Wire Health & Medical

Of the countless painful decisions surrounding a loved one's end-of-life care, among the trickiest is how to provide physical comfort in a way that also provides a dignified ending.

End-of-life choices and treatment decisions are rarely discussed in the medical community, despite expert advice meant to encourage communication, studies suggest. As a result, many patients spend their final days receiving invasive treatments that they might not have chosen if they had known more about them.

After struggling to breast-feed her first two children, Nyssa Retter was determined to do better with her third.

In the United States, we like to think that the foods we purchase are not only free from contaminants and toxins, but also contain what the label states. If a food is labeled "organic," we hope that it has been brought to market with strict organic standards, and that it is largely pesticide-free and GMO-free. We also hope that fresh foods are properly labeled, and that manufacturers, grocers, and restaurants are honest about the content of the products that they sell.

In the spirit of April Fool's (or close to it, anyway), here are a few fun contributions from readers and other sources:

The style of your running shoes isn't just making a fashion statement. It may be controlling the way you run and setting you up for injuries down the road.

Nearly half of young women say the first time they lived with a guy, they weren't married.

Changes in brain function may foreshadow schizophrenia as early as puberty, nearly a decade before most patients begin showing obvious symptoms, new research from the University of North Carolina shows.

More than half a million U.S. children are now believed to have lead poisoning, roughly twice the previous high estimate, health officials reported Thursday.

Cancer and heart disease are bigger killers, but Alzheimer's is the most expensive malady in the U.S., costing families and society $157 billion to $215 billion a year, according to a new study that looked at this in unprecedented detail.

After crocheting a colorful blanket, Joan Ferguson snuggled up under it one night and proudly thought: "This is one groovy blanket. I'm brilliant."

A new global plan aims to end most cases of polio by late next year, and essentially eradicate the paralyzing disease by 2018 - if authorities can raise the $5.5 billion needed to do the work, health officials said Tuesday.

Despite a growing consensus that cardiovascular disease is a "food-borne" illness, many physicians are ill-prepared to advise patients on what they should eat to best protect them from heart attack or stroke.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - At one time or another, Jana Begor has tried most of the commercially advertised diets, not to mention the grapefruit diet and the cabbage soup diet. She became a vegan. She tried the raw food diet.

Now let's see what we know about eggs:

Since opening her first studio in San Francisco in 2000, Jill Dailey McIntosh has been spreading The Dailey Method across the country and beyond, combining ballet barre work, core conditioning, muscle strengthening, yoga and orthopedic exercise.

Take five or 10 minutes, the professor said, and write down things that you love, like, need, or enjoy.

Curtis Fournier said receiving news from a doctor that you have cancer can send you into a whirlwind of emotions. He ought to know -- he heard the news twice on the same day.

Government health officials launched the second round of a graphic ad campaign Thursday that is designed to get smokers off tobacco, saying they believe the last effort convinced tens of thousands to quit.

Surveys show most Americans would rather die at home than in a hospital. Now, a new government study suggests more and more people getting their wish.

The young woman bent over in her wheelchair, stretching her muscles to the limit as she tossed a treat to the big black dog.

Many folks are skipping marriage these days, but a new study shows that happily married couples consider themselves healthier than their unmarried peers.

A huge international effort involving more than 100 institutions and genetic tests on 200,000 people has uncovered dozens of signposts in DNA that can help reveal further a person's risk for breast, ovarian or prostate cancer, scientists reported Wednesday.

Given how often they're on the floor, occasionally inside a public restroom, it should come as no surprise that a third of women's purses crawl with E. coli.

The harsh spending cuts introduced by European governments to tackle their crippling debt problems have not only pitched the region into recession - they are also being partly blamed for outbreaks of diseases not normally seen in Europe and a spike in suicides, according to new research.

We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math - and what children know about numbers as they begin first grade seems to play a big role in how well they do everyday calculations later on.

Have a heart problem? If it's fixable, there's a good chance it can be done without surgery, using tiny tools and devices that are pushed through tubes into blood vessels.