In the 11th Report on Carcinogens, the US government added Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, and certain papilloma viruses to their list of substances known to be carcinogenic. This represented the first time ever that viruses were included. At the sixth annual International Conference of the American Association... Read more →

Who is to blame when patients die in overcrowded and understaffed emergency rooms? The story of the death of a psychiatric patient in a large Brooklyn, New York hospital got my attention, both as a nurse and as a human being. These stories are, thankfully, rare but still happen too frequently. In this... Read more →

The eighth leading cause of death in the U.S. is medication error. This statistic may surprise you. Other frightening statistics include the following: * 7,000 deaths occur each year that are directly attributable to medication errors. * Errors occur around 1 in 5 times that medication is administered. *... Read more →

The compilation and selling of physician prescribing habits has been a common practice since the 1990’s. Many physicians were unaware that the issue was occurring. Pharmaceutical companies argue that the mining of prescribing data has beneficial uses, such as providing information about drug interactions... Read more →

One of the biggest crises facing the United States today is healthcare. There are approximately 47 million people in the United States who have no medical insurance. Millions more have inadequate insurance coverage, cannot afford their premiums or deductibles, and have no access to dental care. In the... Read more →

The article I posted a few weeks ago in regards to the H5N1 vaccine caused me to consider a potential pandemic and the health care workers’ obligation to work should the event come to pass. The World Health Organization estimates that today a pandemic is likely to result in 2 to 7.4 million deaths... Read more →

A recent study from Harvard Medical School found that restrictive drug programs might cause schizophrenia patients to stop taking their meds. Nearly 80% of patients without antipsychotic medication will have a serious recurrence of their illness within a year. The study focused on Medicare beneficiaries... Read more →

As research has moved away from the realm of universities and into the private sector, more physicians are being paid by drug companies to enroll and monitor patients during clinical trials. Private corporations have been the largest sponsors of pharmaceutical research in both Canada and the United Sates... Read more →

Since the virus was first detected in Guangdong Province, China in 1996, H5N1 (Bird Flu) has received much attention as the fear of a global spread of the disease mounted. Initially, H5N1 was considered merely interesting; however, alarm bells began to ring when it spread through live-poultry markets... Read more →

In June of 2007, the American Medical Association’s Council on Ethics and Judicial Affairs stated, “RFID tags may promote the timely identification of patients and expedite access to their medical information. As a result, these devices can improve the continuity and coordination of care... Read more →

Perry Cross, a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic, traveled to India to receive daily injections of stem cells. He claims that, owing to the stem cell treatment, he is now able to breathe on his own for the first time since a rugby injury made him a quadriplegic 14 years ago. The breakthrough is likely... Read more →