Insects often scare or disgust us. But a small proportion of people don’t just experience normal fear.

Scientists are investigating a compound found in green tea for often-fatal medical complications associated with bone-marrow disorders.

The financial crisis facing the NHS is starting to bite. Demand for NHS care is rising but funding per person is falling.

We all know and hear a lot about postnatal depression, but what about depression and anxiety during pregnancy?

The experience of having periods varies between women. They can be light and completely painless for some, but completely debilitating for others.

Under emotional distress, the brain may signal the adrenal glands to produce chemicals called corticosteroids. Cancer-related processes are accelerated in the presence of these chemicals. Certain cancers have also been associated with distressing life events.

Healing can include dramatic, sudden physical cures, but is not confined to the 'miraculous' or the spectacular. Perhaps for most people, the healing power of faith involves a healing of the mind and emotions, the intangible spirit, and of relationships with others.

Recent reports that cancer rates in UK women are set to rise six times faster than in men over the next two decades will have alarmed many.

How’s your back? About a quarter of Australia’s population experience a back pain episode at any point in time, and nearly all of us (around 85%) will have at least one lifetime experience with back pain.

As the baby boomer generation begins to age, the prevalence of both eye and ear disease will rise exponentially, as there is a strong correlation between vision loss, hearing loss and ageing.

I was recently asked: If my eating habits are half good and half bad, does that make my overall diet balanced?

Simple painkillers (such as aspirin, paracetamol and ibuprofen) are widely bought over the counter and prescribed by doctors. But the stark truth is that most of these medicines don’t work very well.

Many of us do things we wish we would not do. We may compulsively eat sugary or fatty things, drink too much alcohol, become a zombie in front of the TV, or whatever. We may judge ourselves as “weak” or “lacking in willpower”, because of this. Maybe we...

The rise in recent decades of diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis suggests that factors in the environment are contributing.

Planned Parenthood has allowed generations of low-income women to survive childbirth, to combat sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and to plan their pregnancies.

As the world’s population lives longer, the significance of osteoporosis and fractures increases.

Pleasure and pain are always coming and going, fluctu­ating to and fro, sometimes only five minutes apart, doing “their thing” to this flesh-and-bone vehicle, inspiring all kinds of crazy thoughts in our thinking organ—the brain.

More than a half-million people have lost over 5 million pounds by learning to conquer their food cravings. For many people, food choices have little to do with physical hunger. Instead, they are driven by an emotional hunger and they eat to satisfy some kind of longing.

Dietary guidelines come under a lot of fire. They have been accused of not being based on evidence, not being environmentally sustainable and being out of touch with nutritional science. They also fail to change people’s eating habits, as shown in Australia and the US.

We generally assume moderate drinking (two standard drinks per day) is good for our health.

In the past few years, you may have noticed more and more people around you turning away from meat. At dinner parties or family barbecues, on your social media feed or in the news, vegetarianism and its more austere cousin, veganism, are becoming increasingly popular.

Preventative medicine has long used drugs to prevent the onset of disease. Those with symptoms such as high blood sugar or pressure are often diagnosed with the “pre-condition”, such as prediabetes or prehypertension, if their symptoms haven’t yet reached the levels which define the disease.

Mary Tyler Moore debuted on television in the 1950s, appearing in commercials that aired during a popular show.