Insights

<p><p><em>This is one in a series of articles, running between Thanksgiving and January, examining the relationship between housing loss and death in San Francisco. Check out the previous articles in the series,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77054&quot; target="_blank">Looking for death</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77250&quot; target="_blank">Gunpowder on the streets</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77641&quot; target="_blank">Will losing your home kill you?</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=77908&quot; target="_blank">Hidden in plain sight: dying and homelessness</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=78376#commen…; target="_blank">Be selfish: Give a gift to a homeless person</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=78423&quot; target="_blank">The Tenderloin: substance abuse and Nate</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?entry_id=78591&quot; target="_blank">Starving in the Financial District: Ken and food insecurity</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gurley/detail?blogid=114&amp;entry_…; target="_blank">The Sixth and Mission Death Corridor: Assaults, brain trauma and homicide</a>.</em></p><p>If you're like me, you probably like to tell yourself that we don't actually need to&nbsp;<em>read&nbsp;</em>Oliver Twist to know that it's bad for children to grow up on the street. Especially since Dickens discreetly omitted the worst sexual predations that can happen to a child behind a dumpster. As a developed society, we're way beyond needing to revisit that lesson, right?</p></p>

<p>California’s long-awaited hospital infection data isn’t ready for prime-time.</p> <p>Last month, journalist <a href="../../../../../../../../users/dschoch">Deborah Shoch</a> of our sister program <a href="http://www.centerforhealthreporting.org/">California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting</a> detailed one woman’s battle to get state officials <a href="http://www.centerforhealthreporting.org/article/california-fight-infect… release individual hospital infection data</a>.</p>

<p>Promises, threats and predictions about health care fill our first Daily Briefing of 2011!</p>

<p>For the past two years, <em>New York Times</em> reporter <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/ref/national/bogdanich-bio.html">Walt Bogdanich</a> has written more about medical radiation than most reporters will in their entire careers. He has examined it from every possible angle, focusing on both the power and the peril of various radiation treatments.</p>

<p><p>If you are sent to live on the streets, it is for most people the same as being sent, without a mouth guard or helmet, into a boxing ring. A ring where the gong never sounds and there's no rope to mark the place where someone could take a swing and blow out your eye socket.</p><p>Doesn't matte

<p><p>Since it opened six<strong>ty</strong>&nbsp;years ago,&nbsp;<strong>St. Anthony's</strong>&nbsp;has gone through several menu styles and chefs. From visit to visit you never quite knew what you were going to get.</p><p>Located off the Plaza in&nbsp;<strong>Civic Center</strong>, the restaurant

<p>Older doctors should not lose their licenses just because they hit a target birthday. But should they have their skills regularly tested after a certain age?</p>

<p>Last week in <em>Career GPS</em>, the <em>ReportingonHealth</em> community shared its best health media in 2010. This week, we're highlighting awards to celebrate that work.</p>

<p>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.</p> <p>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.</p>

<p>One of the biggest problems with public health care is knowing where to turn in order to gain reliable information that will lead to reasonable options for care. It's difficult to learn how to receive the proper services. Hollywood accurately portrays the masses sitting in the waiting room wa