-
Hospitals that receive federal funds would have to advise rape victims of the availability of emergency contraception (EC) to prevent pregnancy under bipartisan legislation that has been introduced into the U.S. House.
-
If youre a physician and you have ever (or often) misrepresented patients symptoms to make sure their treatment and your services are covered by insurance, youre not alone.
-
Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the United States is legal only in Oregon, but the palliative care practice of terminal sedation is viewed by some as accomplishing the same thing as PAS, only without the stigma and illegality associated with intentional euthanasia.
-
The use of opioids for pain relief is limited by what some have called opiophobia, or the fear that patients will become addicted to the drugs. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has spelled out a means of addressing the drawbacks to opioid therapy and reducing the fear of prescribing opioids.
-
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) found its sweeping new ethics changes were proving a hard pill for its employees to swallow. As a result, they supplemented it with proposals that respond to actual and threatened resignations by some of the key NIH employees who say the new regulation, which requires employees to divest themselves of outside consulting and investments with pharmaceutical and biotech industries, is too restrictive.
-
Illinois has become the first state to enact legislation based on the idea that an apology might serve as the most effective means to stop some medical malpractice lawsuits.
-
A convicted murderer who sought a reprieve so he could donate his liver to his ill sister was executed in May after Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniel was advised by doctors that Gregory Scott Johnson was not a good candidate to be a donor, and that his sister, Debra Otis, would likely receive a donor organ through regular channels within a matter of months. Johnsons bid to become an organ donor resurrected debate about the ethics of accepting organs from condemned inmates.
-
Accepted clinical therapies developed from embryonic stem cell research may be years away, but now is the time for health care providers to ask themselves where they stand on the use of treatments derived from human embryos.
-
With the plethora of continuing medical education (CME) resources available to most physicians in the United States many of them free or paid for by employers it would appear that falsely reporting CME credits would be a pointless risk.
-
Although the prevalence of defensive medicine unnecessary tests, referrals, treatments, or avoidance of some patients altogether out of fear of malpractice litigation has been the subject of debate, a new study reports hundreds of physicians in Pennsylvania say they practice defensive medicine regularly.
