Word: chesting
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SMOKERS' SCREEN Lung cancer could be caught early--and thousands of lives saved--if smokers and former smokers were routinely screened with C.T. scans. Unlike conventional chest X rays, the supersensitive scans can spot tiny malignancies before they cause any symptoms--and while they're still small enough to be treated. Bottom line: up to 80% of lung-cancer patients might survive. The rate is only about 15% today...
Doctors offhandedly counsel moderation as a holding pattern, something you do, cautiously and faute de mieux, until things go really wrong. But moderation is neither inspiring nor tasty. Most of us, lacking an urgent health reason to behave (e.g., recurring shortness of breath or pains in the chest), are liberals in the practice of moderation and harbor in ourselves the latent impulses of Farouk the Indulger. We revert to bad habits when the conscience naps, especially since the buildup of cholesterol and heart blockages occurs silently, invisibly, in the dark chambers of the chest...
Bush's war chest carries staggering implications for those other would-be Presidents who have been begging donors for money just to keep their campaign alive. "This is the political equivalent of bombing the supply lines," says John J. Pitney Jr., a political-science professor at Claremont McKenna College. "There's only so much political money out there, and every dollar that goes to [Bush] is a dollar that doesn't go anywhere else." Bush's money advantage is so great that his campaign advisers believe the only real threat they face comes from Steve Forbes, the self-financed tycoon...
...drama begins with a noise you can't hear. Your doctor places a stethoscope over your chest and detects a faint murmur or a distinctive clicking sound whenever your heart contracts. "There may be something wrong with one of your valves," he says. "I'd like you to get some ultrasound tests." Seven days and several hundred dollars later, you learn you have mitral-valve prolapse, a condition in which the tiny flaps of tissue that keep blood from flowing backward between the chambers on the left side of the heart don't close completely. Even though you feel fine...
Mammotomes are not for everyone. If a woman's breasts are very small or if her problem area is near the chest wall, the procedure may be impossible. Also, some doctors prefer to take out a larger sample of tissue if an area appears very suspicious. But the lesson for the 1 million women who face biopsies each year is that even specialists can disagree. In the end you mustn't be embarrassed to ask another doctor--or two or three--to help you get the information you need to make an informed decision...