Backers Of Cost-Free Coverage For Birth Control Fault Legal Challenges
You know all those lawsuits now pending around the country charging that the Obama administration’s rule requiring most health insurance plans to offer no-cost contraception is a violation of religious freedom? Well, a whole bunch of supporters of the rule are chiming in now to say that argument has no legal merit. The dozen new [...]
Keep Kids Away From Laundry Detergent Packs
Something that looks good enough to eat can sometimes turns out to be a really big mistake. Take those small, brightly colored single-use packs of laundry detergent that are becoming popular. To a curious toddler or small child, they look like candy. But once inside childrens’ mouths, the tempting packs can burst, releasing a concentrated [...]
MIT Builds A Needle-Free Drug Injector
The needle and syringe are icons of modern medicine. But a device developed at MIT to squirt medicines quickly and pretty much painlessly through the skin suggests that the future of medicine could be needle-free. The idea is to shoot an extremely thin, extremely fast jet of medicine straight through skin and into muscle. “It’s [...]
Need A Nurse? You May Have To Wait
Nurses are the backbone of the hospital — just ask pretty much any doctor or patient. But a new poll conducted NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health finds 34 percent of patients hospitalized for at least one night in the past year said “nurses weren’t available when needed [...]
What’s Up, Doc? When Your Doctor Rushes Like The Road Runner
To physician Larry Shore of My Health Medical Group in San Francisco, it’s no surprise that patients give doctors low marks for time and attention. “There’s some data to suggest that the average patient gets to speak for between 12 and 15 seconds before the physician interrupts them,” Shore says. “And that makes you feel [...]
Doctors Look Likely To Resist Change On PSA Tests
Forgive me, if you’re suffering from PSA policy fatigue. But there are a few more things I thought you might want to know about the new guideline from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that says men of all ages should forgo routine blood tests to detect prostate cancer. Research from Johns Hopkins suggests the [...]
Call For Emergency Action On Polio Eradication
The drive to wipe polio from the face of the earth is in jeopardy. Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan are the only three countries left where poliovirus remains endemic. But work to put the paralyzing virus on the ropes there is in danger of failing. Cases in all three countries jumped last year. Weak public health [...]
By Putting Patients First, Hospital Tries To Make Care More Personal
No one likes to go to the hospital. But some hospitals around the nation are trying to make their patients’ stays a little less unpleasant. They’re members of an organization called Planetree, which was founded by a patient named Angelica Thieriot, who had a not-so-good hospital experience back in the 1970s. “She herself became very [...]
Will Men And Their Doctors Change Course On PSA Tests?
The dust is nowhere near settled over advice that men of all ages should forgo a routine blood test to detect prostate cancer. The harms, such as false alarms and unnecessary surgeries that leave some men impotent and incontinent, outweigh the benefits of the PSA test, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. So [...]
Compensating Organ Donors Becomes ‘Talk Of The Nation’
When we first kicked around the idea of asking people to share their opinions about compensating organ donors, it was pretty clear that we were on to something. Everybody in the newsroom seemed to have a strong feeling about it. Our NPR-Thomson Reuters Health Poll found that about 60 percent of Americans would support modest [...]
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