COVER STORY  Assume that you are a 40-year-old man. What do you think the chances are that you will die of a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years? (Please forgive the morbidity of the question; there is a purpose to this pop quiz.) The answer: just 4 out of 10,000 according to Drs. Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, authors of Know Your Chances. The chances that you will die in an accident before reaching your 50th birthday are 50 percent higher: 6 out of 10,000.

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SPECIAL SECTION  In the days before mochas and lattes, it used to be a simple question with a simple answer: How do you take your coffee?

Now it’s the same with water. And the answer is more complex than with ice or without, bottled or from the tap.

Consumers can choose from countless varieties of water: Flavored, oxygenated, caffeinated, “organic” and waters spiked with fiber, vitamins and minerals. Read More>>

NEWS  Dave Martin wanted to know why, exactly, he had adenoid cystic cancer in his mouth.

He didn’t smoke. He didn’t chew tobacco. He lived a healthy life — he drank lots of milk, he ate all his vegetables. So why, he asked the doctors at the University of Washington, did he have cancer?

Because he drank lots of milk and ate his vegetables, they theorized. Martin lived the first seven years of his life near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Read More>>

LIFESTYLES  Chef Pete Tobin grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and his East Coast edge is infectious. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, he found his way to Spokane, where he’s a chef educator at the Inland Northwest Culinary Academy. Sandwiched between those culinary landmarks, Chef Tobin apprenticed in ski resort kitchens nationwide. Read More>>

SPECIAL SECTION  Pilates is all about using your mind to control muscles. Named after its inventor, Joseph Pilates, who called it Contrology, the exercises emphasize flexibility and core strength. Pilates exercise programs may appear gentle or even relaxing to observers, while participants readily acknowledge the exercise program provides a challenge, especially to muscles in the abdomen and back. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Costs are up, jobs are down, and the headlines are filled with news of strife and economic uncertainty. It’s enough to make anyone feel stressed.

Stress isn’t just an annoyance; it’s a significant contributor to many major health problems — obvious ones, like heart disease and hypertension, and less obvious conditions including autoimmune disorders and cancer. Read More>>

GUEST COLUMN  Each time an infant dies from being shaken by a caregiver, our community also feels shaken. Yet the deaths continue. For more than 10 years, the Child Death Review Team — a group of medical experts, children’s advocates and public health nurses — has been volunteering time to review all sudden and unexpected deaths of Spokane County children from birth to age 18. The team, led by the Spokane Regional Health District, identifies preventable factors that may have contributed to a child’s death. And yet now the budgets for these local programs are being slashed. Read More>>

INNOVATION  Starting this spring, some Spokanites will use Google not just to search the Web or check their e-mail, but to manage their health.

“The idea is to put health information in the hands of the consumers, the people who really need access to it and the people who should, legitimately, be controlling it,” says Inland Northwest Health Service’s Jac Davies. “We want to help people bring all [their health information] together in one place where they have easy access to it.” Read More>>

PARENTING  Aaah, who can resist that “baby” smell — the freshly bathed little bodies in those hooded towels, the peach-fuzzy hair? Sniff it. Is that the 1,4-dioxane or the phthalates?

Yes, in addition to worrying about PVC in plastic toys, and BPA in bottles, we now may need to worry about the bath bubbles. A recent test of top baby shampoos, lotions and body washes found traces of cancer-causing agents. Read More>>

PARENTING  Q. My 6-year-old son still needs to wear a pull-up at night. How can I help him be dry at night?
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PEOPLE  About 20 years ago, on the rain-forested edge of West Africa, a young doctor waited for a patient in a tiny makeshift hospital. Located 50 miles from the nearest paved road, powered by a gas generator and filled with villagers he had recruited and trained to approximate a nursing staff, it was a ramshackle operation. Still, it was all pretty impressive for a 24-year-old recent med school graduate working in the ancient village where his father was born. And when a local man arrived with his 9-year-old daughter — spiking fever, lots of pain — he saw how even his improvisation of a hospital could change a community. Read More>>

SENIORS  Ideally, once you leave the hospital — lollipop in hand, Daffy Duck band-aid on your arm — you’re “all better now.”

Not quite.

The road away from the hospital towers is bumpy, winding, and full of potholes. If there’s miscommunication, if discharge occurs at the wrong time or without the proper support services and education in place, major problems can arise. Read More>>

SPECIAL SECTION  Finally I got it. After months of searching, scouring and reading about the Wii Fit, I managed to snag one at a Wal-Mart late one evening (probably right after a shipment came in). I had anticipated using this to get Me-Fit since hearing of its release. OK, I’m a fitness trainer, and I have to admit to already being in pretty good shape — but I was curious about this little white board and whether it lived up to the hype. Read More>>

SPECIAL SECTION  The Wii Fit was the most popular online purchase on Black Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, in 2008. More than 7 million of the fitness platforms have been sold since it was introduced in the U.S. about a year ago. But it hasn’t just fascinated gamers; it has caught the interest of researchers in a variety of fields, all over the globe. Read More>>

SPECIAL SECTION  If you’re reading this, it’s less than nine weeks to Bloomsday. (Maybe a lot less.) Oh, you just want to finish, you say — you’ll just walk it. Well, fine. But whether you plan to walk, jog or run — whatever your race-day pace — if you’re a couch potato who can barely walk three miles now, you should put off your assault on Mount Bloomsday until 2010.

Because if you’re not already doing 3-mile walk/jog/runs regularly (at least twice a week, preferably three), then you’re already lagging at the back of the Bloomsday training pack. Read More>>

COVER STORY  Some day soon, your doctor may hand you an information prescription instead of a medication sample or a referral to a surgeon.

That’s right. You’ve got homework.

You’ll be provided with written materials or access to information in the form of video or audiotapes or Web-based tutorials. You’ll learn more about your diagnosis, as well as the pros and cons of different treatment options, and perhaps even watch video interviews with people who chose different remedies for your particular condition. Then you’ll be guided through questions to discern more about your personal preferences and values in the outcome of your treatment. At the end of your inquiry, you may be asked a few questions to assess your level of understanding of the condition, its treatment and possible outcomes, and given the opportunity to select what course of treatment you are considering. Armed with this one-page summary, the result of what’s called shared or informed medical decision making, you’ll head off to the doctor to discuss and fine-tune your treatment plan. Read More>>

FROM THE EDITOR  Cancer. Heart disease. Stroke. It sometimes feels as though our bodies are under siege from every side — anything we do could be potentially disastrous, any oversight a fatal mistake, any symptom the first sign of a devastating illness. Television, books, magazines, newspapers and the Internet provide a daily bombardment of the latest research on health risks, and undeniably there are many, many people suffering from debilitating and tragic illnesses. But are we becoming excessively anxious about some scary diseases? And in our quest to find and fix problems, are we inadvertently over-treating and perhaps even harming more people than we help? At considerable expense? While ignoring things that really would contribute to improving our health? Read More>>