As we were putting together this year's top 10 list, uncertainty became a motif. Here at the beginning of the flu season, we don't really know if the H1N1 flu pandemic will stay controlled by public health measures, or take off in some unexpected way. Will the yearlong debate over health care reform result in something significant — or wind up being political sound and fury, signifying stalemate?

Even when a large randomized clinical trial seems to have settled an important matter, it's hard to say how the findings will be applied exactly. Results from a large study of ...

Medications and surgery can cure urinary incontinence, but first try cutting back on fluids and exercising the pelvic floor.

From an early age, we learn to fend off the urge to urinate and instead "hold it" till we can get to a bathroom. But many people lose the ability to control when they urinate. In the brain-versus-bladder tug-of-war, the bladder seems to gain the upper hand. Often it's a matter of small leaks of urine now and then, but it's common for the problem to be a much bigger one, because of either the frequency of the leakage, the amount ...

 

Beta carotene, the B vitamins, vitamins C and E, selenium — they've all been talked up as agents of health and well-being, only to lose altitude after middling, even negative, results from randomized trials. Now it's time for vitamin D to be put to the clinical trial test: the largest randomized clinical trial ever of large doses of vitamin D is starting in 2010.

Dr. JoAnn Manson, a member of the Health Letter's editorial board, and her colleagues at Harvard Medical School are conducting the VITAL study (they arrived at the name by selectively plucking letters from VITamin D ...

I'm 72 and my systolic blood pressure has been steady between 115 and 125. The diastolic number is low (55-65) and seems to be falling. Is the difference between these two numbers important, and is the falling diastolic number something to worry about?

After Dr. Kenneth Arndt answered a question about toenail fungus, a number of readers sent us their favorite remedies. We asked Dr. Arndt to comment on several of them.