I’m mildly agoraphobic and it’s not easy for me to plan long trips.  And while I like looking at travel guides for places like Ecuador or Tanzania and imagining what it would be like to go there, I know that I’m not brave enough to go through with the trip.  So what inevitably happens when I read these sort of ...

Danielle Ofri is a physician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bellevue Literary Review.  Her twin roles are inextricable, and in both medicine and arts and letters she has illuminated how illness has meaning, in an individual’s life and in our culture. In the hospital clinic and emergency...

Call me late to the game, this book came out last year, but I just read Dr. David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. Wow! If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s never too late to tell someone about a good book. I can no longer look at food as anything but salt...

I found myself shaking my head in agreement as I read the cartoons in One Lump or Two, Things that suck about being diabetic, a book of comics about life with diabetes by the cartoonist Haidee Soule Merritt.  Merritt was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of two, and as a veteran of this disease (diagnosed at the age of four),...

Ever since Galen, the Roman physician, people have trusted their health to doctors- and doctors, at least in the last century and a half, have often deserved such trust.  In antiquity it was common for  medicine and food to be variants of the same ingredient – certain spices or roots might flavor a stew, and mitigate the symptoms...

You probably remember that November was American Diabetes Month.  I’m sorry, I didn’t get you anything.  Then December was declared National Awareness Month – okay, that declaration was by The Onion, but my take away on these two months is that we should at least be spending 1/6th of the year focusing on our health.  And now...

Check out the diabetes section of your local bookstore, and chances are most books will fall into three types: memoirs, recipes and tips. Each of these categories is valuable in its own right — if you try to steal my copy of Pumping Insulin, you’ve got another thing coming. But there is a conspicuous dearth of journalistic...

I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes on a cold Saturday morning in college — particularly unfortunate timing because it meant that there were no diabetes educators on duty in the student health center where I was staying. In fact, none of the nurses seemed to know much about diabetes at all — my first dinner with diabetes...