It’s a new way to push for patient safety: Don’t pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.
That has the nation’s hospitals exploring innovative programs to prevent injury and infection: Hand-washing spies. Surgical sponges that sound an alarm [...]

The state Board of Medicine has suspended a Hurricane doctor for six months after he gave a dying patient a muscle-paralyzing drug as part of “end of life” care.
Dr. Sean DiCristofaro will start serving his suspension Friday. DiCristofaro told the medical board he administered the drug after the patient was gasping for breath and his [...]

Nonnie Hawkins remembers standing beside her daughter’s hospital bed, steeling herself for a final goodbye.
She turned to physicians at DeKalb Medical Center, who minutes earlier had disconnected a machine that was breathing for 18-year-old Tara Bottoms-Hawkins. Hawkins thought her daughter was in a coma, as she had been for four months. But doctors said the [...]

The multinational tobacco companies responded to arguments about the social costs of smoking and hazards of secondhand smoke by quietly implementing the Social Costs/Social Values project (1979–1989), which relied upon the knowledge and authoritative power of social scientists to construct an alternate cultural repertoire of smoking. Social scientists created and disseminated non-health based, pro-tobacco arguments [...]

Twenty-five years ago, when Kanwaljeet Anand was a medical resident in a neonatal intensive care unit, his tiny patients, many of them preterm infants, were often wheeled out of the ward and into an operating room. He soon learned what to expect on their return. The babies came back in terrible shape: their skin was [...]

After gaining national media coverage of a videotaped speech at Wayne State University in Detroit where he told medical students it was acceptable to lie to patients, Dr. Alberto Hodari told Cybercast News Service he will no longer tell couples that Michigan state law prohibits the man from being in the room when an abortion [...]

Informed consent may be the biggest misnomer in medicine: Studies show that most patients don’t read the forms they sign before undergoing surgery or medical treatment. More than half of those who do read the forms don’t understand them, and only a quarter of forms include all of the data patients need to make an [...]

There are a lot of good reasons for people to lose weight and stop smoking — but saving money on lifetime health care costs isn’t one of them, according to a study out of the Netherlands.
The researchers found that healthy people cost governments more in the long run because they live years longer: an average [...]

An Australian euthanasia campaigner says a Wellington woman who killed herself with his assistance was of sound mind. Philip Nitschke says the 68-year-old was not suffering depression before she died in 2006 as some of her friends are claiming. He says the woman knew what she was doing when she took his advice and smuggled [...]

Manitoba doctors have been handed new rules governing how they decide to pull patients off life support, but a lawyer fighting one such decision calls the rules hypocritical.The 15-page statement unveiled Wednesday by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba is believed to mark the first time a Canadian body has spelled out step-by-step [...]