Health News

Colorado becomes the second state to allow psychedelic therapy this week after two years of rulemaking

Another raw pet food led to the death of a cat in Oregon, officials say.

Jimmy Carter spent nearly two years in hospice care before his death.

A new year brings new goals

The FDA plans to collect 300 samples from warehouses and distribution centers.

Carter strove to help nearly eliminate Guinea worm disease, and more.

The CDC estimates there have been over 1,500 deaths from flu so far this year.

ABC News' Dr. Neil C. Bhavsar joins Live to give tips on how to prevent a New Years Eve hangover.

The latest government data shows that cases of a fast-spreading stomach bug are surging in parts of the United States

Dr. Alok Patel discusses the benefits of taking a digital detox, including boosting your attention span, bettering your mental health and strengthening your relationships.

Even with abortion bans in place in most Republican-controlled states, the number of people obtaining them has grown slightly

If you’re planning on ringing in the new year quietly at home, you’re not alone

It is unclear what type of fungus the eye drops are contaminated with.

More than 90 norovirus outbreaks were reported the week of Dec. 5.

A genetic analysis suggests the bird flu virus mutated inside a Louisiana patient who contracted the first severe case of the illness in the United States

Health officials are warning pet owners not to give their cats raw food after a house cat in Oregon died of bird flu.

Sierra Leone's brutal civil war from 1991-2002 created about 28,000 amputees

This is a MedPage Today story. This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Anthony Olson wanted a career, children, a partner with whom he could hike Montana's trails. Despite the diabetes diagnosis at age 4, the anemia, the kidney transplant that failed at age 29, the dialysis, he clung to those dreams. He attended community college and later moved from his parents' house in Helena to study accounting at Montana Tech in Butte. He thought he might live a nearly normal life. All of that was taken away in early 2011 when an oncologist at St. Peter's, Helena's only hospital, diagnosed him with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a blood disorder that's often described as pre-leukemia. The life expectancy of MDS patients is short. "He told me that without treatment, I'd be dead before the end of the year," Olson said. He was 33. "That...

Oregon authorities say a house cat died after eating raw frozen pet food that tested positive for bird flu

Here’s how to stay safe during the holiday season.

This is a MedPage Today story. A western New York health insurance provider for seniors and the CEO of its medical analytics arm have agreed to pay a total of up to $100 million to settle Justice Department allegations of fraudulent billing for health conditions that were exaggerated or didn't exist. Independent Health Association of Buffalo, which operates two Medicare Advantage plans, will pay up to $98 million. Betsy Gaffney, CEO of medical records review company DxID, will pay $2 million, according to the settlement agreement. Neither admitted wrongdoing. "Today's result sends a clear message to the Medicare Advantage community that the United States will take appropriate action against those who knowingly submit inflated claims for reimbursement," Michael Granston, a Department of Justice (DOJ) deputy assistant attorney general, said in announcing the settlement on December 20. Frank Sava, a spokesperson for Independent Health, said in a statement: "The assertions by the DOJ...

Dr. Neil Bhavsar, an ABC News Medical Unit fellow and emergency medicine resident at New York Presbyterian Hospital, discusses the best ways to stay healthy during the holidays.

This is a MedPage Today story. The federal Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) fielded a massive influx of claims due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). CICP received approximately 27 times more claims in response to the COVID pandemic than it had received in the whole first decade of the program, which began in 2009 -- a total of 13,333 claims compared to just 491. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which runs the CICP, had made a decision on 3,483 of those claims, or 25%, as of June of this year. Of the decided claims, 92 (3%) were found eligible to receive compensation for a serious injury or death directly caused by a covered countermeasure. Fifty-two of these were due to COVID countermeasures, 37 due to the H1N1 vaccine, and three due to smallpox and anthrax countermeasures. To encourage the development of vaccines and drugs against pandemic illness and other serious...

This is a MedPage Today story. Ohio doctor Frederick Tanzer, MD, has been indicted on federal charges related to a rape case from 1989. (KCTV) A family sued Amazon One Medical alleging a 45-year-old patient died after a telehealth visit with the company. He reported being short of breath, coughing up blood, and having his feet turn blue, but was reportedly prescribed an inhaler. He allegedly collapsed and died later that day. (Washington Post) A court awarded $66 million to the family of a woman who died due to complications of plastic surgery. (CBS Chicago) California oncologist Lauren Pinter-Brown, MD, was awarded nearly $4 million in attorney fees in a discrimination and wrongful termination case against the Regents of the University of California, according to a press release from attorneys. In May, a jury had awarded her $14 million in the case. New Hampshire physician Thomas Marks, MD, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a patient and will spend 8 months in jail....

President Joe Biden has signed the annual defense authorization bill into law despite his objections to language banning transgender health care for military children

This is a MedPage Today story. Some doctors had a sleepless night when the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology's (ABPN) online certification program locked them out earlier than the expected deadline -- leading some to believe they would lose their board certification. Physicians were working on their quizzes to maintain board certification late on the evening of Saturday, Dec. 14, when the online tool shut down -- ahead of the expected deadline of 11:59 p.m. Central Time on Sunday, Dec. 15. "I almost had a heart attack thinking that I would no longer be board certified," one physician told MedPage Today. "I was laying in bed at 4 a.m. with chest pain. I thought I was either going to have a heart attack or a panic attack." By the morning of Dec. 15, some physicians had taken to social media channels, posting that they had been locked out of the test early, according to messages shared with MedPage Today. ABPN posted a message on its website on Sunday noting that there...

