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Most eye twitching is harmless. A flickering lower or upper eyelid, usually in one eye, is almost always eyelid myokymia, a benign twitch set off by poor sleep, stress, caffeine, or dry eyes, and it fades on its own within days to a few weeks. A twitch that lasts longer, forces the eye shut, affects…

The Epley maneuver is a short sequence of head and body positions that moves loose calcium crystals out of the inner ear’s balance canal and back to where they belong. For benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, the most common cause of spinning dizziness, it often stops the vertigo in one or two sessions. It works best…

You park, grab a cart, and start down the aisle at H-E-B. By the produce section, your legs feel heavy, almost as if they’re filled with wet sand. Then you lean forward on the cart handle, and the heaviness fades. Walk the same distance upright through the parking lot, and you need to stop and…

It usually starts small, for example, when you finish a long phone call and notice your pinky finger numb, along with the outer half of the ring finger. Or you wake at night with fingers buzzing. By morning the inside of your elbow aches a little, as if you bumped your funny bone and the…

At 8 am, everything works. By 4 pm, one eyelid sags after an hour of reading emails. At dinner, the steak gets harder to chew halfway through, and the TV starts to double up if you stare at it too long. After a night’s sleep, it all resets. This rhythm of reasonable strength in the…

Your head drifts to the left when you stop paying attention. You straighten it, and a minute later it’s back. Maybe you’ve had months of massages, muscle relaxants, and “probably just a strain,” and your neck still won’t stay where you put it. It’s tiring, and it can feel isolating, because nothing looks wrong from…

Forget the cartoon version, where someone face-plants into their soup mid-sentence. Real narcolepsy is a chronic neurological disorder in which the brain can’t hold a steady line between being awake and being asleep. The everyday narcolepsy symptoms look far more ordinary: heavy exhaustion most of the day, no matter how long the night was. That…

It’s 3 a.m., and you’re awake. Your eyes are open, you know exactly where you are, and nothing will move. Not an arm, not a finger, not your voice. Something heavy presses on your chest, and part of you is certain someone else is in the room. Then it ends, usually within a minute or…

At 10 am, a retired engineer jokes with the receptionist and remembers the name of his first boss from 1971. By 3 pm the same day, he can’t follow a simple conversation and insists a small child is sitting quietly in the corner of the living room. His wife mentions, almost as an afterthought, that…

A doctor says three words, “mild cognitive impairment,” and your mind jumps straight to the word nobody said: dementia. That leap is understandable. It’s also usually premature. If you’ve been searching for what mild cognitive impairment is, think of it as a yellow light. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) means testing shows a real, measurable change…