For residents of California's vast rural areas, where nine hospitals have closed in the past decade, a cancer diagnosis can be especially frightening. Here's why.
HIPAA was designed to protect what’s called “protected health information.” But a rising chorus say the law has been too widely applied and now poses serious barriers to health information for doctors, patients and journalists alike.
Rural hospitals have been closing at alarming rate across the nation, including California's Central Valley. What happens to rural residents when a local hospital closes it doors? And is telemedicine really the solution?
In 2011, a panel of medical experts said that men, regardless of age, should not get the long-used blood test for prostate cancer. The panel’s recommendations caused an instant uproar, with dissent coming in particular from urologists and oncologists.
The likelihood of black men getting prostate cancer and dying from it represent two of the biggest gaps between the health of black and white men in the United States. The gulf is particularly wide in North Carolina, where the odds of dying from prostate cancer are among the worst in the nation.
If you decided to travel for your cancer treatment, there are resources that can help lighten the financial load.
When faced with cancer, here are some tips to decide if it is best to rely on local medical care or consider traveling to a big-name medical center given the hassle and expense.
I recently spoke with Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the ACS. I told him how I wished I had undergone screening earlier, thinking my cancer would have been caught before it could spread to my bones and my brain. “I would not have screened you,” he said bluntly.
Inefficiencies, profiteering, and disregard for evidence-based medicine plague our health care system, Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society told the 2013 California Health Journalism Fellows. The coming "tsunami of chronic disease" stands to intensify the situation.
When it comes to health issues, the southeastern corner of Virginia usually is pretty average. That’s why I was surprised to discover a report that showed a city in my readership area has the highest cancer mortality rate in the state.
