WATSONVILLE – For the greater part of 2008, Dr. Chris O’Grady closed his doors to new Medicare patients.
He was already caring for so many elderly patients in his Watsonville-based family practice that he was often going home at 10 p.m.
Medicare paid him far less than he considered fair – and now the government was threatening to cut the rates again.
Many of the county’s primary care doctors have struggled before reaching the same conclusion.
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Calif. Medical Board Launches Investigation Of Fertility Doctor Involved In Octuplet Pregnancy
The Medical Board of California is investigating the physician who provided fertility treatments that resulted in the birth of octuplets to a 33-year-old woman who has six other children between ages two and seven, the
reports. Board spokesperson Candis Cohen said that the board was looking into whether there was a “violation of the standard of care.” Read the rest of this entry »

-(Dow Jones)- U.S. federal regulators on Monday acknowledged it was
a mistake to “dis-invite” a leading cardiologist to a panel that was deciding
whether to recommend approval for a controversial anti-clotting drug made by
Eli
Lilly & Co.
(LLY).
Dr. Sanjay Kaul, a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in
, was scheduled to participate in a
Feb. 3
Prasugrel, an anti-clotting drug that has been linked
to dangerous internal bleeding.
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SANTA CRUZ — Carol Fuller was approaching 65 and in fine health.
The longtime Santa Cruz resident and former business owner had little reason to visit the doctor in previous years and relied mostly on annual visits to the gynecologist to catch anything wrong.
Just before her 65th birthday, Fuller was surprised to discover that in leaving her private medical insurance provider and becoming a Medicare recipient, she would need to find a primary Read the rest of this entry »

10:27 PM CST on Friday, January 30, 2009
New research by a UT Southwestern Medical Center physician calls into question whether health insurers are adequately performing one of their main functions: containing costs.
Dr. Ethan Halm, chief of internal medicine at UT Southwestern, found that private managed-care plans for Medicare do no better job of steering patients away from unnecessary surgeries than the traditional Read the rest of this entry »

Progress is made not by leaps and bounds, but by small steps on a clear path toward where we want to go.
While there is optimism that universal health care is coming soon under an Obama administration with a Democratically dominated House and Senate, we should not wait on that promise to make progress. Health care in the United States is a massive business, and while its goal is to deliver the best care to our population, it does remain a multibillion-dollar Read the rest of this entry »

Nearly two decades ago, when Abraham Verghese put his career as a physician on hold to try his hand at fiction, he knew he wanted to write an “epic medical novel.”
Beyond that, things were a little vague.
Verghese, an internist specializing in infectious disease who’s now on the faculty at Stanford’s medical school, spent the late 1980s in Johnson City, Tenn., ministering to the first wave of AIDS patients to surface there. Needing a break from Read the rest of this entry »

“People get shot sometimes and live with bullets in them for their whole lives,” said Dr. Carmon Glover, an emergency room physician at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Belleville. “It just depends on where the bullet winds up. It is certainly possible to not know you’ve been shot, especially if it’s a small-caliber bullet and the bullet lodges in an area that isn’t immediately critical.”
Glover did not treat Bunn after the home invasion Jan. 8 and is Read the rest of this entry »

Health is constantly in the news, but what do doctors on the frontline actually think?
This video diary is a weekly insight into the local and national issues affecting a busy GP practice.
This week, Dr Tom Coffey talks about the severe effects of food allergies he has seen working in A&E. He explains how to keep an eye out for them, especially in children.
The BBC diary doctors work at Brocklebank Health Centre in Wandsworth, London, which Read the rest of this entry »

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, October 26, 2008
Have you gotten your flu shot yet?
I’m scheduled to get mine tomorrow. But someone is urging me to reconsider.
The question is: Should you take medical advice from the same guy who treats your grub worms and powdery mildew?
Local organic gardening guru Howard Garrett calls himself “The Dirt Doctor.” But now he’s expanding his practice.
Last week, his e-mail newsletter gave no gardening advice, just Read the rest of this entry »