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In this economy, we're all forced to be penny pinchers. And it's a shame, since many of us love luxury. "Champagne taste on a beer budget" is more apt now than ever. I have found a way to have champagne and pay beer prices. Read on.

'Tis the season for soft and cuddly fleece.

I love this pillow project because it doesn't require a sewing machine, and the finished product can be as simple or as embellished as you like. The secret is using knots to tie the front and back fabrics together, because fleece fabric doesn't need to be hemmed.

When Glamour magazine featured a nude plus-size model, women applauded, while physicians shook their heads in dismay. Was this a sign that women have given up on finding their healthy weight? Before the women's cheers subsided, Ralph Lauren fired his size 4 model, weighing in at 120 pounds, for being too fat.

TUCSON, Ariz. - Victims of cardiac arrest were twice as likely to survive when given continuous chest compressions by bystanders, according to a study released Sunday by two Arizona researchers.

While health care pundits debate over when women should have mammograms, 2,000 men diagnosed with breast cancer this year are in the shadows.

One of them is Marshall Anderson, 52, who works as a medical technologist with Texas Oncology in North Carolina. He takes care of parents all day, but never imagined that he would be diagnosed with breast cancer.

Dentists are cautioning parents that children should give up their pacifiers by the time they're 3 years old.

The timing varies, but it's generally 2-1/2 to 3, according to Maumee, Ohio, pediatric dentists Stephen Pero and Michael Glinka, who have been in practice together for more than 36 years.

Does your doctor talk to you about money?

Chances are, he or she does not. But it is a lost skill of medicine that many providers are finding they need.

Increasingly, patients are finding they need to know how much a particular diagnostic test or prescription or procedure will cost because some or all of the expense will come out of their own pockets.

Questions are being raised about the safety of folic acid supplements after new research has found links between the B vitamin and increased cancer risk.

Researchers in Norway found that heart disease patients treated with a combination of folic acid and vitamin B12 had an increased risk of cancer and death compared to patients who didn't receive the vitamins.

As with many a great notion, the idea came to nutritionist Bronwyn Schweigerdt while she was doing something totally unrelated to her work.

"I was rock climbing," Schweigerdt says, "and I was doing one where you're basically horizontal. I'm hanging there upside down thinking, 'There needs to be a female superhero. There needs to be Fiber Girl. That's it!'

Long before swine flu made people sick, dog lovers were hitting the panic button because canine influenza was killing dogs at greyhound racing tracks.

Dog flu first surfaced in greyhounds in 2004 in Florida. As racing dogs were shipped to tracks around the country, the outbreak spread and cases were confirmed in 25 states.