�Թϲ�����

The first time a doctor told Gina Balzano that she was too fat to have a baby was in 2013. She was 32, weighed 317 pounds and had been trying to get pregnant since soon after she and her husband, Nick, married in 2010. Balzano — whom I have known since high school — lives in Waltham, Mass., and works in special education. She’s the kind of person whom others often go to with their problems, but her own predicament, after three years of negative pregnancy tests, had left her feeling overwhelmed. “I’ve always had horrible, heavy, painful periods, so I thought something was wrong,” she says. “But I didn’t know enough to know what to worry about.” She told herself it was time to find out. (Sole-Smith, 6/18)

“They’re just getting so blunt,” Ruby Corado said. “It’s just out there. It used to be more isolated.” Corado could be talking about support for the LGBT community. The Pride parades across the region this month drew huge crowds. And they’re not just drag queens and shimmy-shimmy dancers with in-your-face protests. Social media has been filled during Pride Month with heterosexual couples and families showing up in rainbow regalia supporting LGBT rights with the same verve as they would a Fourth of July parade. (Dvorak, 6/17)

Shakespeare wisely recognized that sleep “knits up the ravell’d sleave of care” and relieves life’s physical and emotional pains. Alas, this “chief nourisher in life’s feast,” as he called it, often eludes millions of people who suffer from insomnia. Desperate to fall asleep or fall back to sleep, many resort to Ambien or another of the so-called “Z drugs” to get elusive shut-eye. But except for people with short-term sleep-disrupting issues, like post-surgical pain or bereavement, these sedative-hypnotics have a time-limited benefit and can sometimes cause more serious problems than they might prevent. (Brody, 6/17)

Last year, Mom’s Organic Market founder and chief executive Scott Nash did something many of us are afraid to do: He ate a cup of yogurt months after its expiration date. Then tortillas a year past their expiration date. “I mean, I ate heavy cream I think 10 weeks past date,” Nash said, “and then meat sometimes a good month past its date. It didn’t smell bad. Rinse it off, good to go.” It was all part of his year-long experiment to test the limits of food that had passed its expiration date. In the video above, we interviewed Nash about his experiment and examined where expiration dates come from and what they really mean. (Taylor, 6/17)

Dr. Louise Aronson says the U.S. doesn't have nearly enough geriatricians — physicians devoted to the health and care of older people: "There may be maybe six or seven thousand geriatricians," she says. "Compare that to the membership of the pediatric society, which is about 70,000." Aronson is a geriatrician and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. (Gross, 6/17)

Kaiser Health News: Miracle Machine Makes Heroic Rescues — And Leaves Patients In Limbo

The latest miracle machine in modern medicine — whose use has skyrocketed in recent years — is saving people from the brink of death: adults whose lungs have been ravaged by the flu; a trucker who was trapped underwater in a crash; a man whose heart had stopped working for an astonishing seven hours. But for each adult saved by this machine — dubbed ECMO, for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation — another adult hooked up to the equipment dies in the hospital. For those patients, the intervention is a very expensive, labor-intensive and unsuccessful effort to cheat death. (Bailey, 6/18)

This past New Year’s Eve, I expressed thanks for getting through another year. I was 50, with a wife and two kids. I ran most days, and my freelance career was going well. Two days later, I was nearly dead. The cause was a cardiac arrest. Blood flow to my heart wasn’t the issue. Instead, it was an “electrical problem,” the doctors told me. Cardiologists would later confirm that there was no blockage of my arteries. A random electric malfunction caused an arrhythmia that stopped my heart. (Wasserman, 6/18)

Many studies have found that obesity is associated with an increased risk for prostate cancer. Now a new study suggests that the degree of risk may depend on where in the body the fat is. The report, in the journal Cancer, included 1,832 Icelandic men. All underwent CT scans to measure subcutaneous fat in the abdomen, the visceral fat surrounding internal organs, and fat in the thighs. (Bakalar, 6/17)