California voters appear ready to further scale back the state’s extensive prison system 20 years after they passed the controversial three strikes law, which sentences third-time felons to 25 years to life. Proposition 47, also known as...
I write about health and health care, but even I'm not immune to the "young and invincible" mentality. My annual dental checkup is more than six months overdue. A provision of the Affordable Care Act that took effect in 2010 aimed to make it...
Everyone knows what it’s like to be afraid. A snake slithers unexpectedly across the path ahead, and your body automatically responds. You spring backward should it strike. Your heart pounds, muscles tense, breath quickens. You begin to...
New York City is using a $400,000 federal grant to review suicides and acts of self-harm in city jails with an approach commonly applied when things go wrong in the medical and aviation industries, officials said Tuesday. The review — dubbed the...
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, around 1 in 4 adults in the US experience some form of mental illness in any given year. Approximately 1 in 17 adults live with a severe mental illness, such as major depression,...
Young sexual minority women, including those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), were found to have higher elevated odds of adverse health conditions than heterosexual young women and lower odds of receiving a physical or...
When construction started on Heritage Park Senior Village here in mid-October, it marked the end of 55 years of effort by the federal government to make sure low-income elders can live out their years in decent housing. The development getting...
My first sight of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Artesia, New Mexico reminded me of stories I heard from Japanese Americans who as children were held in internment camps. FLETC is entirely comprised of trailers. The...
Ed. Note: Unless Congress acts, federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which matches state dollars to provide health coverage for children under 19 in low-income families, will end next year. Ed Walz is...
Translating from one language to another is a tricky business, and when it comes to interpreting between a doctor and patient, the stakes are even higher. Consider the story of 18-year-old baseball player Willie Ramirez . In 1980, Ramirez...
Last night the mental health and substance abuse advocacy communities celebrated the merger of two organizations -- the National Council for Behavioral Health and the State Associations of Addiction Services -- at the Meridian House in Washington,...
Not long after Marcia Stanton stumbled across the original article from the CDC’s Adverse Childhood Experiences Study , she heard a conference presentation by Dr. Vincent Felitti, one of the study’s co-authors. She invited Felitti to...
At the Long Beach community health clinic where I’m a pediatrician, I’ve learned that the way you ask questions can be more powerful than any medication. For example, we saw a child who was struggling with her vision and clearly...
Obese children and teenagers already show hints of future cardiovascular problems, new research has found. German researchers studied 61 overweight and obese children 8-to 21-years-old, comparing them with 40 non-obese children of the same age. All...
Because of the well-known dangers of open defecation — especially for children’s health — bringing millions of latrines to the poor has long been a goal of public health experts. But now a major study in India has stunned advocates...