Medicine: Coping with Eve's Curse

Doctors are finally treating menstrual miseries

It has many names: period, monthly, that time, my friend. But for many women the most apt description is the curse. For about half of all women of child-bearing age, menstruation is a monthly misery that causes intense physical and mental discomfort. In the U.S. alone, menstrual problems result in the loss of 140 million hours of work a year. Menstrual pain, says Pathologist Laurence Demers of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa., "probably is the most common cause for absence of women from the...

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