ProPublica

(PROPUBLICA) – A few years ago I called a Las Vegas surgeon because I had hospital data showing which of his peers had high rates of surgical injuries – things like removing a healthy kidney , accidentally puncturing a young girl’s aorta during an appendectomy and (more…)

20 Sep (PROPUBLICA) – Judge Kurt Engelhardt’s decision overturning the convictions of five New Orleans police officers for their roles in the Danziger Bridge shootings runs to 129 pages.  Page by page, the decision addresses claims of prosecutorial misconduct, and i (more…)

3 Jul (PROPUBLICA) – On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that drug company GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay a $3 billion fine, the largest health care fraud fine in the history of the United States.  This fine is just the latest in a string of drug company penalties for improper promotion of drugs for “off-label,” or unapproved, uses. (more…)

3o April (PRO PUBLICA) – Medical devices sustain and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. But as the over $100 billion-a-year industry pushes thousands of devices to market every year, reports of faulty devices, repeat surgeries, and recalls (more…)

17 Apr – This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups.  One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course.  After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100 multiple-choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets. (more…)

The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared the overdoses from opioid drugs like OxyContin an “epidemic”.   And a growing group of experts doubts that they work for long-term pain.  But the pills continue to have an influential champion in the American Pain Foundation, which describes itself (more…)

1o Nov –  An agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that maintains a discipline and medical-malpractice database reopened it for public access yesterday, two months after the agency had first taken the database offline. (more…)

More than 700 doctors in California sanctioned for wrongdoing by hospitals and other health care organizations haven’t faced any disciplinary action from the California medical board. (more…)

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has called into question a key pillar of the FBI’s case against Bruce Ivins, the Army scientist accused of mailing the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people and terrorized Congress a decade ago. (more…)

Medical journals have long had to wrestle with the possibility that financial bias influences the work they publish, but if the growing controversy over Medtronic’s Infuse spinal product is any indication, they may not be doing enough. (more…)

Five senators are calling for an investigation into a system that gives surgeons a financial stake in the devices they use on their patients. The inquiry comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation of Dr. Vishal James Makker, a surgeon with a questionable track record for performing (more…)

FLORIDA – About a third of psychiatrists serving Florida’s juvenile jails and prescribing drugs to incarcerated youths have accepted payments from the drug companies [1] that manufacture antipsychotic medication (more…)

20 May | ProPublica – As we reported earlier this month, there are often deep financial ties [1] between professional medical societies and the drug and medical device industries. This week, other news outlets chimed in, detailing how (more…)

19 May | ProPublica – Stanford University has taken disciplinary action against five faculty members at its medical school after determining they violated school policy by giving paid promotional speeches for drug companies (more…)

16 May | ProPublica – The Transportation Security Administration says its full-body X-ray scanners are safe and that radiation from a scan is equivalent to what’s received in about two minutes of flying. The company that makes them says it’s safer than eating a banana. (more…)

13 May|ProPublica – A Pittsburgh hospital informed 141 patients earlier this year that they may have received unneeded angioplasties and stents, the tiny mesh tubes inserted to keep arteries open.  A Towson, Md., cardiologist faces a hearing on the fate of his medical license (more…)

10 May|ProPublica – Nursing homes are unnecessarily administering powerful antipsychotic drugs to many elderly residents, including residents with dementia, according to a new report by the Health and Human Services inspector general. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO — From the time they arrived to the moment they laid their heads on hotel pillows, the thousands of cardiologists attending this week’s Heart Rhythm Society conference have been bombarded with pitches for drugs and medical devices.  At night, a drug (more…)

7 Feb | ProPublica – A firm that specializes in HIV medications has become the eighth pharmaceutical company to disclose the payments it has made to U.S. health professionals for speaking and consulting. (more…)

13 Jan | ProPublica – We’ve reported extensively on the ties between pharmaceutical companies and the physicians they fund to speak, consult and do research. But doctors aren’t the only ones taking money from drug companies—and they’re not the only stakeholders in the (more…)

22 Dec – ProPublica has added another $13 million in payments to our Dollars for Docs database of drug-company spending on doctors and other health professionals. That brings the total to nearly $295 million. (more…)

14 Dec – Minnesota – Long before the rest of the country cared, Minnesota took aim at the pharmaceutical industry.  In 1993 it passed a novel law: If drug companies paid any of the state’s health providers to push their pills, the money had to be publicly reported. (more…)

Patients in Missouri face a double whammy of the state’s faulty oversight of dangerous doctors — Missouri law limits the state medical board’s authority to disciple them, and the board (more…)