William Heisel
Contributing Editor
Contributing Editor
I have reported on health for most of my career. My work as an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register exposed problems with the fertility industry, the trade in human body parts and the use of illegal drugs in sports. I helped create a first-of-its-kind report card judging hospitals on a wide array of measures for a story that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I was one of the lead reporters on a series of stories about lead in candy, a series that also was a finalist for the Pulitzer.For the Center for Health Journalism (previously known as Reporting on Health), I have written about investigative health reporting and occasionally broke news on my column, Antidote. I also was the project editor on the Just One Breath collaborative reporting series. These days, for the University of Washington, I now work as the Executive Director for Insitutue for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Client Services, a social enterprise. You can follow me on Twitter @wheisel.
<p>The doctors behind the "Diets Fail!" campaign to get people to undergo Lap-Band surgery have innovated again. Failing to win a libel case against the newspaper that exposed their shady business practices, they are attempting to persuade a judge to treat newspaper reporters like the Mafia.</p>
<p>I'm highlighting "slaps" — lawsuits, threats or other attempts to shut up health journalists or whistleblowers. Has this happened to you or your colleagues? Let me know.</p>
<p>The feds may have shuttered the public portion of the National Practitioner Data Bank, but you can still access it thanks to an investigative journalism group. Get tips on using this data from Alan Bavley, the Kansas City Star reporter whose stories prompted the data's removal.</p>
<p>Kansas City Star reporter Alan Bavley became something of a cause celebre after the feds threatened him with a fine for using public medical malpractice data. I talk with him about his experiences and public reaction to his reporting.</p>
<p>A pharma insider offers some strict rules for medical researchers to avoid pharma ghostwriting and other conflicts of interest in their work — and help save the reputation of medical science.</p>
<p>A patient wants a friendly doctor, but not too friendly. So what's a patient to do when her doctor asks her to a football game — or for a loan?</p>
<p>After Michele Bachmann's ill-advised comments on the cervical cancer vaccine, here are some suggestions for covering vaccines. At the top of the list: stop quoting celebrities.</p>
<p>Let's stand up publicly to support patient safety and Alan Bavley, the <em>Kansas City Star</em> reporter whose coverage of medical malpractice caused federal health officials to remove a public doctors database and threaten Bavley with fines.</p>
<p>Kansas City Star reporter Alan Bavley was just doing his job. In response to his watchdog stories on medical malpractice, federal officials yanked public portions of a national doctor database offline and threatened him with fines. Now, journalists are pushing back.</p>
<p>Alan Bavley at the Kansas City Star found an opening in Missouri state law, drove a truck into it and loaded it up with facts for his story on Kansas and Missouri doctors who had histories of alleged malpractice, yet whose medical board records were spotless.</p>