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.

Articles

Doctors Behaving Badly: Minnesota doc bends pregnant patients to weird whims

<p>If you were going to make a bet on which doctor lost his license in Minnesota, who would you choose?</p> <p>The doctor who didn’t pay his taxes?</p> <p>The doctor who repeatedly had female patients undress in front of him, asked them to assume unusual positions while undressed and then touched their genitals without explaining why?</p> <p>If you chose the tax laggard, you win. If you are a female patient in Minnesota, you may be losing.</p>

Doctors Behaving Badly: Doc's solo flights leave patients plummeting with no chute

<p>The best doctors know their limits. General practitioners trust radiologists to read X-rays, pathologists to interpret lab results. Pulmonologists call oncologists if they suspect cancer. Obstetricians send patients to nutritionists to make sure they are eating the right foods during a pregnancy.</p> <p>And then there are doctors who like to fly solo.</p>

Covering Pharma Ghostwriting: Five Tips from PLoS Medicine's "The Haunting of Medical Journals"

<p><a href="../../../../../../../../blogs/qa-dr-adriane-fugh-berman-ghostwriting-sneaks-past-most-journal-editors">Adriane Fugh-Berman</a> has been leading the charge against the use of drug company-sponsored ghostwriters to craft scientific articles for publication in seemingly legitimate journals. She has been a paid expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in the litigation over hormone replacement therapy drugs, and she directs <a href="http://www.pharmedout.org/">PharmedOut</a&gt;, a project at Georgetown University that aims to scrub industry influence from medical training.

Doctors Behaving Badly: Louisiana board keeps doctor's inappropriate history hush-hush

<p><em>Antidote</em> wrote last week about an odd rule set by the <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?gl=us&amp;hl=en&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;msa=0&am…; State Board of Medical Examiners that allows a doctor accused of “inappropriate conduct” with female patients to continue seeing patients with a chaperone, unless they are 60 or older. At that age, the board considers the patients risk-free and allows the doctor to see them alone.</p>

Fraud Fishing, Part 5: Go early, go often when interviewing suspected fraudsters

<p>Now that you have established your target, walk up to the door and knock.</p> <p>This is the step that even some veteran investigative reporters like to avoid until the very end. How can you let a subject know that you are investigating them? Won’t they start shredding records, threatening potential whistleblowers, putting cameras in the parking lot to capture you talking to patients?</p> <p>They may do all those things. But here are three good reasons to talk to your subjects early.</p>