Diabetes is an ancient disease, but the first effective drug therapy was not available until 1922, when insulin revolutionized the management of the disorder. Insulin is administered by injection, but treatment took another great leap forward in 1956, when the first oral diabetic drug was introduced. Since then, dozens of new medications have been developed, but scientists are still learning how best to use them. And new studies are prompting doctors to re-examine a fundamental therapeutic question: what level of blood sugar is best?

Normal metabolism To understand diabetes, you should first understand how your body handles glucose, the sugar ...

Think rehab, and you may conjure up the image of an athlete working his way back from a torn ligament or an older guy getting back on his feet after a total hip replacement. Penile rehabilitation is harder to picture. Indeed, it may sound more like a creative pick-up line than serious therapy, but it's a real, if unproven, program advanced by many urologists.

The problem Before you decide that penile rehabilitation sounds like fun, remember that it's triggered by a diagnosis of prostate cancer. About 218,000 American men will receive that diagnosis this year, and all will face the ...

In the age of swine flu, anthrax, SARS, HIV, and drug-resistant tuberculosis, microbes are high on nearly everyone's list of villains. But scientists have learned to harness some of the most dangerous critters, using microbial components or products to fight disease. Immunizations are the obvious example, but other applications are increasing. For example, while the bacterium Clostridium botulinum can cause lethal outbreaks of botulism, it also produces Botox. And now doctors can inject an enzyme produced by Clostridium histolyticum, a bacterial cause of deadly gas gangrene, to treat a common, sometimes disabling hand condition called Dupuytren's contracture.

What is Dupuytren's? ...

Q. Every time I open a newspaper, I seem to read about another VIP with cancer of the pancreas. It sounds like a dreadful disease. Is there some way I can be tested to see if I'm at risk?

A. Cancer of the pancreas is relatively uncommon; only about 43,000 cases are diagnosed in the United States each year, putting it far behind prostate cancer (218,000 a year), breast cancer (209,000 a year), and colorectal cancer (143,000 a year) — yet because pancreatic cancer is so hard to treat, it has a much higher mortality rate than any of these ...