Medical Treatments

A husband and wife who are doctors have been working on fact boxes for drugs that, like nutrition labels for foods, would more concisely convey a medicine's benefits and risks.

Making health decisions based on the odds can be an extremely difficult thing to do when you're a patient, even for people who study the science of how we make decisions.

Service members are prescribed narcotic painkillers three times as often as civilians. For some vets, dependence on those pills becomes a bigger problem than their original ailment.

Federal officials have announced that a young Mississippi girl, once thought to have been cured of HIV, now once again has detectable levels of the virus.

Two California counties and the city of Chicago, hard hit by OxyContin addiction, are suing the drug's manufacturers. Reporter Emily Green says they're charging that the drug-makers have contributed to an epidemic of prescription drug abuse.

Los Algodones is tiny, but with help from the Internet, the Mexican border town has become a virtual dental factory, drawing patients from across the U.S. and Canada.

Scientists used high-powered DNA sequencing to diagnose infections missed by usual lab tests. The pricey method is still experimental, but might offer a way to identify tough-to-diagnose infections.

The federal Medicare program for the elderly and disabled will cover two new drugs that can cure hepatitis C, a liver disease that can cause cancer and lead to death. The drugs are very expensive, but they cure hepatitis C in most cases. The government and insurers are concerned about these costs; three million Americans have hepatitis C, most of whom don't know they have it.

Nearly every state has a prescription drug monitoring program that's meant to end abuse of opioids and other powerful pain medicines. But many of these programs have a big loophole: they're voluntary.

"If smallpox is outlawed, only outlaws will have smallpox," says one NIH virologist. Others say keeping vials of deadly virus just invites a horrific accident or theft. WHO is about to vote — again.