You would be hard pressed to find anyone with a greater breadth of understanding and experience in navigating the complex Golden State health care system than Diana Dooley, California’s secretary of Health and Human Services.

Most businessmen have a dream of the business they want to build before they begin. Brian Watwood’s vision for his new company was born in a personal nightmare.

A broken leg used to be a death sentence for a horse. Now, the University of California veterinary teaching hospital in Davis is using stem cells to help the horses heal quickly.

When the pain began, Kevin assumed it was indigestion. He would occasionally experience bowel irregularity but would return to work anyway, fixing hot rods at a body shop in Carmichael. The 53-year-old didn’t grow alarmed until after about eight months, when he noticed a protrusion emitting from the side of his groin like a blister.

Low testosterone. For men, these words have the same foul odor as “impotence,” “shrinkage” or “Justin Bieber.” The topic is taboo. Throughout civilization testosterone has been prized as the lifeblood of manhood, so a deficit would imply, by definition, that we are somehow less manly.

In August of last year, it was reported that local eye-care titan VSP would be excluded from competing for individual members in the state’s health insurance exchange market because the vision plan it provides is a stand-alone program. The move lead to conversations that VSP might relocate its headquarters out of state.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June to uphold the Affordable Care Act briefly tempered some of the political brouhaha surrounding the new health care law. But partisan rhetoric flared again during election season, creating more confusion about the law than clarity.

On a spring day in 2011, 60-year-old Russell Edgar checked himself into a 14-day Newstart residential program at the Weimar Center. In the Sierra Nevada foothills above Sacramento, the center promised to teach people with diabetes, obesity and cancer how to reverse their health problems through natural healing methods.

Many of my estate-planning clients grasp the importance of wills, living trusts and financial powers of attorney but feel unprepared when the conversation turns to quality-of-life for their final years.

In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, the nation became engrossed with end-of-life issues when the media grabbed hold of the stories of Karen Ann Quinlan and, later, Terri Schiavo.