This is a MedPage Today story. This story is part of a series called "Ozempic: Weighing the Risks and Benefits." It was produced in part through a grant from the NIHCM Foundation. This is a sidebar to a story on how bariatric surgeons are being put out of work as a result of the rise in GLP-1 drugs. For the main story, click here. Sandra Sio weighed 300 pounds and couldn't diet it away. For years she tried with no luck. The 35-year-old San Diego-area dental office manager and single mother of two said she went to her doctor in 2022 asking for bariatric surgery. She wanted the extra pounds gone. Instead, he convinced her to try injections of semaglutide (Wegovy), one of the newer GLP-1 receptor agonists prescribed for weight loss that have received so much media attention and praise for their ability to suppress appetite and slow digestion. But the weekly injections didn't work for her. "I was just very nauseous and sick. I would wake up nauseous and go to bed nauseous and be...

This is a MedPage Today story. This story is part of a series called "Ozempic: Weighing the Risks and Benefits." It was produced in part through a grant from the NIHCM Foundation. Since she lost her job this summer as a bariatric surgeon, Lana Nelson, DO, has a phone message that tells callers, "I'm probably out on the trails" hiking near Grand Junction, Colorado. For 19 years until this fall, Nelson worked at the Norman Regional Health System's "Journey Clinic," a large weight-loss surgery program 15 miles south of Oklahoma City. For the last 12, she was its medical director. The 324-bed hospital system's two or three surgeons provided weight-loss surgery to more than 750 patients in each of the 2 years before COVID, she told MedPage Today. She did more than half of those herself. But the hospital was having financial woes, and caseloads dropped during the pandemic. Instead of bouncing back, they dropped to 387 in 2023. The chief reason: Many surgery candidates were trying the...

There were major breakthroughs in drug development and disease treatment.

The battles over abortion in the U.S. are increasingly focusing on the pills that are now the most common way pregnancies are ended

Kelley Kitley, a licensed clinical social worker and author, joins ABC News Live to discuss the benefits of participating in “dry January.”

This is a MedPage Today story. Many of President-elect Donald Trump's candidates for federal health agencies have promoted policies and goals that put them at odds with one another or with Trump's choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., setting the stage for internal friction over public health initiatives. The picks hold different views on matters such as limits on abortion, the safety of childhood vaccines, the COVID-19 response, and the use of weight-loss medications. The divide pits Trump picks who adhere to more traditional and orthodox science, such as the long-held, scientifically supported findings that vaccines are safe, against often unsubstantiated views advanced by Kennedy and other selections who have claimed vaccines are linked with autism. The Trump transition team and the designated nominees mentioned in this article did not respond to requests for comment. It's a potential "team of opponents" at the government's...

Emergency medicine physician Dr. Neil Bhavsar outlines the steps you should take to protect yourself and your loved ones from illness this holiday season.

Renowned spiritual leader Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar discusses the benefits of meditation in alleviating loneliness, stress and depression.

This is a MedPage Today story. This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. In states with abortion bans, ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections, and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were "products of conception" still in their bodies. These are the very kinds of cases state maternal mortality review committees are supposed to delve into, determining why they happened and how to stop them from happening again. But panels in states that have recently imposed strict bans on abortion have done little to uncover whether the laws are contributing to maternal deaths, including tracking delays in care for pregnancy complications and making these problems known, a ProPublica investigation shows. In fact, we found that in a few states, political leaders who backed...

This is a MedPage Today story. It seems simple: Require hospitals and insurers to post their negotiated prices for most healthcare services and -- bingo -- competition follows, yielding lower costs for consumers. But nearly 4 years after the first Trump administration's regulations forced hospitals to post massive amounts of pricing information online, the effect on patients' costs is unclear. And while President Joe Biden added requirements to make pricing information more user-friendly, Donald Trump's imminent return to the White House has raised questions about what's next, even though posting prices is an area of rare bipartisan agreement. The uncertainty of what might happen next led some proponents to lobby Congress to include hospital and insurer price transparency in must-pass legislation before Trump takes office. That would turn both his and Biden's regulations into law, making them less susceptible to being weakened or repealed by a future administration. But that...

The CDC says there is not an unusually high number of outbreaks this year.

This is a MedPage Today story. The ex-wife of a Los Angeles doctor who was murdered in an ambush outside his office has been arrested for the crime along with four other suspects. (People) A 20-year-old student is suing multiple California healthcare providers and hospitals alleging she was wrongly diagnosed with gender dysphoria and "fast-tracked" to puberty blockers, sex hormones, and surgery. (NBC News) A man sued Hartgrove Hospital in Chicago, alleging he was sexually assaulted at the behavioral health facility as a young boy. (ABC Chicago) A federal judge in Texas has dismissed a lawsuit accusing a hospital of allowing unlicensed foreign physicians to perform surgeries. (Becker's Hospital Review) Pennsylvania doctor Kenneth Fox, DO, was charged with illegally distributing buprenorphine/naloxone (Suboxone) from a basement office after being fired from Jefferson Health. (6ABC Action News) A school nurse in Florida was arrested for allegedly having an inappropriate...