Scott Hensley

The Komen Foundation for the Cure has a new chief executive.

Dr. Judith Salerno, 61, a geriatrician, is replacing Nancy Brinker, the philanthropy's founder and longtime CEO, the group said Monday.

"Judy's years of proven leadership in public policy and research make her the right choice to lead all aspects ...

This weekend the American Medical Association will kick off its annual exercise in medical democracy.

The group's House of Delegates will meet in Chicago to vote on resolutions that range from a demand that private insurers pay doctors at least as much as Medicare does to a call for federal ...

First, let's spoil this tale right away by telling you the 19-year-old man in Virginia who downed a quart of soy sauce on a dare survived.

It's a happy ending of sorts. But the guy had a close call. And you definitely don't want to try it.

While there's been ...

When it comes to profound depression, many people just can't get relief from current treatments.

Now there's more evidence that the anesthetic ketamine, sometimes abused as a club drug, has potential as a fast-acting treatment for the condition.

Doctors at the Mayo Clinic gave 10 patients ketamine twice a ...

Fallout from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation's controversial and short-lived decision to halt funding for Planned Parenthood projects appears to still be piling up.

The group is pulling the plug on three-day events featuring fundraising walks in Washington, D.C., and six other cities in 2014. The Washington ...

Some men have testosterone so low that it's a medical problem.

But how low is too low? And how many men really need a pharmaceutical version of the hormone to replace the testosterone that they might be missing?

Answering those questions isn't so easy. Testosterone levels can vary. And symptoms ...

Now a virus that has caused respiratory failure and 30 deaths has turned up in Italy.

The World Health Organization says lab tests have confirmed the infections in a 2-year-old girl and a 42-year-old woman with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, or MERS-CoV, as it's now called.

Both ...

If you've been following the news out of China about the latest bird flu and its threats to humans, may we direct your attention toward the Middle East for a minute?

A virus that many people had been calling a SARS-like virus because of the severe respiratory condition it has ...

Chinese doctors report they've seen signs that the bird flu virus infecting humans is able to overcome one of the few drugs used to fight it.

In a report published online Tuesday by The Lancet, doctors report on 14 patients infected with the H7N9 virus and admitted to the ...

There are two things you can always count on: public radio pledge drives and the local blood bank asking for a donation of a very different sort.

Both kinds of giving can fill you with a sense of goodwill. But, let's be honest, the tote bags help, too.

When it ...

When the diagnosis is cancer, the expenses can pile up in a hurry.

Even people with insurance can face steep copayments for drugs, a sizable share of hospital bills and significant incidentals. These side effects of cancer care are sometimes even called "financial toxicity."

So wouldn't it make sense for ...

On Wednesday's Morning Edition, David Greene talks with writer and breast cancer survivor Peggy Orenstein about actress Angelina Jolie's decision to have a double mastectomy to reduce her risk of breast cancer.

Jolie, whose mother died at 56 from ovarian cancer, has a genetic variant that puts her ...

To curb drunken driving, the federal National Transportation Safety Board has voted to recommend that states tighten the legal limit for drivers' blood alcohol.

The threshold now for drunken driving is a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08. (The BAC equals alcohol divided by the volume of blood it's in.)

Cervical cancer takes its greatest toll in the countries whose economies and health systems are poorest.

Women in those places are less likely than those in rich countries to get regular Pap tests to detect the cancers when it can be treated effectively.

Of the 275,000 women who die of ...

When it comes to health care, the biggest of the big data are all about Medicare.

So, it's kind of a BIG deal when the government releases what individual hospitals charge Medicare — and what they actually get paid — for the most common diagnoses and treatments.

In a first, ...

The ubiquitous blue-toned TV ads for Viagra look downright tame compared with Pfizer's latest gambit for the impotence remedy.

Pfizer is now selling the drug directly from the official Viagra website.

Men still need a prescription for the diamond-shaped blue pills. But instead of going to the pharmacy in ...

The men and women who often treat prostate cancer are now recommending that the blood test commonly used to screen for it should be given a lot less often.

The American Urological Association released new guidelines that, if they're heeded, would dramatically reduce the ranks of men who would ...

It may be time to change the benchmark for discussion of public health problems in the U.S.

For quite a while, the annual number of fatalities from auto accidents has been a kind of shorthand for health issues that are big and important.

Starting in 2009, though, suicides surpassed deaths ...

Public health authorities in Taiwan have identified the first human case of a new type of bird flu seen outside China.

The development, while not unexpected, points to the potential spread of a new type of bird flu that has, according to the World Health Organization, sickened at least ...

Even for a hardcore David Lynch fan, the idea that a film of his would be used to weird people out in a psychology experiment is a tad weird.

But it gets much stranger than that — fast.

Imagine the experiment involved testing whether Tylenol could help people overcome the ...