[NYTimes] When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.
Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who [...]

[Medscape] “Honesty is the best policy” and “the patient always comes first.”
As absolute and correct as those aphorisms may be, they can be hard for doctors to apply in the complex world of modern medicine.
A recent Medscape medical ethics survey of over 10,000 physicians found that when it comes to patient treatment, a significant number [...]

[NYTimes] The patient, in her late 50s with failing kidneys, had come to the hospital for what she and her doctors thought would be a simple procedure preparing her for dialysis. But instead of returning home the next day, the woman ended up in the hospital for nearly half of my internship. Her procedure went [...]

[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 [...]

“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.  

After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to [...]

 [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 [...]

[ChicagoTribune] If ever Carol Gaetjens becomes unconscious with no hope of awakening, even if she could live for years in that state, she says she wants her loved ones to discontinue all forms of artificial life support.  But now there’s a catch for this churchgoing Catholic woman. U.S. bishops have decided that it is not [...]

[dailymail] A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them [...]

[Special to The Birmingham News]  At the end of December 2000 on a cold night, my brother Bob called.
“Dad’s not doing very well,” he said. “If you want to see him before he dies, you’d better fly up here.”
I didn’t believe him. At age 88, my dad had weathered crises before, and he had told [...]

Total health care expenses for Americans age 45 to 64 in 2006 ($370 billion) were about double the inflation-adjusted total for 1996 ($187 billion), according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. AHRQ’s study covers all Americans age 45 to 64 other than those residing in nursing homes [...]