After the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti, Dr. Melissa Barber received a call asking her to help treat people left injured and living in squalid conditions. “There was no question,” said Barber, 30, who was born and raised in the Bronx and worked in quality assessment at St. Barnabas... » read this article

Wage increases designed to equalize incomes in the public health sector were approved yesterday for Venezuelan doctors working in the country’s Ministry of Health. President Hugo Chavez made the announcement from the Municipal Theater in Caracas during an address celebrating Venezuela’s National Doctor’s Day.  The increases will be retroactive from... » read this article

Is depression manufactured? Two decades after the introduction of antidepressants, it’s become commonplace to assume that our sadness can be explained in terms of a disease called depression. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than 14 million Americans suffer from major depression every year and more than... » read this article

Dandelion Salad  ... » read this article

It’s difficult to understand a subject when those explaining it are motivated not by truth, but profit.   In the case of health care, both Democrats and Republicans have huge financial incentives to obscure, mislead, or lie. Instead of common sense and honesty directing the debate, bags of money facilitate the conversation,... » read this article

Take Action! By the time you read the next couple paragraphs the veil will be lifted from your eyes and you will finally understand what is really going on with the health care “debate”, which up to this point has been a total fraud on the American people. On the... » read this article

"A socialist solution to the crisis—taking the profit out of heath care—is excluded from the official debate, which is based instead on the premise that people's health should be subordinated to the accumulation of private wealth." 27 February 2010 Thursday’s televised health care summit in Washington ended without any agreement... » read this article

With the results of a medical study summarized by a new report delivered to the California state legislature, the California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research (CMCR) claims it has established scientific proof that inhaled cannabis holds medical value at or above the level of conventional prescription medicines used for a... » read this article

Scientists have deciphered the genetic blueprint of South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu and an indigenous Bushman from Namibia as part of an ambitious and controversial project to bring modern genomic medicine to the developing world. An international team of researchers decoded every gene of the Nobel Prize-winning anti-apartheid leader and... » read this article

More than a million spectators gathered before the Capitol on a frosty January afternoon to witness the inauguration of Barack Obama, who promised in his campaign to change Washington’s mercenary culture of lobbyists, special interest influence and backroom deals. But within a few months of being sworn in, the President... » read this article

WHO’s Pandemic Chief, Dr. Keiji Fukuda and pharmaceutical industry chief Dr Luc Hessel faced tough questions on WHO’s controversial decision to declare a pandemic emergency over the mild swine flu during a 2-hour public hearing at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg this morning in a heated session that ran... » read this article

The less you use your brain's frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses, a University of Texas at Austin researcher says. Those findings are being published in the February edition of the journal NeuroImage. "In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes,... » read this article

01/17/2010 PIH has been working on the ground in Haiti for over 20 years. We urgently need your support to help those affected by the recent earthquake. More About PIH In today’s earliest hours, Dr. Evan Lyon recounted his reactions to PIH staff in Boston. He spent his first twelve... » read this article

Scientists have once again found that people with higher levels of bisphenol A (BPA) in their urine are more likely to have heart disease than those with lower urinary BPA levels. Used to make some plastic drinks bottles and the inner coatings of food cans, BPA can mimic the effects... » read this article

ASUNCIÓN, Jan 6 (IPS) - "Did you have to pay for anything?" is the obligatory question these days in the waiting room at the Mother and Child Hospital in Fernando de la Mora, on the outskirts of the Paraguayan capital, where people still have doubts that the public health services... » read this article

The death threats keep coming this fine morning.  I guess the Tea Party crew is determined to have “death panels” one way or another.  The dustup started because of this cartoon: “Learn to Speak Tea Bag” ran on my usual client sites, including NPR, which really set off the guys... » read this article

Scientists have successfully tested a system that translates brain waves into speech, raising the prospect that people left mute by stroke, Lou Gehrig's disease and other afflictions will one day be able to communicate by synthetic voice. The system was tested on a 26-year-old man left paralyzed by a brain... » read this article

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago: “Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for... » read this article

Brinjal (eggplant, aubergine) is one of the most traditional vegetables in India and probably its land of origin. "Bt Brinjal, the first ever such Genetically Modified (GM) food crop anywhere in the world with the toxin-producing Bt gene in it." (Countercurrents, Devinder Sharma: India's GM Scandal: Bt Brinjal Approval Rigged)... » read this article

22 December 2009 A study by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), Northwestern University and the Chicago Tribune, published in the newspaper Sunday, found that health care lobbyists have spent more than $396 million this year to influence senators and congressmen engaged in passing the health care restructuring legislation, and... » read this article