Nancy Shute

Brittany Maynard was a beautiful anomaly.

Most 29-year-olds don't get incurable brain cancer. Most young cancer patients don't choose assisted suicide when given a terminal diagnosis, or decide, as Maynard and her husband did, to pack up and move to another state so she could have that choice.

And Maynard ...

Public health types are getting increasingly annoyed with people freaking out about Ebola in the United States, from governors to the general public. It's easy to see why; when I heard a swim coach was getting questions from parents worried that their children might get Ebola from the pool water, ...

The hunt to find genes that cause autism has been a long slog, one hampered by a lack of technology and families willing to be tested.

But the effort is starting to pay off. On Tuesday, researchers at more than 50 laboratories said they had identified more than 100 genes ...

Now that the United States is asking people arriving from West Africa to monitor their health in an effort to identify those infected with Ebola virus, the natural question is: How would I do that?

With your Ebola CARE Kit, of course.

On Thursday the Centers for Disease Control ...

I'm bummed that the green coffee weight-loss cure touted by Dr. Oz doesn't work. It could have been the perfect painless antidote to my habit of lying on the sofa eating Russian chocolate.

But the one flimsy bit of research that suggested that green coffee extract might speed weight loss ...

The number of men getting vasectomies spiked during the Great Recession, rising one-third from 2006 to 2010, a study finds.

In 2006, 3.9 percent of men said they had had a vasectomy; in 2010, 4.4 percent reported having the surgery. That means an additional 150,000 to 180,000 men per year ...

Getting an eye exam typically involves big complicated machines. But eye doctors are trying to get the big and complicated out of the equation by using smartphones and tablets instead. That way, they figure, eye exams can be done just about anywhere — even a village in Nepal.

That's where ...

Nurses were worried about Ebola long before nurse Nina Pham became the first person to become infected with the deadly virus in the United States.Now they're worried and mad. And they've got lots of questions about how to care for future Ebola patients safely.

Pham, 26, was part of the ...

In the bestselling Ivy and Bean books, 7-year-old Bean puts a lot of energy into avoiding chores and reading. So when her friend Ivy brings up measles shots, Bean is ready with alternatives:

• Wear a hazmat suit for the rest of your life.
• Make an anti-measles force field with ...

Fecal transplants can be life-saving for people with stubborn bacterial infections, but they're not for the faint of heart. So doctors have come up with a way to make them more palatable – the frozen poop pill.

People infected Clostridium difficile suffer debilitating diarrhea, but the bug often defies antibiotics. ...

On Aug. 15, doctors and nurses at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., realized they had a problem.

Children were coming into the emergency room with an illness that caused wheezing and breathing problems so severe that some children ended up in the ICU on ventilators. And it was ...

Liquid detergent pods can cause eye injuries in children after they squeeze or bite the brightly colored pouches, a study finds.

Eye doctors at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical treated 10 young children who had eye injuries in 2012 and 2013 as a result of encounters with a ruptured detergent pod. ...

When nine children in one hospital in Colorado come down with a mysterious form of paralysis in less than two months, it's hard not to worry.

Colorado has been hit hard by enterovirus D68, a virus that has caused severe respiratory illnesses in children around the country over the ...

People who have had a very mild form of stroke called a transient ischemic attack, or TIA, are at risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, with almost one-third of people later diagnosed with PTSD, a study finds.

Earlier studies have shown that PTSD is more common in people who have had ...

After confirming the first U.S. case of Ebola virus, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stepped up its public education efforts, including tweets like the one above about how Ebola is spread.

But we've still got questions, lots of questions. That's especially true for people who live ...

I love caffeine. I would love to trim my derriere. Combining the two seems like such an obvious win. Evidently some manufacturers of women's undergarments thought so, too. And now they're $1.5 million poorer.

The Federal Trade Commission has ordered two companies, Norm Thompson Outfitters Inc. and Wacoal America, to ...

Heart disease is the number one killer of people worldwide, so you'd think that we'd be up to speed on the risks. Evidently not, based on a poll of people in the United Kingdom.

Are you smarter than a Brit when it comes to risk factors? Take our quickie quiz ...

There's plenty of evidence that spanking, paddling or hitting children doesn't improve their behavior in the long run, and actually makes it worse.

But the science never trumps emotion, according to Alan Kazdin, head of the Yale Child Study Center and author of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

After NFL ...

We all know which kid Mom and Dad liked best, and odds are you're thinking it's not you.

But does that really make a difference? It can, researchers say, but not always the way you might think.

Less-favored children are more likely to be using drugs, alcohol and cigarettes as ...

I have fond memories of listening to NPR while lounging at the physical therapist's with a heating pad on my shoulder. Don't do that, the nation's physical therapists' association says.

Heat therapy, electrical stimulation, ultrasound and other "passive physical agents" almost never help, according to a list released Monday by ...