Insider Health

A couple months before John Curtis turned 80, he found out he had lung cancer. A nonsmoker, the diagnosis caught him off guard. “I was a little bit disturbed,” he recalls. “Why would this happen to me?” Secondhand smoke was likely the culprit, his lung doctor told him. Luckily, they’d caught the tumor early, and Curtis was a good candidate for a minimally invasive procedure for treating the disease. When Curtis and his wife met with Dr. Daryl Pearlstein, the surgeon who would perform the operation, Curtis was impressed by how straightforward the procedure seemed. “I had envisioned my whole…

After 25 years with the Milwaukee Police Department, Tony Hawkins has had his share of harrowing experiences. But nothing prepared him for the pain that gripped him early one morning when he had a heart attack in spring of 2008. “It felt like someone with glass gloves on was squeezing my heart as tight as they could,” he recalls. “It gives me the chills just thinking about it.” Lucky for Hawkins, he’d asked his wife to call 911 well before the worst of his symptoms began. When he woke up with indigestion that acid reducers did nothing to relieve, he…

It all began in trendy California. The inventor was Kate Munger, whose good friend was dying from complications due to HIV/AIDS in 1990. As Munger sat bedside, she instinctively began to sing. “As I sang, he got more calm and I got more calm,” she says. Even though he was comatose, she says, his facial color and expression changed, proof to her that he was hearing the music. And thus, the concept of Threshold Choir was born. The first official meeting was held on March 21, 2000, in the El Cerrito, Calif., home of Munger’s friend, Katharine Osburn. Since then,…

We thought we’d found the fountain of youth. Less than a decade ago, it seemed hormone replacement therapy not only treated the bothersome symptoms of menopause, but protected women from illness and helped them stay young. “It prevents heart disease! Alzheimer’s! Wrinkling!” the scientific community told us. What woman wouldn’t want a part of that magical treatment? Then, in 2002, the fountain ran dry. A widely publicized clinical trial suggested the hazards of the therapy far outweighed the benefits. Women using hormones to protect themselves from heart disease were actually putting themselves at greater risk. Higher incidences of breast cancer,…

Ann Marie Helm had been overweight all her life. At age 4, she was classified as morbidly obese. In her early 20s, joint pain made it hard to walk. By the time she was 30, with her diabetes and weight spiraling out of control, her doctor said she’d likely be dead before reaching 40. But after laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery, the once 330-pound Waukesha resident has lost 160 pounds (and counting). She’s also resolved many of the lifelong health issues that plagued her. Within days of the surgery, her glucose levels returned to normal, and today she no longer suffers…

It’s a Friday in late May, just before noon, and Ken Alvord has things to do. A 49-year-old sales manager, he’s leaving for a trade show in Europe on Monday. He needs to get a haircut, pick up dry cleaning, buy a new pair of shoes. But sitting in his barber’s chair in Elm Grove, he realizes something isn’t right. He’s feeling nauseous. He’s tired and sweating, too. Maybe he pushed too hard in this morning’s workout. He’s fit, in good health, so he shrugs it off. But back in the car, heading down Watertown Plank Road, he starts feeling…

Susan didn’t thinkshe could have children. She’d been diagnosed with an infertility disease that made conception unlikely. So discovering that she was pregnant was “beyond a surprise,” says the 28-year-old, who asked that her name be changed to protect her privacy. A nurse at a local hospital, Susan wanted to do everything right for her baby. She ate healthily and took prenatal vitamins. And she decided to stop taking the medication that controlled the depression and anxiety she’d battled since her teens. She didn’t want to expose the baby to medicine. Plus, she recalls, “I had always assumed if I…

What if we could look into the future and know whether or not we’d someday fall victim to cancer? That’s essentially what newly developing genetic tests can do. While results do not provide an absolute guarantee of future health, they can help you and your relatives predict whether you are a likely victim of various diseases. Mary Jo Tye, an elementary school principal, knows this first-hand. At 44, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was a shock – no one else in her family had ever had it. “When you look at family history, I did not fit the…

Katherine Klopfenstein hadn’t gone grocery shopping for years. The 58-year-old Menomonee Falls resident began experiencing pain in her right knee in her early 50s, the debilitating effects of arthritis. “It was bone-on-bone,” she says of her damaged joint. “I couldn’t walk for more than five minutes.” While her husband took over supermarket duties, Klopfenstein embarked on a frustrating roller coaster ride of pain and reprieve. Cortisone shots and other anti-inflammatory injections brought temporary relief, but the discomfort and disability always came back. She put on weight. Worst of all, she often couldn’t participate in activities that were important to her,…

Quincy Tharps vividly recalls the time when one of her nine sisters was banished from the family’s North Side Milwaukee home to New Jersey after becoming pregnant out of wedlock. “The family was in chaos,” says Tharps, then a young girl. “I remember eavesdropping on my parents talking to her one night, and my dad said to her, ‘You’ve disgraced us…you come in here with a youngun stuck up in you!’ My mother somehow felt it would contaminate the rest of us. That’s how serious it was.” Tharps, a nurse researcher and assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s College of…