[NYT] CHICAGO (AP) — Should parents of extremely obese children lose custody for not controlling their kids’ weight? A provocative commentary in one of the nation’s most distinguished medical journals argues yes, and its authors are joining a quiet chorus of advocates who say the government should be allowed to intervene in extreme cases.
It has [...]

[The Economist] DRUG smugglers can expect harsh penalties nearly everywhere—if the drugs in question are heroin or cocaine. Those who smuggle counterfeit medicines, by contrast, have often faced lax enforcement and light punishment. Some governments deem drug-counterfeiting a trivial offence, little more than a common irritant. After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads [...]

[NYT] When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale study that provides the first rigorously controlled assessment of the impact of Medicaid.
While the findings may [...]

[NYT] Poverty is often cited as contributing to poor health. Now, in an unusual approach, researchers have calculated how many people poverty kills and presented their findings, along with an argument that social factors can cause death the same way that behavior like smoking cigarettes does.
In an article published online for the June 16 issue [...]

[Blog.Bioethics.gov]- The question was simple, the answers not.
At the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues today, Commission Chair Dr. Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, asked a panel of international experts on bioethics whether the so-called Guatemala incident could happen again. In Guatemala, from 1946 to 1948, a U.S.-funded research experiment [...]

[NYTimes]- I shouldn’t be surprised when doctors object to laws telling them how to practice medicine, as does New York State’s new Palliative Care Information Act — not surprised, but in this instance, distressed.
Vehemently opposed by the Medical Society of the State of New York, the law passed last summer by a two-thirds majority of [...]

[Huffington Post]- I am a psychiatrist who has treated patients for over 35 years, run all varieties of psychiatric services and worked in city and state government. But I still cannot bear to read or hear a story of a fatal outcome for a person with a serious mental illness who dies from neglect or [...]

[First Word]- The US Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned whether Vermont’s decision to enact laws that prohibit the use of prescription drug records for marketing purposes violates free-speech rights. All states currently allow pharmacies to collect and pass on data about the prescription-writing habits of physicians, but Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire banned use or [...]

[Huffington Post]— Experts say that the kind of unethical medical studies that occurred half a century ago could still happen again despite more than 1,000 rules and regulations that should prevent such abuses.
Bioethicists and researchers spoke Tuesday before a presidential panel in Washington. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal [...]

[Courier-Journal]-U.S. government doctors once thought it was acceptable to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates, including giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.
Much of this occurred 40 to 80 [...]