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Woman’s persistent spinal pain after surgery fails to improve

DEAR DR. ROACH: My wife is suffering from a failed back surgery that was caused by a neurosurgeon. The operation was four years ago, and she also had a spine stimulator that was implanted three years ago. Her pain management doctor said that she’ll get progressively worse as current medical care hasn’t improved for this condition. She’s currently consuming the maximum dose of pain medication. To your knowledge, is there any “light at the end of the tunnel” for patients with chronic arachnoiditis? — B.B. ANSWER: Persistent spinal pain after surgery (PSPS), which was formerly ...

Feeling ‘under-babied’? More like underpaid and overburdened

It was just my luck last week that as my column on the fertility crisis was being laid out in newspaper pages and posted to websites, the sharpest minds of the Trump administration were gathered in the Oval Office to hold forth ... on the fertility crisis. Bad timing is an occupational hazard. But something made it a little more painful for me. As President Trump struggled to keep his eyelids open nearby, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, stated the gravity of the crisis in terms our nation will not soon forget. “One in three Americans,” ...

What’s so bad about a stable population?

Back in 1969, President Richard Nixon warned Congress against the rapid growth of the American population: “When future generations evaluate the record of our time, one of the most important factors in their judgment will be the way in which we responded to population growth.” If the American headcount continued rising at the current rate, Nixon said, the nation’s “social supplies — the capacity to educate youth, to provide privacy and living space, to maintain the processes of open, democratic government — may be grievously strained.” Since 1969, America’s ...

Dear Annie: Is a teenage bride ever okay?

Dear Annie: My 19-year-old daughter — she’ll be 20 in July — is a sophomore at Charleston College. She came home for spring break and informed my husband and me that she had found her soul mate at Charleston, and they plan to marry this summer. He’s 24 and a graduate student teaching English. She wants to go back to school in the fall as husband and wife. How they plan to support themselves we have no idea. Should we try to talk her out if it? We’ve already told her we think it’s a mistake. — Disapproving Dear Disapproving: Have a candid conversation with your daughter ...

DEAR DR. ROACH: What’s better for your health: beer (light or full) or soft drinks (sugar or sugarless)? And why? — W.C.G. ANSWER: Neither alcoholic drinks nor sweetened beverages are on my list of recommended beverages. Alcohol has many toxicities, whether it’s short-term or long-term use, and is a known carcinogen (cancer-causing substance). The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 178,000 deaths per year occur due to alcohol in the United States. While “light” beer has slightly less alcohol and calories than regular beer and is therefore less toxic, I still can’t ...

Our screen culture increasingly can’t read

We’ve been having a debate about “book bans” in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how anyone would notice whether a book is available in a school library or not. The New York Times published an eye-opening report on a study by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading. Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83% of school districts. What looked like a Covid-driven catastrophe is, instead, part of a long-running trend. Reading ...