For over 20 years, the state of Indiana hoarded the blood of newborns without their parents' consent. If your child was born in Indiana after 1991, chances are his or her blood sample is one of an estimated 2.5-million specimens currently stored in a warehouse, the location of which state officials have not disclosed. » 7/19/14 6:17pm Saturday 6:17pm

The number of people suffering from kidney stones has grown over the past thirty years, and a new study shows it's likely to get worse. Here's why. » 7/10/14 8:28pm 7/10/14 8:28pm

While everyone was busy with Facebook fights over the safety of childhood vaccines (GET IT TOGETHER, AMERICA), they've become vastly more expensive. Costs have leapt so high many doctors are struggling to offer them, leaving some parents scrambling for someone to perform this most basic of preventative measures. » 7/03/14 12:30pm 7/03/14 12:30pm

A new law waiting to be signed into law by Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal would require that pregnant and brain dead women be kept on life support, regardless of the stated wishes of her family. If the pro-life crowd is trying to disprove accusations that they only care about women to the extent that they are… » 6/13/14 3:50pm 6/13/14 3:50pm

If you believed the internet, you'd think there's huge debate over whether eggs, coffee, or salt are good or bad for you. In reality, there's significant agreement on diet and health issues among experts, but the general public is conflicted. So why are we so confused when experts agree? Let's clear the air. » 5/07/14 2:59pm 5/07/14 2:59pm

Here's a very handy rap delivered to a little girl, teaching her what she needs to do to make sure she takes care of her cast. » 4/16/14 11:20am 4/16/14 11:20am

Police in Arkansas have issued an arrest warrant for an OBGYN who they say took nude photographs of a woman during a medical exam without her consent. » 4/15/14 11:00pm 4/15/14 11:00pm

You know those "articles" that your barista and your old coworker's boyfriend and your weird Kansas cousin are always posting all over their Facebook feeds, revealing shocking and outlandish "secrets" that such-and-such establishment doesn't want you to know about? And they're always from "news" websites you've never… » 3/20/14 6:30pm 3/20/14 6:30pm

In the annals of Victorian medical history, few foes receive as much bile as the corset, which physicians claimed contributed to miscarriages, cancer, and slow, crushing deaths. But while there are some health problems that can be linked to corsets, they aren't nearly the instruments of medical terror that they're… » 3/17/14 3:38pm 3/17/14 3:38pm

The recent announcement by a British medical ethics board in favor of an experimental three-parent IVF treatment—wherein the genetic material from three donors, not the usual two, is used to create a fetus—and has once again stirred the pot of reproductive controversy. So where exactly is the line between prenatal… » 3/16/14 4:45pm 3/16/14 4:45pm

After a baby born last year with HIV was deemed potentially HIV-free, there was much cause for celebration. Now doctors are even more stoked because a second child born with HIV has been treated and found to have cleared the virus. » 3/06/14 10:00am 3/06/14 10:00am

Recently a group of midwives published a paper about birth outcomes for home births, which seemed to indicate home birth is as safe as hospital birth. A skeptic blog got a statistics professor to analyze the paper, and came up with very different results. Check them both out! » 2/26/14 3:09pm 2/26/14 3:09pm

Healthy living isn't easy. For some, it comes naturally, but for those folks who are already overweight—large enough that it's difficult or even painful to do what thinner people can do—it's even tougher to get started. Here are some tips to help. » 2/12/14 10:09pm 2/12/14 10:09pm

Here's a little anecdote that shows how hard it is to get accurate data on risk. Just to keep things spicy, the "risk" involved is the likelihood of dying from a fatal heart attack during sex. It's more complicated than it seems. » 1/12/14 5:30pm 1/12/14 5:30pm

Here for spreading far and wide is a graphical reminder of the important distinction between correlation and causation. » 1/05/14 8:00pm 1/05/14 8:00pm

Don't worry, emotional overeaters; your future is bright, sort of. Thanks to a collaborative study between the Microsoft Research Institute and the University of Rochester, a new, emotional-stress-detecting bra and mobile app duo may soon be giving your already fragile emotional state the extra guilt it needs to… » 12/05/13 10:57pm 12/05/13 10:57pm

Going to the gyno is enough of a pain in the cervix without the fear that the doctor between your legs is snapping pictures without your knowledge. But, for 9,000 ex-patients of deceased Johns Hopkins gynecologist Dr. Nikita Levy, that seemingly irrational fear may actually have been warranted. Bleargh. » 11/06/13 7:15pm 11/06/13 7:15pm

Bet you didn't have this marked on your calendar: today is World Vasectomy Day, a holiday celebrated not with parades or fireworks, but with the delicate snip of two tiny tubes. But is such a largely permanent step really our only male birth control option? Where's the male version of the pill? » 10/18/13 4:59pm 10/18/13 4:59pm

As anyone who's ever seen an episode of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman can tell you, women make better doctors than men — and not just the lady doctors of the late -1800s American West, but the lady doctors of today, too! I know, I can hardly believe it myself, but a new report released by the University of Montreal… » 10/18/13 11:10am 10/18/13 11:10am

Thanks to the efforts of conservatives who got elected based on lying to the electorate about knowing how to do stuff like "create jobs" and "fix the economy" (LOL), it's been a generation since getting an abortion was this big a pain in the ass — albeit not as big a pain in the ass as carrying a pregnancy for 9… » 10/10/13 2:10pm 10/10/13 2:10pm