[newswise] Growing up poor can suppress a child’s genetic potential to excel cognitively even before the age of 2, according to research from psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin.
Half of the gains that wealthier children show on tests of mental ability between 10 months and 2 years of age can be attributed to [...]

[NYT] The Obama administration, reversing course, will revise a Medicare regulation to delete references to end-of-life planning as part of the annual physical examinations covered under the new health care law, administration officials said Tuesday.  The move is an abrupt shift, coming just days after the new policy took effect on Jan. 1.

Many doctors and [...]

[WSJ] Christopher G. Wayne doesn’t look like a typical family-practice doctor. Known to admirers as the “Rock Doc,” he wears his hair spiked, punk style, and festoons himself with chains, bangles and leather bracelets.
He uses his upscale Miami Beach home as a production studio for Playboy photo spreads, and his MySpace page shows him posing [...]

[WSJ] California has purchased a large supply of a drug used in executions from a British pharmaceutical company, according to a spokeswoman with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The state ordered the drug before the U.K. last month said it planned to limits exports of the drug, thiopental sodium, because of the U.K.’s “moral [...]

[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 [...]

[HinduStandTimes] Indian scientists are more likely to cheat when reporting scientific results than scientists from other countries, says a new study in the US — a view endorsed by independent reviews. “India does have the lowest (worst) E/F [error to fraud] ratio,” said R. Grant Steen, the US-based consultant who carried out the study, published in [...]

[Reuters] – Most people who have used direct-to-consumer genetic tests bought them to improve their health and say they found the tests easy to interpret, but some do not fully understand their results, U.S. researchers said on Friday.
A team led by David Kaufman of Johns Hopkins University did a random online survey of 1,048 people [...]

[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 [...]

[NPR] ROBERT SIEGEL, host:  In 1978, the phrase in-vitro fertilization was something the experts said.�The rest of the world spoke of test-tube babies. Newspaper columnists and editorial writers invoked Aldous Huxley’s image of baby hatcheries in his dystopian novel “Brave New World.”
Jeffrey Kahn directs the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School. [...]

[NYTimes] Growing up in California’s rural Central Valley, the two cousins spent summers racing dirt bikes and Christmases at their grandmother’s on the coast. Endowed with a similar brash charm, they bought each other matching hardhats and sought iron-working jobs together. They shared a love for the rush that comes with hanging steel at dizzying [...]