The Supreme Court will hear arguments for Wyeth v. Levine, pertaining to whether manufacturers complying with FDA stipulated warning requirements can be held liable under state tort law for not supplying adequate warnings, this November.  Professor Zipursky of Fordham University, my alma mater, provides the following relevant facts: 
Levine’s facts present a shocking tragedy of the sort that can overwhelm [...]

Newswise — Nearly one in 10 obstetricians in a new study has considered giving up obstetric practice because of the emotional toll of stillbirths and infant deaths.
Three-quarters of the 804 obstetricians who responded to a survey by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System reported that the experience took a large emotional toll on [...]

[wsj] In hospitals, medical-ethics teams are increasingly the arbiters of agonizing health decisions: helping parents and doctors plan care for a dying child, mediating among family members who disagree about removing a parent from life support, or steering patients in denial about a terminal illness toward end-of-life care.
But as the number of hospitals with ethics [...]

When a patient tests HIV-positive, a doctor has to navigate state law and medical ethics. It can be a rocky path. My patient, a 26-year-old native of the Dominican Republic, had been seeing me for only a few months when I determined that he had been infected with HIV. He didn’t seem surprised but was [...]

Efforts to create an artificial blood substitute to prolong life for wounded soldiers or bleeding car crash victims were set back Monday by a study saying the products have led to a 30% increase in the risk of death and a nearly three-fold chance of having a heart attack.
The findings in the Journal of the [...]

“I took on the conventional wisdom that an aging population is driving U.S. hospital bills higher. The truth is that a combination of spending on new construction and hi-tech equipment pushed the nation’s hospital bill to $648.2 billion in 2006 —up 7 percent from 2005. The uptick was part of a trend:  since 2000, outlays [...]

Many hospital patients are dissatisfied with some aspects of their care and might not recommend their hospitals to friends and relatives, the federal government said Friday as it issued ratings for most of the nation’s hospitals, based on the first uniform national survey of patients.
The survey was meant to provide a constructive way for patients [...]

Las Vegans who underwent medical procedures at a local clinic that reused syringes reacted angrily to news that they should seek testing for hepatitis strains and HIV, calling Thursday for the Shadow Lane facility to be shut down.
But that won’t happen, state officials said, even as they revealed that an affiliated center that performs colonoscopies [...]

Legislators yesterday shelved a plan to increase individual control over online medical records.
The measure had backers from both sides of the aisle in the House, but hospitals and medical associations opposed it. Debate raised questions over the measure’s unintended consequences and uncertain costs.
The bill would have allowed people to restrict access to their own records [...]

Patients who don’t like the care they are getting from their doctors are always free to leave them and find a new one – if they can fnd one in these days of chronic physician shortages. But do doctors have the right to “fire” a patient?
That’s what Jennifer Thomson has been asking herself. She had [...]