape brings a host of misery, including sneezing, sore throat, and watery eyes.There are a wealth of both over-the-counter and prescription medications available to ease allergy misery.

If you’ve ever tried to locate the Facebook passageway that takes you through the steps to permanently delete your account, you know it’s not easy to find. That’s because the popular social networking Web site doesn't present an obvious “delete my account” button. Deactivating your Facebook account is not the same thing as deleting it.

Your knee pain has gotten so bad that it’s keeping you from doing many of the things you enjoy. You can’t kneel to work in your flower beds or stoop to play catch with your grandkids. And forget walking the back nine of your favorite golf course, you can barely make it through the front nine. Arthritis medication isn’t doing the trick anymore and your doctor is recommending total knee replacement.

Menstruation and menopause are well-known biological milestones in a female’s life. Contrary to popular thinking, menopause is not the period of months or years when a woman is “going through the change.” This timeframe is called perimenopause. Menopause is an actual date in time. Specifically, it’s the 12-month anniversary of a woman’s last menstrual period.

Choosing a therapist can seem like a daunting task. You’re already overwhelmed by life’s challenges. How do you find a therapist with the right temperament, training, and therapeutic focus to help you figure out healthy ways to overcome your particular problems? Luckily, there are plenty of referral sources you can turn to and common sense questions you can ask that will make it easier to choose the right mental health professional for you.

Every year, millions of people enroll in thousands of clinical trials conducted around the world. These research studies are crucial to evaluating the effectiveness and safety of new medical procedures and medications. Maybe you’ve heard the results of various clinical trials in the news and wondered how people are recruited for these studies — or even how you can enroll in one yourself.

While the “colon prep,” as it is commonly called, involves an inconvenient 1- or 2-day liquid diet and a bathroom camp out, it's a necessary step toward ensuring your continued colon health. Properly flushing out your large intestine before undergoing a colonoscopy allows your doctor to see your colon clearly and identify any abnormalities, including cancerous polyps.

Chemotherapy can be a life-saving cancer destroyer. Unfortunately, the drugs don’t take aim solely at cancer. They can also kill hair, skin, and reproductive tract cells. This collateral damage leaves some chemotherapy patients with thinning hair, nail loss, uncomfortably dry skin, and permanent reproductive damage.

The same properties that make chemotherapy drugs effective cancer killers also cause them to damage healthy cells in your bone marrow, blood and nervous system. The damage, although often temporary, can make cancer patients vulnerable to a series of side effects and secondary conditions, including bleeding, anemia, infections, numbness in the extremities, and memory loss.