Synthetic marijuana — K2 and its chemical analogues — is the scary-new-drug du jour in Dallas, having sent somewhere close to 100 users to local emergency rooms in the past week. Even scarier: This represents a spike of only 50 percent. Baylor alone treats 70 fake-weed overdoses per month. Parkland…
Update: Associate District Judge Sheryl McFarlin ordered UGH to temporarily reinstate the doctors’ admitting privileges pending an April 30 hearing. Last month, an appeals court upheld a key provision of Texas’ new anti-abortion law requiring doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. A women’s health…
On Wednesday, the federal government released a massive trove of Medicare data showing how much some 880,000-plus U.S. healthcare providers were paid for their services in 2012. Fully mining the data will take months or years, but using the data to compile a list of the top Medicare billers took…
A significant chunk of America’s uninsured population lives in Texas, and a lot of those people live in the Dallas area. That’s partly because Texas refused to expand Medicaid, which has left a million-plus people too rich to qualify for government insurance but too poor to get subsidies to buy…
Last year, Governor Rick Perry called the Texas Legislature to Austin for two special sessions, both focused on passing one of the country’s most restrictive abortion laws. The new law, HB 2, put Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis on the map after an 11-hour filibuster. It also began to unravel…
Electronic cigarettes look like cigarettes. They supply nicotine like cigarettes. Users exhale a puffy cloud like cigarettes. So they must be cigarettes, right? According to the Frisco City Council, yes. On Tuesday night, its members voted unanimously to ban the use of e-cigarettes wherever traditional cigarettes are banned — i.e…
Local officials had a big celebration last month when a hospital in southern Dallas finally started offering forensic exams for rape victims. “Unfortunately, Dallas has a perceived — and maybe a real — impression that individuals from the southern sector don’t receive services like those in the north,” Dallas County…
The folly of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to opt out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has been well-documented. Billions in federal funds are off the table. More than a million poor adults won’t have access to health coverage. Texas businesses will wind up paying an estimated $400 million in tax…
KERA’s hour-long debate between the four Republican lieutenant-governor hopefuls was, as expected, a desperate scramble to the right. On issue after issue — evolution, abortion, immigration — the candidates studiously avoided any hint of moderation. Nowhere was that clearer than in their answers to the first question of the day:…
Update: On Sunday, Marlise Munoz was allowed to die. According to attorneys for her family, Fort Worth’s JPS Hospital removed Munoz, 23 weeks pregnant, from life support at about 11:30 a.m. Her body was released to her husband, Erick Munoz. The hospital had announced earlier in the day that it…
Mark Crutcher, the founder of Denton’s Life Dynamics, is famous for using clever (i.e. underhanded) strategies in his fight to end abortion. But his new venture, which debuted this weekend at Dallas’ March for Life, is quite direct. Dubbed Bikers for Life, the organization aims to use motorcycles to keep…
It’s flu season, a fact you’ve probably noticed if you’ve experienced a bout of achy, feverish misery, or if you’ve seen the equally feverish news reports on the mounting death toll in North Texas, which reached 21 yesterday. To put this all in context, we spoke with Dallas County Health…
This fall, as the growing stack of policy cancellations was giving the lie to Obama’s ill-considered “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” promise, newspaper editors across the country were simultaneously barking at reporters to dig up Obamacare horror stories, and fast. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s…
Erick Munoz wasn’t trying to set off a debate about abortion or end-of-life care. He just wanted to comply with the wishes of his wife, who is on life support at JPS Hospital in Fort Worth after suffering an apparent pulmonary embolism two days before Thanksgiving. But because his wife,…
At the request of Governor Rick Perry, the Texas Department of Insurance rolled out an additional set of requirements Obamacare “navigators” will be subject to. On top of the training and certification the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services mandates, TDI will require an additional 40 hours of continuing…
Placing tough new rules on abortion clinics is just common sense, according to common sense fanatic Rick Perry. He says that House Bill 2–the new law requiring all abortions to be performed in surgical centers, by a doctor with admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles — will ensure…
When the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and more than a dozen health care providers took Attorney General Greg Abbott to court in September to challenge Texas’ new anti-abortion law, they weren’t trying to tackle the entire law. Instead, they narrowed in on a few key provisions that were supposed to take…
James O’Keefe may be the motive force behind Project Veritas, the conservative nonprofit that has taken down ACORN, an NPR executive and now a handful of health-insurance navigators, but its latest undercover video sting wouldn’t have packed the same punch had it been him walking into the Urban League of…
As President Barack Obama was praising Obamacare volunteers at Dallas’ Temple Emanu-El last week, conservative activist James O’Keefe was plotting a visit of his own. O’Keefe, whose video stings have successfully taken down the community group ACORN and an NPR executive, had members of his Project Veritas team visit local…
The electronic cigarette is either a) a near-miraculous smoking-cessation tool that has enabled untold thousands of smokers to ditch tobacco or b) a rapidly growing menace to public health. Or, it could be both. Researchers aren’t really sure and won’t be until they can study the long-term health effects of…
Unless Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit gets in the way, Texas’ new abortion restrictions will require all abortion providers to become ambulatory surgical centers by September 1, 2014 or close their doors. But state regulators seem to be even tougher on abortion clinics than for your typical ASC. Until recently, it hasn’t…
Here’s the good news for customers of Dallas-based USP Labs. Its dietary supplements are no longer linked to fatal heart attacks. The FDA made sure of that this summer when it made the company destroy $8 million worth of product containing dimethlyamylamine, or DMAA, a compound that had been linked…
