These seven tropical diseases are closer to home than you think. Lurking in Dallas-area backyards is Chagas disease, caused by a parasite that infects more than 300,000 Americans. The disease can cause heart failure and death in humans and dogs and is often missed by doctors.
The digital revolution has been a boon to reporting. But turning paper into digital files is not the same as making them freely available online, and major obstacles persist. The National Practitioner Data Bank offers a particularly egregious example.
If she hadn’t gone to donate blood, Candace Stark wouldn’t have discovered that she harbored a dangerous parasite. Although she hadn’t left Texas in 20 years, swimming in her blood was a tropical parasite that causes a disease called Chagas.
As physicians, we can find evidence in the research literature to support or discourage almost anything. If we don't have a coherent approach to care, it's quite difficult to decide when we have sufficient evidence to change our practice.
The rising prevalence of "narrow" health insurance networks has set off alarms. But do such networks keep patients from getting good care? Not necessarily. The more relevant question is whether a provider network is adequate or not.
The infections that patients pick up inside hospitals can be debilitating and even deadly. Yet many hospitals fail to follow simple protocols, and access to information is limited. Here are five tips for reporting on hospital infections.
Walk into the courtroom of Wyandotte County District Judge Kathleen M. Lynch and you may be surprised to find lawyers who aren’t asked to stand up and a judge who prefers street dress to a judge’s robes.
“The Raising of America” lays out the emerging science of early childhood, profiles families struggling to support their kids and make ends meet and argues for national policies that do more to support overstretched families with young children.
More and more, doctors like are looking to parents to help make difficult decisions on how much treatment to give babies born very sick and premature, as well as figuring out when it's time to let them go. There's now more emphasis on parents' values and preferences in such cases.
Anne and Omar Shamiyeh first learned something was wrong with one of their twins during an ultrasound, when Anne was 18 weeks pregnant. "The technician was, like, 'Well, there's no visualization of his stomach,'" Anne recounted. "And I was like, 'How does our baby have no stomach?'"
