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Not so fast, Don Draper.

On Wednesday, the city of Elk Grove, Calif., began discussions to ban smoking from rental apartments. Unsurprisingly, the California Apartment Association and the Rental Housing Association of Sacramento Valley are opposed to the smoker-repelling measure. The Sacramento County Tobacco Control Coalition, meanwhile, is urging the city to become the first in the county to enforce an apartment-smoking ban. Several complexes in Elk Grove already have privately issued residential smoking bans -- bans that are echoed in apartment complexes and co-ops around the country.

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One of the first things you have to deal with when faced with a life-altering illness is the decision about whom you're going to tell, and how. When I learned I had malignant melanoma a year and a half ago, I told my editor before I told my family. (OK, I was on a deadline at the time.) Two days later, I told the whole world in a cover story for Salon. Two months ago, Boing Boing writer Xeni Jardin live tweeted her first mammogram – and her stunning diagnosis of breast cancer – to thousands of followers. For some of us, the diagnosis is where we find our voice. For others that kind of candor isn't an option, for either professional or personal reasons.

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Steven Soderbergh’s film "Contagion" came out a few months ago and was inexplicably and completely frozen out of the Oscar nominations. But it is the most plausible experience of a global pandemic plague you’re likely to see until the real thing strikes. With outstanding performances from an ensemble cast that includes Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Laurence Fishburne,"Contagion" is stark, beautiful in its own terrifying way, and all-too-believable. The story tracks the swift progress of a deadly airborne virus from Hong Kong to Minneapolis and Tokyo to London — from a handful of peanuts to a credit card to the cough of a stranger on a subway. Rarely does a film issue such an inescapable invitation to think: it could happen; that could be us. What would we do?

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Doctors and psychiatrists at work on the newest version of the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders -- the American Psychiatric Association's bible for mental-health professionals -- describe this confluence of symptoms as Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). The revised version of the DSM, just the fourth new edition in 52 years, will be published next year.

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Thirty years later, Davidson is still researching and writing about the intersection of neuroscience and emotion -- he currently teaches psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his new book, written with Sharon Begley, “The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live, and How You Can Change Them,” Davidson lays out a fascinating theory that parses out emotional style into six dimensions, giving readers a better understanding of where they stand on this emotional plane and how emotional styles affect the qualities of their everyday lives.

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And if I hadn’t had an amniocentesis, she would have died the day she was born.

Just over 11 years ago, I received a call from my obstetrician’s assistant to let me know that there was an anomaly in my recent blood test. “It’s probably just a testing error,” she assured me.

But when I returned the following week to have the blood test redone, the anomaly showed up again. There was a foreign antibody in my blood stream that shouldn’t have been there. I was six months pregnant, and up to that point my pregnancy had been completely normal.

Rather than turning to my local politician for prenatal advice, I followed the guidance of my obstetrician, who sent me to a perinatologist, who recommended I have an amniocentesis. Because he had a medical degree and years of experience treating pregnant women, I followed his recommendation.

That day, he stuck an alarmingly long needle directly into my growing belly to sample the amniotic fluid around my baby. The results weren’t good. She had Rh negative disease.

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In his new book, "The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care," Eric Topol, a former professor and researcher at the University of Michigan and Case Western University, and chief academic officer for Scripps Health, a nonprofit healthcare system based in San Diego, argues that the digital revolution can democratize our medical system. Topol demonstrates how the digital revolution can be used to change individual care and  prevention, and even the economics of American healthcare. From cellphones that automatically collect medical data, to biosensors, advanced imaging, individualized prescriptions and gene-specific drugs, Topol's book leads readers through science-fiction-sounding scenarios that may soon be a reality.

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Open "The Art of Medicine: Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination" (University of Chicago Press, out now), which spotlights works from London's Wellcome Collection, and you'll find illuminations from late medieval medical manuals; 18th-century anatomical waxworks with removable organs; leaves from hand-colored plant and herb guides; early-20th-century lithographs advertising gout remedies; astonishing close-ups of implanting human embryos; and much, much more. The collection is so wide-ranging and diverse as to defy a pithy explanation -- but taken as a whole, it's transfixing.

Emma Shackleton, one of the book's co-authors, answered a few of my questions over email; the accompanying slide show offers a whirlwind tour of the past few hundred years of medical imagery.

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Yet when the news broke Tuesday that Komen was ending its funding for Planned Parenthood breast cancer screenings and services, the organization's eagerness to throw Planned Parenthood – and the women who depend upon it – under the bus wasn't surprising. It's actually thoroughly unshocking for this venerated organization to pull such a crass, insensitive move.

