The ACLU is suing one of the country's largest Catholic health systems for failing to provide emergency abortions for women suffering life-threatening pregnancy complications. The civil rights group, which filed the lawsuit Thursday, Oct. 1, in U.S. District Court in Detroit, says Trinity Health, based in Livonia, violates federal law for "its repeated and systematic" refusal to provide women with "appropriate emergency abortions." "We're taking a stand to fight for pregnant women who are denied potentially life-saving care because doctors are forced to follow religious directives rather than best medical practices," Brooke Tucker, an ACLU of Michigan staff attorney, wrote in a statement.
It's been exactly one year since the CDC confirmed that Thomas Eric Duncan had Ebola. He had flown from Liberia to Dallas to visit his fiancé, and became the first person diagnosed with the deadly virus on American soil. During his stay at Texas Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, two nurses also fell ill with Ebola. Duncan died, but the nurses survived, as did a handful of Americans who fell ill in West Africa but were transported back to the United States for care. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and its spillover into the U.S., forced hospital officials to take a hard look at their readiness for a serious epidemic.
Medicine is slow to move, and that's especially true with breast cancer. Doctors are up against not only new data but also an accumulated mass of public opinion seeded by policymakers and advocacy groups with strong positions on how best to screen for and treat breast cancer. These measures were put into place for good reason, of course–because experts thought they would save lives. But they didn't–or at least not as many as anticipated. This year more than 40,000 women in the U.S. will die of breast cancer.
Family physicians are frustrated with gaps in training for treatment of opioid addiction, as well as lack of access for patients and barriers to prescribing, and they are taking that frustration to the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Congress of Delegates meeting here.
Helping patients communicate their symptoms clearly could go a long way toward making an accurate diagnosis, John Ely, MD, MPH, said at the annual meeting of the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine.
Injuries from accidents and violence cost the United States $671 billion in 2013, with men accounting for far more of those costs than women, federal health officials reported Wednesday. Fatal injuries cost $214 billion and nonfatal injuries cost $457 billion. The amounts include lifetime health and work loss costs for fatal and nonfatal injuries treated in hospitals and emergency departments, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Injuries cost Americans far too much money, suffering and preventable death," CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said in an agency news release. "The doubling of deaths by drug poisoning, including prescription drug overdose and heroin, is particularly alarming."