Digital communications are playing a larger role in health care, but transparency and equity are being forgotten.

Being a surrogate decision-maker for someone at the end of life isn’t easy, but there are steps you can take to ease the burden. 

As Congress debates cuts to Medicaid (the health insurance program for the poor and disabled) in order to deliver a tax cut to the wealthy, it risks a cascade of negative effects on our entire health care system.

We spend lots of time figuring out at what age to start screening for cancer. But when do we stop screening?

You can easily order genetic tests online, but should you?

Can artificial intelligence, based on machine learning, predict more accurately the care a loved one would want at the end of life compared to next of kin?

The thinking goes that testing before elective surgery can reduce risks and complications.  But, it turns out it may do the opposite.

Touch during a visit to the doctor has many benefits, but it can also negatively impact the provider-patient relationship.

While video offers some advantages to patients and providers, it also has some significant downsides.

There are several reasons for the increasing use of medical imaging tests buy they may not always benefit the patient

When is it simply avarice to profit at the expense of public health?

USAID is a powerhouse of humanitarianism and global security

First comes the disaster. What follows is predictable, but equally worrisome.

Should prisoners be allowed to donate organs in exchange for a reduced sentence?

Changes are needed to ready ourselves to treat new emerging infections

For good reason, other than the US, only one other country in the world allows drugs to be advertised directly to the public.

Small acts of kindness make a huge difference to patients and families

Good quality turns out to be complicated and unrelated to reimbursement rates

While properly ordered blood tests can help enormously with diagnosis, too often, blood tests are ordered without good reason.

Is there value in getting a second opinion?  What happens when the two opinions differ from each other?

A look at some of the topics we covered throughout the past year.

Statistics can be intimidating.  But before you decide to begin a treatment you should ask what the expected benefit will be to you.

These four words may not mean the same thing to all people

Too often the use of expensive and risky technologies catch on before we have good data suggesting benefit.

When a person is a victim of systemic injustice does that constitute a medical diagnosis?

The state of California is about to take on pharmaceutical companies by producing safe, effective, FDA approved insulin.

For over 100 years we’ve had a similar approach to understanding Alzheimer’s disease which hasn’t produced many benefits. Perhaps it’s time to cast the net more broadly?

In medical care job specifications are often blurred and a focus on the person can get lost

Until we know more, it makes sense to avoid microplastics as much as possible

Using participatory science to examine local air quality.

Unnecessary medical testing often leads to a “care cascade” that results in real harm and sky-high costs.

Often medicine gets hooked on using simple tools of measurement only to discover, after they have become entrenched, that they don’t measure what they are supposed to measure. 

It’s hard to tell, but we have no way to know for sure. 

Big polluters are not just cars and power plants - they include the American health care system.

Remote monitoring devices are now capable of tracking our health behaviors including the pills we consume, the food we eat, and the step we take.  Is this an advance in health care?

Nationally, emergency departments have become the latest battle ground around issues related to abortion.

A very large preliminary study suggests that there may be some health benefits to regularly drinking black tea.

Soil is something that often gets ignored as we think broadly about health.

It turns out that even what we chose for breakfast can have a biological origin.

The new legislation offers some major successes, but with regard to drug pricing it is not close to what it could have been.

AI is increasingly being used to collect and process clinical information. Whether this is a good thing depends on who you ask.

We currently have no good communication systems to assure that those at risk for serious inherited diseases are informed of their risk.

It turns out that much of what we’ve been told about antidepressants is wrong or misleading.  The prevailing thinking has led to huge sales with little evidence of effectiveness.

Video recordings in the OR have a chance to improve quality but they also open a can of worms.