We have a guest post today from Felice Freyer, veteran medical writer for the Providence Journal, member of the Association of Health Care Journalists Board of Directors and chair of AHCJ's Right to Know Committee.
By Jim Johnson
Monterey County Herald reporter Jim Johnson examines efforts to save a financially-troubled safety-net hospital.
For Mark Campano’s entire career as an anesthesiologist, other doctors worried that he was a bomb waiting to go off. They saw him showing up for work drowsy and agitated from weeks of caffeinated days and alcohol-soaked nights. They counseled him about his drug abuse and urged him to stop.
Putting together a scientific research paper should be a different process than building a Ford Taurus or making a Big Mac.
For the drug companies and their ghostwriting partners, it isn’t.
A loophole in California law means that insurers could require you to take a genetic test to qualify for long-term care insurance – and potentially deny coverage based on the results.
Do you know how many hours there are in a week?
For doctors, the answer is on the tips of their tongues: 168 hours. As one medical resident recently put it to me, “When you are in residency, you start with the hours in the week and then subtract the few hours that you are not at the hospital. It’s not uncommon to work 120 hours a week. It’s the reverse human schedule.”
In the heated debate over the new routine mammogram screening recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, not enough coverage has focused on our perception of risk.
It’s important context for all reporting on medical screening.
Journalist Merrill Goozner, who blogs at GoozNews, has a great post on this topic, and on the costs of our misperception of risk. He writes:
Blogs, twitters and daily print help keep us abreast of breaking news. But there's nothing like an old-fashioned book to get inside a big sweeping tale. In the summer of 2007, when I was a fellow here, I had little more than a vision for a book that explored Big Pharma. Well, I also had some solid sources, a blockbuster drug, and a dramatic plot that spanned some 20 years. The hard part was finding a place to adequately tell the tale.
Diabetic children are in jeopardy of dying in the classroom due to a severe shortage of California registered school nurses. There are 15,000 school districts in California and less than 50 percent of those districts have a registered nurse on campus. Current law in California requires only a reg
Have you ever worked on a story where you knew that you were just one source away from a blockbuster? But you could never find that one great document that spelled out the connections or that one repentant insider willing to walk you through the corporate crime, government malfeasance or law enforcement deceit.
The WIC federal nutrition program has just undergone a makeover, and vouchers are now good for fresh produce and healthy foods. This switch has put thousands of WIC-certified stores through some changes of their own. Rachel Dornhelm reports.
