The widespread availability of naloxone, which reverses overdoses, has radically changed the culture of opioid use on the streets, giving drug users a sense of security and inducing them to seek out the more powerful high of the synthetic opioid fentanyl.
It’s never easy to tell a patient about a terminal illness, but a longtime doctor whose own diagnosis was botched says physicians must do better.
Supporters of the rule say it would strengthen health care professionals’ freedom of conscience, but opponents say it “empowers bad actors to be bad actors.”
Boomers are aging reluctantly but, for the most part, gracefully. Many even have found the secret to shaving a decade or more off their physical age.
Across the nation, public health departments are redirecting scarce resources to try to control the spread of measles. Their success relies on shoe-leather detective work that is one of the great untold costs of the measles resurgence.
Some Veterans Affairs hospitals around the country use writers to record patients’ life stories, then place a short biography in each vet’s medical record. The My Life, My Story program gives clinicians another way to get to know their patients.
Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health care policy stories each week, so you don’t have to.
The scientific use of tissue from aborted fetuses has frequently been a hot point of contention between anti-abortion forces and researchers. It heats up again as federal officials announced this week they were ending NIH research using the tissue.
The problem affects private drug policies and Medicare Advantage plans that provide both medical and drug coverage and substitute for traditional government-run Medicare. It could leave plan members without coverage.
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times, Joanne Kenen of Politico and Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss the Trump administration’s efforts to curtail federally funded research using fetal tissue, the backlash from former Vice President Joe Biden’s support for the anti-abortion Hyde Amendment and how health policy intersects with both trade and immigration policy.
