I recently spoke to a friend whose been struggling with a type of colitis. She’s taking steroids to keep the inflammation down in her GI tract, but she’s desperate to get off of them. She talked to her doctor the other day and the doctor told her she probably wouldn’t be getting off of the steroids any time soon because of how quickly she relapsed the first time they tried to wean her off. My friend was distraught. Although she knew in her heart that her doctor couldn’t be right, she couldn’t help but repeat the pessimistic words over and over in her mind.

After all we’ve been hearing about the Susan G. Komen foundation and their decisions about funding breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood, I’d like to echo Dr. Susan Love’s sentiments in her essay, Real Race in Cancer is Finding its Cause. She certainly supports screening as “the best tool we have.” But she writes, “[W]e have to start looking for other approaches to decreasing deaths from breast cancer.”

I just read an article by breast imaging specialist, Dr. Stacey Vitiello, in The Atlantic called “The Negative Mammogram Myth.” In it, she reminds us that mammography is an imperfect science and that a normal mammogram doesn’t necessarily mean a woman is breast cancer-free. In fact, researchers report that combining mammogram and sonogram (also called an ultrasound) can find 29% more cancers and 34% more invasive cancers.

I took my mother to her primary care doctor a few years ago and was happy I’d tagged along. Not only was the doctor talking mostly to his computer screen - he barely looked at us and my mother doesn’t hear well so it’s important that she sees your lips moving-but I had to ask for him to listen to her lungs. After all, she was there for a heart problem and it doesn’t take a medical student (or breast surgeon as the case may be!) to know that the lungs, as our oxygenators, are highly connected to heart function.

It’s a new year again! And with each new year we all have a fresh opportunity to enhance our lives and our health. This year, I recommend learning something new. As we get older, we become experts at the things we like to do and take less time to learn new things.

The holiday season is here, though sometimes what begins as genuine good cheer can turn to anxiety and stress without us even realizing it. Here’s a simple tip to keep you sane through it all: hug a tree.

I was thinking about the belly laughter children have — even children who grow up in difficult settings can still be silly — and wondering why we laugh less in adulthood. Stress and responsibility surely play a role and the silly expectation that adults are just more serious. But what if we made an effort to let go and laugh more? If you can do one good thing for your health today, find something funny and laugh.

You may or may not know that today is World Diabetes Day. And on this day at 2 PM (local time) thousands of people — whether they have diabetes or not — will test their blood sugar, exercise for 14 minutes, test again, and then share their results on the TuDiabetes website in an event called The Big Blue Test.

As a breast surgeon, I’ve seen many women — if not most or all — feel totally overwhelmed by a diagnosis. While this is understandable, the fear that comes with getting bad news can paralyze us into doing whatever we’re told to do. But what many women don’t understand is that we often have more time than we think.