Side Effects

My doctor prescribed tramadol with APAP for headaches. He also wrote prescriptions for Lexapro and Effexor for depression and anxiety. He said that Effexor and Lexapro are antidepressants, but they work on different parts of the brain. When I went to fill the new Lexapro and refill the tramadol prescriptions, the pharmacist would not fill them. She said the combination could cause side effects. What would those be? Your pharmacist might have saved your life. The combination of Lexapro, Effexor and tramadol (Ultram)

Possible Side Effects Augusten Burroughs St. Martin's Press / 304 pages / $23.95 Will the real Augusten Burroughs please stand up? In Running With Scissors, his best-selling memoir, Burroughs was a 13-year-old imp of the perverse in a gallery of grotesques, including his psychotic, self-absorbed, aspiring-poet mother; his father, who preferred to sit alone in the dark; and the more than slightly cracked psychiatrist who became his guardian. Dr. Finch, in turn, became his guide to even more of the freakish, introducing him to his Masturbatorium, his Purina Dog Chow Munching mate, a motley crew of mistresses, and his daughters, April, "the bible-dipper," and Natalie, whose principal skills were oral sex and restraining patients.

GISHWATI FOREST, Rwanda -- In 1995, a Rwandan named Gad Tegeri cut down a tree in the Gishwati Forest Reserve, 30 square miles of soaring hardwoods in the hills east of Rwanda's largest lake. He and his family, returning to Rwanda from exile in Congo, needed land to grow food. The Gishwati forest seemed more fertile ground for restarting life than United Nations refugee camps outside the city of Gisenyi. So, with his wife, baby daughter and his machete, Tegeri climbed the slopes into the forest and started chopping.

Women at high risk for breast cancer might have a safer option for preventing the disease, doctors said yesterday after concluding one of the largest breast cancer prevention trials in history. A nationwide trial among more than 19,000 post-menopausal women showed that a popular drug used to prevent and treat osteoporosis is just as effective in staving off breast cancer as the older standby, tamoxifen, but with fewer side effects. Both medications cut in half a woman's chance of developing breast cancer, but women taking the osteoporosis drug - called raloxifene and sold as Evista - developed fewer uterine cancers and blood clots.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A minibus packed with explosives detonated near a busy market last night, killing at least 21 Iraqis and wounding 29, the most lethal attack in the capital in more than two months. The explosion targeted a mostly Shiite Muslim area in the religiously mixed Dora district, which is widely seen as among Baghdad's most dangerous areas. On the heels of a suicide bombing Monday in the Shiite district of Kadhimiya, it marked an end to a period of relative calm that had followed a series of deadly suicide bombings in early January.

You don't need a prescription to buy a mutual fund but, much like a drug, fund investing can have its annoying side effects. Of course, funds basically come with just one warning - "Past performance is no guarantee of future results" - rather than the long list of symptoms that consumers are warned about with drugs, often a description so long and detailed that a squeamish consumer might prefer death to the unintended consequences of the medicine....

A spate of recent studies demonstrating the powerful effect of placebos, or fake treatments, reinforces the idea that what we think about our medical care really can affect our health. The new research, particularly studies using the latest in brain scanning technology, is giving scientists the most detailed and direct evidence yet into how expectations - beliefs about whether a treatment will work - can have an actual, observable effect in patients' brains and on their well-being. In one study, researchers hooked 14 healthy young men up to PET scanners that monitored changes in brain function.

The news that a weight-loss pill will soon be sold over the counter, allowing Americans to pig out without worrying about their waistlines, is a dream that ranks right up there with a knock on the door from Publishers Clearinghouse. But don't hit that buffet table just yet. The fat-blocking pill comes with plenty of caveats, according to those who have already had firsthand experiences with the drug orlistat, which has been sold in prescription form as Xenical since 1999. "I'd give it low marks," said Scot Roskelley, 49, who used it during 2002, without seeing any results on the scale.

FOR THE MOST PART, I DON'T PAY attention to all these phony national "weeks" that are always being trotted out. No, you can have your National Up With Poetry Week and your National Appreciate Pasta Week and your National Bald is Beautiful Week, and who cares about any of them? But National Pet Peeve Week, which is this week, well, this one's right up my alley. In fact, I have so many pet peeves stacked from floor to ceiling in my brain, it's like a Sam's Club of peeves up there. Where to begin?

Elisabeth Reed, a writer in Santa Fe, N.M., is an attractive 59-year-old who looks perhaps a decade younger. This, she believes, is because she never smoked, eats well and plays tennis regularly. Oh yes, there's one other possible explanation. Five years ago, she had a face-lift. "Someone showed me a picture of myself, and I saw a little droop in my neck that I'd had since I was 28. I thought it was high time to get rid of it," she explained. "What I hadn't realized, though, is that there are politics involved in cosmetic surgery.