If you are a middle-aged African-American or Asian woman, your social class may play a significant role in how likely you are to suffer bone fractures, according to a new study by researchers at UCLA.
Month: April 2014
For the first time since 1992, United States officials are strengthening rules to protect farmworkers across the nation from pesticide poisoning.
I interviewed the top finance official at a large Southern California hospital a few weeks ago. She said she was skeptical of the Affordable Care Act. “We need to keep in mind,” she said, “that we do already have the best medical system in the world.” Is this true, I wondered?
A new study from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) finds that urban gardeners often don’t know that the soil they’re using for their gardens can contain contaminants such as asbestos.
The buildup of soft plaque in coronary arteries is more common and extensive in HIV-infected men than in men not infected by the virus, according to a new study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Soft plaque ruptures more commonly than hardened plaque and is therefore a serious risk for heart attacks.
Even as lawmakers in Washington D.C. drove themselves into a bitter partisan divide over federal health reform in 2010, an unusual experiment across the country in Oregon was amassing evidence that the rancorous debate in Congress was focused on many of the wrong things.
And if what Oregon’s experience is telling us now is accurate, the Affordable Care Act will be neither the boon to America’s health that its supporters claim nor the threat that its detractors fear it will be.
Why? Because expanding access to health insurance and even health care — the primary goal of the ACA — might not make us healthier, at least not in the the short term and not in the ways most people seem to believe.
Many young immigrants in California don’t realize that they may be eligible for health coverage, even if they don’t have legal status. But even if they are aware, there’s another hurdle — the cost of the application. As Natalie Jones reports, the fee to apply for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival status is $465 per person.
While medical schools graduate a lot of students who have been trained in family medicine, most new doctors eventually choose to practice as specialists in fields like radiology, anesthesiology, and dermatology. That gap has helped create a shortage of primary care physicians, in California and nationally. One Sacramento program is using community connections to build more interest in family medicine.
When Misao Okawa recently blew out her 116th candle, she also nabbed the bragging rights as the oldest person in the world. She, like the previous world’s oldest person, who died last year at 116, is of Japanese descent.
At Kendall Hollinger’s school, the classroom and cafeteria are adjacent, and there are no students slamming locker doors and yelling “Wait up!” to a group of friends. That’s because the 17-year-old has been home-hospital schooled since kindergarten, owing to severe and potentially deadly allergies.