Political powerhouse Texas Right to Life is working overtime to try to defeat a compromise measure aimed at improving state laws governing “end of life” medical decisions. But with time running out to get Senate Bill 303 passed, the fight over the legislation has shifted from political to personal.
The makers of popular drugs like Advair, Cymbalta, Viagra and Zoloft have physicians, psychiatrists, and medical school faculty members across California on their payrolls. Does this influence prescribing patterns?
Some doctors leave the healing arts altogether and become fulltime prescription writers.
Atul Gawande, surgeon and staff writer for The New Yorker, is one of the most prominent voices speaking about patient safety in the United States. But in his latest New Yorker contribution, "Personal Best: Should everyone have a coach?," the "everyone" in question here is, not surprisingly, just the physician.
Behind the operating room doors, anesthesia is the probably the only profession where there are two licensed providers, with different educational backgrounds, who can perform exactly the same functions.
Health experts still debate whether wearing hospital scrubs outside the hospital can increase patients' infection risk. Could an Ottawa hospital be the perfect site to investigate that question?
How one doctor could allow another doctor to use his license to order painkillers for a clinic being used as a front for a drug mill and still be allowed to operate with no restrictions on his license is a true mystery. Finally, William Heisel reports, Dr. Scott Bickman faces some sanctions.
A look into why Tulare County, a poor, semi-rural county in California's Central Valley, has a severe lack of physicians.
Although Doctors Behaving Badly tends to focus on exactly what you would expect, its mission is to make people aware of the many ways that patients are left unprotected.
There are nearly 1 million licensed, practicing physicians nationwide. Antidote has no ability to count how many are “behaving badly,” but it is safe to say that only a slim minority are tainting the reputation of the medical community. Doctors who abuse, injure or kill patients are the surrogate markers for an illness in the physician discipline system. They are not the illness.
Who hasn’t come home from work with a company pen in their pocket? Used the work printer for directions to a restaurant on a Friday afternoon? Answered a call from their mom on the company cell phone?
In that spirit, we could consider Dr. Duane Stillions just one of the rest of us.
If only he weren’t a children’s physician with a drug habit.
Stillions, a 42-year-old anesthesiologist, was caught in May 2009 by Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC taking painkillers that were meant for kids undergoing surgery.
