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A nurse checks in on a 72-year-old patient recovering from pneumonia and, after checking her vital signs, asks if theres anything the patient needs. Instead of asking for water or a snack, the patient replies, Will you pray with me? What is the appropriate answer?
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Patients who participate in clinical trials not only have access to newer, experimental treatments, they also have access to more routine medical checkups and state-of-the-art technologies. Yet for many women, participation in medical research studies is still not an option.
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Expansions in public health insurance programs are designed to offer a safety net to vulnerable Americans unable to obtain basic health insurance and regular access to medical care.
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Studies of terminally ill patients indicate that a small number of them want the option of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) or other means of controlling the manner in which they die. Yet with PAS legal in only one state, most will not have that option.
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Rather than age or severity of illness, the strongest determinants of the withdrawal of ventilation in critically ill patients are often the physicians perception that the patient preferred not to use life support or had a low chance of survival in the intensive care unit, a recent study1 by the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group and the Level of Care Study Investigators has found.
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Several leading medical and science journals fail to enforce their own policies for disclosing financial conflicts of interest among contributing authors, according to a study released July 12 by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).
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Mississippi attorney Richard Scruggs has targeted not-for-profit hospitals in his latest class action effort, accusing them of overcharging uninsured patients and using harassment to collect overdue bills.
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On Dec. 17, the American Hospital Association (AHA) announced it would provide guidelines for hospitals on billing and collection practices to ensure that poor patients and patients who lack health insurance are treated in a fair-and-balanced manner.
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Public health officials should carefully evaluate the reasons for low rates of participation of health care workers in Phase 1 of the federal Smallpox Preparedness Plan before expanding the vaccination campaign if they hope to preserve the publics trust in vaccination campaigns as a viable public health measure, a group of ethicists from the University of Pennsylvania warn.
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African-American and low-income U.S. residents are more likely to die from cancer, less likely to be insured, and less likely to have usual sources of health care than white and higher-income Americans, recent reports from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services indicate.