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According to the ordinance, adult film production companies will pay an additional fee with their permit applications to cover an as-of-yet undetermined method of enforcement. Currently, condoms are used in the mainstream gay adult film industry (which includes only gay male films), while the heterosexual industry (which includes both lesbian and straight films) has used mandatory STI testing as a health and safety precaution since the early 2000s. Until May of 2011, the Adult Industry Medical Center, founded by retired performer Dr. Sharon Mitchell, ran the nationwide STI testing service and database that certified heterosexual performers as STI-free previous to their working on any production.

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So here's a crazy idea. This time, let's not use the beginning of the year as an excuse to hate on our bodies. Let's not swear to get a tinier butt by Memorial Day, or even Labor Day. No 21-day "action plans." No master cleanse. Nothing, in fact, that sounds like an enema from a dominatrix. Instead, let's do something radical. Let's do something small.

In just the time it takes to realize that "Work It" is the worst thing that ever happened to television, you could change your life. Thirty minutes a day. That's the minimum amount of physical activity the CDC recommends to stay fit. Yet approximately 30 percent of Americans get no weekly activity at all. Zero. Not even candy-ass pastimes like gardening. And many more of us aren't exactly wearing out the gym membership cards. Right now, the only thing moving at a fast pace in our country is the obesity rate – 30 percent and climbing.

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Right now, Dr. Conrad Murray sits in jail because he couldn't say no to Michael Jackson when Propofol came up in conversation between them. But even doctors who aren't tempted by an enormous monthly retainer and access to one of the world’s biggest celebrities are challenged by the word "no."

American medicine is a business -- but a weird one.  In any other sector of our economy, businesses are determined to give their customers what they want, however they want it. But in medicine, the “have it your way” mind-set doesn’t always jive. First, physicians have a duty to avoid doing harm.  The choice of a drug or test based solely on a patient’s request can undermine that.  Second, as everybody knows, we spend a big slice of our GDP on healthcare. Since the person who has control over expensive tests and the prescription pad is your doctor, there's ever-increasing scrutiny to be responsible stewards of healthcare dollars.

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Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.

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The jagged pink laceration still aches, the 23-year-old says, a daily reminder of the operation he underwent in the capital Dhaka five months ago, in the hopes of raising some quick cash.

In exchange for 60 percent of his liver, an illegal organ broker had promised him 300,000 taka ($3,960) — a royal sum in Bamongram, his small village of mud-brick homes and verdant rice paddies in Bangladesh's northeast.

But when the broker failed to show up after the 10-hour operation, Hasan found himself stranded in Dhaka with nothing but mounting hospital bills and chronic pains in his chest and abdomen.

"He didn't pay me a single penny," Hasan said.

In Bangladesh, the trade in internal organs is big business. Each year, hundreds put their body parts up for sale in the underground organ bazaar hoping to escape the clutches of poverty, only to be short changed by brokers or burdened with chronic health problems, according to police officials and residents.

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In the fall of 2008, I spent a lot of time in and around the tiny town of Basin, Montana. Basin, population 250, is a seemingly ruined, poverty-filled stretch along a frontage road threading off of Route 15 between Helena, the capital of the state, 40 miles to the north, and Butte, the famous mining town, 30 miles to the south. This is the middle to south-end of the Upper Clark Fork watershed. The Wild West. The heart of Montana mining territory in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Basin anchors an area littered with poisonous mine tailings, remnants of Superfund sites and cleanups, and all the gorgeous geology of an ancient, now post-ice age wilderness.

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Asked at last week's Republican presidential candidates' debate about the massive amounts of Medicare money spent on patients in the last two years of life, the former House speaker chose to focus his remarks on prostate cancer, a matter of no small  concern to the 44 million men in America who are age 50 and older – a key voting demographic.

Gingrich said he had recently communicated with Andy von Eschenbach, former  head of the National Cancer Institute and provost at MD Anderson, the largest cancer treatment center in the world.

 And he wrote me to point out that the most recent U.S. government intervention on whether or not to have prostate testing is basically going to kill people. So, if you ask me, do I want some Washington bureaucrat to create a class action decision which affects every American’s last two years of life? Not ever.

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The fears, of course, seem rather quaint these days. The notion of a White House bothering to request the statutory authority to execute troublesome Americans is just so...2009. After all, last week we learned from Reuters that fellow countrymen labeled "militants" by the Obama administration are now unilaterally placed on a "kill list" by "a secretive panel of senior government officials."

Unlike Republicans' fantastical stories about phantom death panels in the sub-basements of obscure public health agencies, this is a real-life death panel inside the highest governmental office in the land -- and, according to Reuters, it acts without "any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate."

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