By CAROL SMITH P-I REPORTER Liz Browning nudged open the unlocked door of her son's Capitol Hill apartment and recoiled at the floor blanketed with garbage -- drifts of unopened bills, mounds of cigarette butts, rotting food and feces. RELATED ST

ANGOLA, La. — Ted "Animal" Durbin expected prison life to be about brawls and knife fights — not changing adult diapers or bathing grown men. Four times a week, Durbin, 51, who's serving 140 years for armed robbery at Louisiana State Penitentiary, meets with frail, dying inmates at the prison's Treatment Center. He bathes them, provides other personal care and often ...

Toddler Dafi Evans owes his life to nothing more than a blob of glue. Using a revolutionary technique hours after his birth, doctors used Histoacryl - similar to superglue - to plug a leak in his brain that would otherwise have killed him in a few days. He was suffering from Vein of Galen malformation, in which missing capillaries between arteries ...

MIAMI - Newly minted nurse Katie O'Bryan was determined to stay at her first job at least a year, even if she did leave the hospital every day wanting to quit. She lasted nine months. The stress of trying to keep her patients from getting much worse as they waited, sometimes for 12 hours, in an overwhelmed Dallas emergency room was ...

HARTFORD, Conn. — Florence Wald, a former Yale nursing dean whose interest in compassionate care led her to launch the first U.S. hospice program, has died. She was 91. Her daughter, Shari Vogler, said Saturday that Wald died Nov. 8 of natural causes at her Branford home. A hospice volunteer was by her side to the end, Vogler said. Wald was ...

The state of Tennessee later this year will begin issuing specialty license plates in honor of nurses, but nurses first must choose a final design for the tags...

CHICAGO – Nadya Suleman's daunting future of raising octuplets into adulthood may best be understood by the exhausted but proud parents of other multiples and the researchers who study them. And if there's anyone who could give Suleman some frank advice, it's a mom with five toddlers. "There's a lot of hype for the first few months and everybody is interested ...

As nurses held her legs aloft and a doctor prepared to catch the baby, Noelle groaned in time with her contractions. All that was missing was the screaming. "In real deliveries, we have family members screaming," said Dana Dugan, a registered nurse at St. Vincent Healthcare. Dugan was among nurses who were introduced Monday to Noelle, a robot that simulates giving ...

File this one under cool -- stem cells cure blindness While electronic eyeballs may eventually be a solution to restore sight for the visually impaired, or even to enhance vision for those with normal eyesight, they still are very crude and may have a long way to go. In a classic race between electronics and biotechnology, it appears that biotechnology may ...

SUNNYSIDE -- It's been seven years since Anne Pasicaran came to Sunnyside Community Hospital from the Philippines to help stem the nursing shortage. She's still here. The registered nurse owns a big home on Sunnyside's South Hill with her husband, Roy, an engineer. They have a son, Riley, who attends preschool. She and her husband became U.S. citizens in May. "I ...

A video posted on YouTube showing Philippine doctors laughing while removing an object from a patient may lead to charges against the surgeons and cost them their medical licenses, officials said Wednesday. The unauthorized nearly 3-minute video of a

Trying to outsmart our circadian rhythms may have grim health results: obesity, cancer, mental illness and gastrointestinal problems. AT 6 a.m., the hospital's bright hallway lights flicker on, signaling the start of a new day. Doctors in crisp busines

Jeanne Deibert knew as soon as she saw the ultrasound. It didn’t matter that the doctor told her that what looked on the screen like pockets in her son’s brain would likely disappear as he got closer to birth. That things were probably fine. That s

LOS ANGELES — A former boyfriend of the woman who gave birth to octuplets last month says he could be the father of her 14 children, and he wants DNA tests. Denis Beaudoin told ABC television Monday that he donated sperm to Nadya Suleman during their three-year relationship in the late '90s because she claimed to have ovarian cancer and had ...

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has thrown a bouquet at the nurses of America. Hosting the first-ever virtual Town Hall at the White House, Obama called nurses the backbone of the country's health care system and suggested they are unappreciated. He said that at a time when his daughter Sasha had a serious medical issue, nurses rather than physicians were doing ...

ATLANTA – The medical arsenal against the flu just got weaker. Government health officials said Friday that a leading flu medicine, Tamiflu, might not work against all cases of the flu this year. The most common flu bug right now is overwhelmingly resistant to Tamiflu, they said. The alert is "an early heads-up" for doctors. If current trends continue, they may ...

LOS ANGELES – Circumcision not only protects against HIV in heterosexual men, but it also helps prevent two other sexually transmitted infections, a large new study found. Circumcised males reduced their risk of infection with HPV, or human papillomavirus, by 35 percent and herpes by 28 percent. However, researchers found circumcision had no effect on the transmission of syphilis. Landmark studies ...

“The association has managed so far to escape the wrath of MoveOn.org and other Democratic apparatchiks by muting its opposition to their beloved public option–the proposed government-run health care plan–and joining a coalition of industry groups pledging to cut $80 billion in health care costs over the next decade. The president has been touting these savings as if they have been ...

LONDON - A Polish woman who gave birth on the London Underground says she was turned away from a hospital less than an hour before going into labor on the train. The Mail on Sunday reported Julita Kowalska, 26, became the first woman in 84 years to give birth on the subway system when her daughter Jennifer was born at Kingsbury ...

Wireless technology is giving emergency-room doctors a look at a patient's heart condition before arrival by ambulance, saving crucial minutes in Pasquotank and Camden counties. Last week, Pasquotank-Camden Emergency Medical Services began using new defibrillators and laptop computers with wireless capability that allows a heartbeat chart to be sent immediately to the hospital. Emergency-room doctors can order cardiac catheterization treatment to ...