[wsj] Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny. As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving. Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician’s duty, insisting that it includes working for [...]

[Medscape] The proportion of organ donors from U.S. minority groups has increased substantially in the past 20 years, following national education efforts to raise awareness of the need, a new study finds.
Kidney transplants, for example, have a greater chance of success when the donor and recipient are as genetically similar as possible. But historically, organ [...]

[NYtimes] A specialist recommended that my wife get a CT scan and suggested that she use a lab in which, we later discovered, he has an interest. She wasn’t required to use that lab, and there was no reason to question its quality or his calling for a scan. I’m O.K. with this lab — [...]

[nytimes] By the time she was 38, Dr. Desiree Pardi had become a leading practitioner in palliative care, one of the fastest-growing fields in medicine, counseling terminally ill patients on their choices.

She preached the gentle gospel of her profession, persuading patients to confront their illnesses and get their affairs in order and, above all, ensuring [...]

[NEJM] Early in 2009, members of major health care–related industries such as insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, medical device makers, and hospitals all agreed to forgo some future profits to show support for the Obama administration’s health care reform efforts. Skeptics have questioned the value of these promises, regarding at least some of them as more [...]

 [BBC] A former BBC presenter is being investigated in Britain after admitting he killed his lover.
Ray Gosling said the man he killed was suffering from Aids and in great pain.
Ray Gosling was arrested on Tuesday after he told a BBC documentary that he smothered the man. The admission and investigation has added to an already [...]

[MHT] When it comes to vaccines, everyone now wants to get in on the action. That’s according to Paul Bogorad, a senior manager at pharmaceutical and biotechnology consultancy Putnam Associates in Burlington. Bogorad and other analysts say that the frenzy over H1N1 has heightened the public’s awareness of the difficulty of making vaccines and has [...]

[Hastings Center] All of the health care reform proposals in Congress promise to substantially increase the number of people who get their insurance from sources other than an employer. This shift opens the door to an increase in civil litigation because existing federal laws, specifically the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), protect the employer-sponsored [...]

[medscape] Every day, doctors face pressure to choose between practicing defense medicine or trying to lower healthcare costs.
Your patient comes in, and even if you think the treatment is ‘wait and see,’ you can’t do that. If you miss diagnosing a disease and the patient sues, his attorney will hammer you for not having done [...]

[EurekaAlert] A growing number of hospitalized adults are incapable of making their own health decisions, but little research has explored how doctors feel about making medical decisions with a patient’s surrogate decision maker.
A study published in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that one in five doctors are not [...]