posted 11/06/2012
Ricki Lewis is a science writer with a PhD in genetics. The author of several textbooks and thousands of articles in scientific, medical, and consumer publications.
posted 04/27/2012
Most of the media missed the genetic glitch in the latest search for the elusive G-spot. An update to the version published in Scientific American blogs, April 25, 2012.
posted 11/06/2011
Correcting a genetic defect before birth sounds like a great idea, but I'm uncomfortable with how we get there.
posted 07/12/2011
"Dignity therapy" is a "novel psychotherapeutic approach" that gives patients with a 6-month life expectancy "an opportunity to reflect on things that matter most to them or that they would most want remembered." In fact, hospice volunteers have been providing dignity therapy for decades.
posted 07/04/2011
After 60+ years of smoking, my mother-in-law’s lungs were surely a toxic wasteland, yet nothing would make her quit. Journalist Ricki Lewis examines the risks and benefits of Chantix and highlights a new way to get smokers to quit: texting.
posted 06/12/2011
How far are we from personal genome scans that yield long lists of risks, some meaningful, some not? Who will develop the criteria for what is meaningful, for what a patient should know?
posted 06/09/2011
My mom, like millions of others, was handed "a vitamin" while pregnant with me in 1954. And so when I became a teenager, I began to drip, and was hauled off to the gyno. The label: DES daughter. It was scary.
Sigh. I learned all of the above in hospice volunteer training in 2005. Sometimes the simplest...