The patient identified only as E.T. in documents had entered the hospital alive, with a slow heart rate. She died a few hours later, after Dr. Madhusudhan T. Gupta had tried to insert a pacemaker into her artery instead of her vein. Years would go by before the Medical Board took meaningful action.
During several inspections over the past five years, federal regulators cited the five local hospitals tracked by the Orange County Register nearly 100 times for infection control violations. The most common problems were incorrectly sterilized surgical tools and dirty operating rooms and equipment.
A year after Thomas Eric Duncan died from Ebola after seeking care at a Texas hospital, what’s different about health preparedness in the U.S.? Reporter Anna Almendrala set out to answer that question, and found a series of heartbreaking stories of loss along the way.
Dr. Gupta was performing a procedure in which a pacemaker is inserted through a patient's blood vessels. But he skipped a key step, and the patient's condition steadily worsened. The case is a reminder that the skills a physician has earlier in their career don’t always remain sharp toward the end.
Last week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a landmark study by CDC researchers on the safety of dietary supplements. The new study stands as a strong challenge to our current regulatory framework, as our Slow Medicine contributors explain.
C-sections have been in the news a lot lately, and the seemingly conflicting messages are enough to sow confusion. But the fact remains that the procedure is way too common in the majority of hospitals throughout the country. And that has consequences for both moms' health and health care costs.
If you are pregnant and considering where to give birth to your child, what matters most to you? Probably not the quality measures used to calculate the ratings at California Healthcare Compare, a new online tool that allows consumers to compare health care prices and quality.
This year alone, I have learned of three doctors, two of whom I personally know and one who I went to medical school with, being disciplined by the Medical Board of California. They're all men. Likewise, a recent study found male doctors were more likely to be disciplined. What's going on here?
By now you’ve heard about the launch of the new California Healthcare Compare website, which allows users to compare cost and quality on common procedures throughout the state. Less noted, however, are some of the site’s serious limitations. Bill Heisel breaks them down for us.
How do you find out how skilled a surgeon is? Asking a surgeon's peers for their opinion is one obvious route, since surgeons are adept at spotting colleagues' skill levels. But getting hold of such peer reviews isn't easy for patients. Can a new surgery market change that?
