Today's Health/Science: hip surgery hype, pot potency, health advice for sale, asking big questions

Like a growing number of young, active people, Jeff Stewart (left) eschewed the "gold standard" treatment - total hip replacement surgery - in favor of a new procedure that, propelled by aggressive marketing featuring pictures of vigorous, youngish athletes, is sweeping the United States: hip resurfacing.

It's a dangerous, highly addictive drug whose skyrocketing potency has only increased its stranglehold on our nation's youth. Or it's mostly harmless, a substance not much worse than caffeine - with medicinal value to boot. It's marijuana. And the polarized debate about its safety has been rekindled by two reports released separately this month by the federal government and a leading drug prohibition group.

You do not have to be famous or well connected like Senator Edward M. Kennedy to get speedy access to the best minds in medicine. Being affluent, though, can help. During the last six years, a number of personal health advising firms and solo consultants have opened shop, catering to people willing to pay fees ranging from $150 an hour to $100,000 a year for advice on the best doctors and treatments for their maladies.

By day, 63-year-old Dr. Howard Weiner (left) is an award-winning doctor, the director of the Partners MS Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. In his lab, he is trying to find vaccines for neurological diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and multiple sclerosis. But he is also an artist, a published novelist, and a philosophy major who, with the death of his father a decade ago, found himself returning to the big life questions that he had studied as an undergraduate at Dartmouth.

Also, where does the name 'dandelion' come from and does eating 'local honey' help prevent allergies?

In Discoveries: Vitamin D may prolong survival and a brain cell's purpose is finally unraveled (second item).