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Some Still Won’t Sell It: Do You Know If Plan B Is Available In Your Area?

emergency contraception, plan b, morning after pill, women's health, reporting on healthNow that the latest controversial decision over federal “morning after” pill restrictions has faded from the headlines, it’s worth following up on this question: how available is emergency contraception right now in your own community?

To recap: last week, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled her own science advisors in a decision preventing the “morning after” contraceptive pill Plan B from being sold over the counter at drugstores and to girls under 17 without a prescription. The election-season decision, largely regarded as highly political, could be reviewed by a federal judge after a legal challenge by a pro-choice group.

Of course, Plan B has been controversial ever since it was first approved by the FDA in 1999 (you can see Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Reporting on Health - Barbara Feder Ostrov's Health Journalism Blog*

The Surprising Life Saving Advantage Of Facebook

“Health is social,” says SPM member Phil Baumann, RN (@PhilBaumann) at HealthIsSocial.com.

Slate has a dramatic story of how a mother’s Facebook network helped spot – rapidly – Kawasaki Disease, a rare auto-immune disease that the family’s doctors had initially missed.

Her social network contains some medically knowledgeable people. (Do you have any docs, nurses, etc in your Facebook circle?) Note that friends’ availability is sometimes far greater than a doctor’s office.

Read how the diagnosis unfolded. And read what her family physician said, when she called from the E.R.:

“You know what?” he said, “I was actually just thinking it could be Kawasaki disease. Makes total sense. Bravo, Facebook.”

Then this, as the crisis wound down: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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