It just got a little easier to find health-care services closer to home.
On Thursday, the Ontario government launched two new initiatives to improve access to health care, and hopefully relieve stress on the province’s emergency rooms.
Health Care Connect aims to help people find a family health-care provider.
Dr. Mark Mensour, emergency department lead with the North Simcoe Muskoka Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), said the program aims Read the rest of this entry »

Investigators say 54 year old Marcus Blanchard of West Palm Beach had a dirty little secret. They say he was molesting a half dozen kids his girlfriend was supposed to be babysitting in her home.
She never got a county day care license, even though records show she was warned in the past she needed one.
“Any child care in this county requires a licensure. Even if you have just one child? Even one child,” said Courtney Shippey with the Palm Beach Read the rest of this entry »

MONDAY, Feb. 16 (HealthDay News) — People with a family history of melanoma are twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease, a new study finds.
While the reasons for this association are not clear, other studies have shown that people with Parkinson’s diseases are at greater risk for developing melanoma.
“For people with a family member with melanoma, they may be at risk for Parkinson’s disease,” said lead researcher Dr. Xiang Gao, an instructor Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program.
The data is in a report being released on Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank whose research is generally respected even by experts Read the rest of this entry »

MAYVILLE – Getting books from the doctor will soon be a routine part of well-child visits at Family Health Medical Services, as doctors and nurses welcome the Reach Out and Read program to the practice. Family Health Medical Services joins more than 3,797 programs nationally that are working to make books part of a healthy childhood.
Reach Out and Read is a simple, yet highly effective concept. The program targets children growing up in poverty Read the rest of this entry »

If you have ever gone to the emergency room in the middle of the night, had to see a doctor while in another city or state, or changed doctors in your life, you have no doubt been privy to the ominous clipboard with a stack of paper up to your chin and a pen almost out of ink in which to fill out the forms. As dreaded as that experience is, I know that a lot of the questions in the past have been left blank on my forms because I am not up to speed Read the rest of this entry »

STAMFORD — Family members and doctors for Charla Nash, the Stamford woman who was brutally mauled Monday by a 200-pound pet chimpanzee, thanked people Wednesday for supporting her and reported that she has made “some good, but small, progress.”
They spoke at a news conference at Stamford Hospital’s Tully Health Center on Strawberry Hill Court.
“While she remains in critical but stable condition, her vital signs are improving,” said Dr. Kevin Read the rest of this entry »

ITASCA, Ill. – The family of an 89-year-old woman who was
found dead in a snow bank outside the courtyard of the suburban
Chicago nursing home where she lived has filed a lawsuit against
the facility.
(eye-TAS’-kuh).
Wentworth’s daughters say she wasn’t able to leave her bed
without help and suffered from dementia. They want to know how
their mother left without the staff noticing.
Louis Cairo, the family’s attorney, says Wentworth was wearing
just Read the rest of this entry »

LYNCHBURG, Va. – The family in charge of the company that shipped salmonella-contaminated peanut products blamed for sickening hundreds of people claims that reports of filthy condition at the company’s shuttered Georgia plant are “exaggerated” and insists that the company broke no laws.
The Food and Drug Administration alleges that Peanut Corp. of America knowingly distributed peanut products from its plant in Blakely, Ga., that had tested Read the rest of this entry »

Medicine is a humbling profession. Just as you begin to feel good about the way you handled a patient’s concern or your perceived profound insight into a medical condition, something occurs that puts you in your place. So it was last Friday when my final patient of the day came to see me because of “a concern.” I had delivered her beautiful baby girl a number of months earlier. Apparently, over the past few weeks, she had been seeing a psychologist Read the rest of this entry »