NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Charges against the owners of a suburban New Orleans nursing home where 35 residents died during Hurricane Katrina should be dismissed because the state attorney general, in another action, blames the federal government for the rampant post-storm flooding and resulting deaths, defense attorneys claimed Tuesday.
The husband-and-wife team of Salvador and Mabel [...]

Year in Review: Procedures found illegal
Doctors at Seattle’s Children Hospital violated Washington state law by performing a hysterectomy and other medical procedures on Ashley, a young girl with severe mental disabilities, without first acquiring a court order. The statement, published on May 8 in the Washington Protection and Advocacy System’s (WPAS) investigative report, was acknowledged [...]

Involving pharmacists in obtaining and assessing a patient’s medication history before elective surgery can significantly reduce medication discrepancies upon hospital admission. The study is published in the May 28, 2007 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine. 
 Led by Toronto General Hospital (TGH), University Health Network and the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, [...]

A new study of intensive care unit patients who are breathing with the help of a mechanical ventilator has found that a two-step sedation and ventilator weaning protocol—called a “wake up and breathe” strategy—helps patients come off the ventilator faster so that they can be discharged from the ICU and hospital more quickly. The study [...]

New technology pushing law into uncharted territory
Custody battles over frozen sperm and eggs. Children sired by dead men. Women giving birth to children who share none of their genes.  These are the realities of modern reproductive medicine, a rapidly evolving area of science that continues to challenge notions of parenthood.
It’s murky legal ground, governed by [...]

You’re in a car crash, unconscious and bleeding profusely. Without your consent, you are injected with an experimental blood substitute.  That’s what happened to dozens of trauma patients across the country in the past two years, most without advance knowledge that they were becoming part of a clinical trial. At least 47 of them died.
At [...]

What if medical care came with a 90-day warranty?
That is what a hospital group in central Pennsylvania is trying to learn in an experiment that some experts say is a radically new way to encourage hospitals and doctors to provide high-quality care that can avoid costly mistakes.
The group, Geisinger Health System, has overhauled its approach [...]

Medical research scientists in public health and other areas routinely make ethical value judgments, even if they’re not aware of it, according to a new Weill Cornell Medical College research study. And not only do these judgments not lead to bias necessarily, but they can make for better research.
Published in the current issue of European [...]

Despite its ability to predict dangerous and even deadly drug reactions, a high price tag and lack of familiarity with the technology have prevented doctors from embracing the world’s first DNA chip test to deliver personalized medicine.
For nearly two years, the AmpliChip P450 has been available from Roche Diagnostics to predict adverse reactions associated with [...]

If you were to collapse from cardiac arrest in several regions of the United States and Canada, you could be enrolled, unwittingly, in a controversial clinical trial testing CPR methods.
No one knows if the research will result in better emergency care or kill more patients than standard CPR treatments, but the only way to get [...]