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SPOKANE, Wash. -- Phillip A. Paul in 1987 was declared criminally insane for killing an elderly woman after voices in his head told him she was a witch. Instead of being straitjacketed and locked away as might be depicted by film or fiction, Paul in the past two decades has spent time living and working in downtown Spokane, fathered a child, ...

4-month-old Alex Lange, who measures 25-inches long and weighs 17 pounds, is bringing a frown to the hypothetical face of insurance company Rocky Mountain Health Plans, The Denver Post reported on its Web site Monday.

Many MRI patients are injected with a GE dye to enhance images. If they have weak kidneys, they might develop a rare and sometimes fatal disease Editor's Note: Gerth is a reporter with ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism organization in New York. For more on GE and MRI drugs, go to http://www.propublica.org. In May 2006 medical regulators in Denmark issued a warning ...

Nursing may be a labor of love, but it is also a profession in which some additional education and training can go a long way toward taking your job title -- and salary -- to the next level. Here are seven top-paying jobs in the profession, covering a range of positions and requiring various degrees and certifications, with salary data from ...

WASHINGTON - In its assaults on a Democratic health care overhaul bill, the insurance industry uses facts selectively and mixes accurate assertions with misleading spin and an embrace of worst-case scenarios. Take the 30-second TV spot that America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's trade group, was running this week in six states as the Senate Finance Committee approved overhaul legislation. With ...

  Only after a patient complained in August about losing some hair following a CT scan did Cedars-Sinai Medical Center realize more than 200 people had been exposed to excessive radiation from diagnostic tests performed there in the last year and a half. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where more than 200 patients were exposed patients to excess radiation during ...

Tinkering with a complicated piece of machinery's default settings can be risky. Consider the situation at Cedars Sinai Medical Center. The plan was to improve stroke diagnoses, but adjustments to the CT scanner's settings resulted in more than 200 radiation overdoses. A hospital spokesman said about 40 percent of the patients lost patches of hair as a result. Hospital officials said ...

WASHINGTON -- Supporters of President Barack Obama's drive to remake health care are pushing back against a dire report from the insurance industry warning of hefty new costs for consumers from the latest legislation.   "I really don't think it's worth the paper it's written on," AARP Executive Vice President John Rother told reporters Monday. "If anyone believes it, that's a ...

When a mammogram detected a lump in Barbara Laufer's breast, the fear was paralyzing. "You think you're going to die," says Laufer, 40, of Burbank, Calif. Laufer was diagnosed with a perplexing condition called ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS, a growth of malignant cells inside the milk ducts of the breast. Though some doctors describe the condition to patients as ...

 After three recent teens suicides, two teens at a local high school have started selling t-shirts that say "talk to me," and I am just thrilled because these teens found a way to tell the adults around them that they need more communication! 

 A $10-million grant to Nabi Pharmaceuticals of Rockville, Md., from the National Institute on Drug Abuse will fund a Phase 3 clinical trial of a new vaccine designed to prevent relapses among smokers -- the final step before the vaccine can be approved for general use. It is the first large trial of an anti-smoking vaccine.

Oct. 12- Five years ago, Sandy Steppig noticed a tremor in her left foot. No big deal. Except it didn't go away. "I had a suspicion," said Sandy, 56, a registered nurse at O'Fallon Family Medicine. Her mother-in-law had Parkinson's disease. So had some of her home-care patients who, depending on the severity of the degenerative nerve disease, had trouble walking, ...

WASHINGTON - The health insurance industry is warning that a comprehensive Senate bill would increase the cost of a typical policy by hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars a year after lawmakers eased up on the requirement that all Americans get coverage. The stinging attack came on the eve of a pivotal Senate vote and was a clear message to President ...

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina is poised to become only the second state to impose a fat fee on its state employees by placing them in a more expensive health insurance plan if they're obese. Smokers will feel the drag of higher costs, too, as North Carolina state employees who use tobacco are slated to pay more for health insurance next ...

Seven years ago, after a scathing series of stories in The Dallas Morning News, the Texas Medical Board promised to crack down on bad doctors. Patient endangerment would be dealt with severely. And sexual misconduct, one official said, would become "intolerable." It hasn't turned out that way.

Formal retention programs for the novice nurse are needed in healthcare organizations to successfully retain novice nurses.   The term mentoring is often confused with the term preceptor. Mentoring is a powerful effective tool that has potential to support individuals.  Mentoring programs along with preceptor programs are important for novice nurses within a healthcare organization. Often, mentoring programs leave out vital ...

WASHINGTON -- In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips' M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn't work either. When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and ...

Orthopedic surgeons who received payments from device makers often failed to follow disclosure policies required by their chief professional society, researchers said. Nearly 30 percent payments to surgeons serving as board and committee members of the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS), and to presenters at its 2008 annual meeting, went unreported, according to Dr. Kanu Okike, of Harvard University. ...

Women who take the most common fertility drugs, progesterone and clomiphene, are at a greater risk to develop thyroid cancer than those who don't, according to a study by the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Society. The 36-year study, which tracked thousands of women, discovered that women who took fertility drugs developed thyroid cancer at an increased rate over those ...