Nancy Shute

They're sometimes called MacGyver bombs, in an homage to the 1980s TV hero who could make a bomb out of everyday items like a cold pill, blow an escape route through a wall and save the day.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would probably call these homemade ...

A person having a stroke may not be in a war zone, but his or her life is in danger all the same. That's enough to trigger post-traumatic stress disorder in some stroke survivors, researchers say, with symptoms like panic attacks, nightmares and flashes of anger.

Researchers at Columbia University ...

People who think they didn't get sick from a nationwide meningitis outbreak caused by contaminated steroid injections used to treat back pain may want to think again.

Doctors at hospitals in Michigan did MRI scans of people who had been given tainted injections but didn't report symptoms of meningitis afterwards.

I'll never forget the time my big brother sank his fork in the back of my hand after I snitched food off his plate.

But all siblings fight, right? So I was more than a little skeptical of a study saying that sibling aggression can cause serious mental health problems ...

Finding the right treatment for depression can be a struggle. People find relief with the first treatment only 40 percent of the time. Trying different antidepressants or therapies can take months, which means months of suffering.

Scientists are trying to better the odds by searching for signals in the body ...

Doctors are prescribing too many CT scans for children, a study says, even though they know that the radiation used in the tests increases children's lifelong risk of cancer.

Choosing other tests and dialing back the radiation used in the scans would prevent 62 percent of related cancers, according to ...

The moms at Saturday's soccer game let out a collective wow as a 10-year-old girl headed the ball away from the net.

Then one next to me said, "Should they be doing that?" Another said, "I don't think so." But none of us yelled: "Hey, kids, no heading the ball!"

We might need to change the definition of a designated driver from noble abstainer to something along the lines of not as drunk as you.

The idea of having one person in a group agree not to drink so that everyone else can get home safely after a night of ...

Most health policy meetings are a dull gray snooze of business suits talking data. They seem a million miles removed from making sick people healthy. But this week in Washington, D.C., some of those meetings was enlivened by a sudden flash of color.

The back of one woman's suit jacket ...

This is not one of those posts that is going to beat you up for doing a crummy job exercising, eating better and all the other things you're failing to do to ward off death.

Instead, this post is here to say that if you improve one thing just one ...

People who are overweight or obese often feel like they're getting dissed by doctors.

So you'd think that a fat doctor would understand. Well, yes and no.

Patients are more apt to trust overweight doctors when it comes to diet advice, a study finds.

But they're also more likely to ...

The news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that at least 49 people in seven states have gotten hepatitis A from eating organic frozen berries has given our smoothie-making some pause.

Frozen berries are full of health-promoting compounds; plus, they're convenient and delicious. So we wondered: Is ...

Smoking is expensive, and not just for the person buying the cigs. Employers are taking hard looks at the cost of employing smokers as they try to cut health insurance costs, with some refusing to hire people who say they smoke.

But figures on the cost of smoking have been ...

Dad takes a cholesterol-lowering statin so he'll be around to see the kids grow up. But statins, like Lipitor and Zocor, as well as some other common adult prescription drugs are causing a rise in poisonings among children, a study says.

The big surprise is that children are at risk ...

People who had ADHD in childhood are more likely to problems with substance abuse as adults.

But there's been disagreement about whether treatment of ADHD with stimulant medications like Ritalin reduces that risk or makes future problems with alcohol, nicotine and illegal drugs more likely.

The latest look finds that ...

Schizophrenia runs in families, but scientists have been stymied in their efforts to nail down genetic changes that could be causing the often devastating mental illness.

By zeroing in on just one pathway in the brain, scientists say they've found genetic variations that are shared in families, and tend to ...

This is one of those "good news, but" medical stories.

New treatments for heart failure have made it much less likely that people with this chronic condition will die suddenly.

But an analysis by researchers at UCLA finds that the death rate for people with advanced heart failure remains stubbornly ...

Home can be a refuge. But when natural disaster strikes, hunkering down at home can be a deadly mistake.

All told, 32 of the 53 New Yorkers who died in last fall's Superstorm Sandy drowned, and most of them died at home, according to a report published today in ...

Stress can be a bummer for your heart. And, it seems, antidepressants may help some people with heart disease better weather that stress.

That's the intriguing suggestion from a study that tested how people with heart disease reacted when faced with challenging mental and social tests.

People who were on ...

Great Britain is in the midst of a measles epidemic, one that public health officials say is the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children after a safety scare that was later proved to be fraudulent.

More than 1,200 people have come down with measles so far this year, ...