Recent studies have found statistical links between pesticide use and an outbreak of Parkinson's disease in California farm towns. Researchers even know which chemicals are the likely culprits. What's the government doing about it? Not much.
This article points out a difficult dilemma, if you close a facility because its not performing well what do you do for patient access? Healthcare is a difficult business, with some barriers to entry, as well as limited supply of particular resources (including physicians, nurses, hospital beds, and/or nursing facilities).
Sometimes, knowing what's on a person's death certificate can lead to a public benefit. So why do some states make death certificates private and others consider them public documents?
Should doctors be checked for competence as they age, as elderly drivers are? A negligence case involving a 75-year-old obstetrician raises some tough questions.
I wrote a piece recently for Health News Review about conflicts of interest. The original post is below, followed by more great examples of writers describing unexpected conflicts in detail.
Contrary to popular belief, resilience is not innate. If you stress a child long enough and don't provide any nurturing to recover from the stress, research shows that the effects are damaging and long-term.
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.
It's no surprise that the Central Valley is a medically underserved community, where recruiting doctors is a tough task. Many of the doctors working here have attended medical school overseas. In fact, if you crunch the numbers, Kern County comes in fourth among California's 58 counties for having the most foreign-trained doctors.
Victims of bad physician behavior everywhere are rubbing their eyes in disbelief today after Dr. Conrad Murray's conviction in the death of Michael Jackson. Here are five lessons from the case for regulatory agencies, prosecutors, patient advocates and journalists.
Parkland Memorial Hospita has for years been one of the state’s worst-performing hospitals on a broad federal measure of patient safety, a Dallas Morning News analysis shows. Hospital representatives accepted the accuracy of the calculations, but they questioned how well the data reflected actual performance and current hospital conditions.
