[Trust.org] The Syrian regime is conducting a campaign of unrelenting repression against people wounded in demonstrations and the medical workers trying to treat them, the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières MSF (Doctors Without Borders) said today.
While MSF cannot work directly in Syria, it has collected testimonies from wounded patients treated outside the country [...]

[huffingtonpost] Should sugar be regulated like alcohol?
That’s the premise of a new position paper, published today in the journal Nature by three leading obesity researchers from the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.

They argue that added sugar in all forms — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup alike — is as perilous to [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

[Yahoo]- End-of-life care falls short of what the average person wants, says a new study that compares palliative care in the U.S. and Ontario.
While most patients prefer supportive measures that avoid a hospital death, U.S. patients received more chemotherapy. Ontario patients have more days in hospital, have more use of emergency rooms, and were much [...]

[RWJF]- First report showing longitudinal change demonstrates differing trends across geographic regions and individual hospitals and academic medical centers.
Chronically ill Medicare patients spent fewer days in the hospital and received more hospice care in 2007 than they did in 2003, but at the same time there was an increase in the intensity of care for [...]

[NYT]  Several years ago, I learned that a physician in a town not too far from where I was practicing had committed suicide. Neither I nor my hospital colleagues knew him, but according to the story we heard, he was the father of young children, was respected by doctors and patients alike and had struggled [...]

[aboutlawsuits - blog] A new study has found that the combined costs of medical malpractice and so-called defensive medicine make up only 2.4% of the total costs of health care in the United States. 
The study was conducted by researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health and was published in the September issue of the journal [...]

[The Hill]  A group of bipartisan senators this week introduced legislation to entice drug makers to focus more intently on cures for uncommon children’s diseases.
Sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.), the Creating Hope Act aims to solve a nagging problem inherent to the market-driven world of pharmaceutical manufacturing: [...]