Sometimes, the simplest tools in medicine are the ones that give us the most useful information. Take the humble blood pressure machine, for example. It's been around for years, and it's cheap, compared with a lot of other medical devices. It's simple to use, and it doesn't require a medical or a nursing degree to operate. But the numbers it reports are valuable in helping predict a person's risk of a host of medical problems, including heart failure, stroke and kidney failure, and can help doctors determine whether a person really needs to take medicine to control his or her high blood pressure.
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 far are we from personal genome scans that yield long lists of risks, some meaningful, some not? Who will develop the criteria for what is meaningful, for what a patient should know?
The long-awaited Federal Communications Commission report on American journalism, Information Needs of Communities, paints a poignant picture of the decline of health journalism at the nation’s newspapers.
My mom, like millions of others, was handed "a vitamin" while pregnant with me in 1954. And so when I became a teenager, I began to drip, and was hauled off to the gyno. The label: DES daughter. It was scary.
A health insurer stuns by giving back, heart attacks killing patients younger in California, and salmonella on the rise, plus more from our Daily Briefing.
Recounting a tornado's path through Joplin's hospital, hospitals sanctioned in California, and seniors loading up on caffeinated energy drinks, plus more from our Daily Briefing.
"Octomom" Nadya Suleman went to Dr. Michael Kamrava as a troubled patient. She was treated instead by her physician - who lost his license this week - as a customer. And now the media has chosen to treat her as a criminal.
Connecting cell phones to cancer, HIV/AIDS at 30, hospital drug shortages and more in today's Daily Briefing.
The increase in HIV infections has risen alarmingly among Asian American women, and will soon surpass the rate of infections in high-risk populations unless intervening measures are taken, noted a panel of experts in San Francisco on May 17.
