Over this past week, I had some interesting conversations with colleagues who are also health care professionals. These conversations usually start with, "You know what I hate about the media ... ?" Now, over the past eight years, I have grown accustomed to being engaged in these sort of discussions where I am asked about everything the "media" have reported over the past few months, and asked to defend things point by point. It can be a challenging task. ...

Swine flu arrived in Macon County, Alabama, last week, showing up in classrooms at all levels and leaving a spate of empty desks in its wake. But authorities are battling the virus on its own turf, using vacant seats as both a map and compass to stem the tide. When the virus entered the United States last April, the Centers for Disease Control issued test kits to physicians around the country to record confirmed cases. But by late July, ...

Relatives of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of President Kennedy, were summoned Monday to a hospital on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a source close to the family told CNN. "It's minute to minute right now," the source said. Shriver, 88, founder of the Special Olympics, has been in the hospital for several days, her family said, and her relatives were summoned after she suffered a setback, the source said. Some members of the family flew in to Cape Cod Hospital last ...

Felipe Massa has been woken successfully three times to make contact with his family, one of the surgeons who operated on the Brazilian Formula One star told CNN on Monday, after a horror crash in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix left the driver needing surgery on a fractured skull. Peter Bazso, the medical director of the AEK hospital in Budapest, confirmed that Massa's injuries had been "life-threatening" after he careered off the Hungaroring at 200kph in his Ferrari, but ...

John Reid, a retired businessman, came home from a Caribbean cruise a few years ago with an infected toe as a souvenir. As a diabetic, he knew it was serious, so he went to the emergency room near his home in New York City. There, he says, the first doctor he saw ordered an immediate amputation, scheduling him for surgery right then and there. Horrified, he argued with the doctor, insisting there had to be a way to avoid ...

Elizabeth Taylor, contrary to a New York tabloid report, was not hospitalized because of her grief over her friend Michael Jackson's death, according to her publicist. Taylor, 77, was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital last week for scheduled testing, which the legendary actress herself announced in an online message posted on Twitter.com. "Although my grief over Michael could not be any deeper, I am not on suicide watch as some of the cheaper 'rags' would have you believe," Taylor ...

One of the results of the ethnic unrest in China's far-western city of Urumqi last Sunday is how difficult it will be to heal the wounds. On both sides of town you have people who suffered and who are still suffering -- whether they are Han Chinese or Uyghurs. I visited the Xinjiang People's Hospital on Wednesday with about 200 other representatives from the local and international media. From July 5, soon after the outbreak of the unrest, to about ...

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off ...

A nine-year-old girl has died in Britain from the H1N1 virus, commonly known as swine flu, as authorities reported a jump in the number of cases in the country. The girl is the third person in the UK to die from swine flu, doctors at a children's hospital in Birmingham, England said Monday. A spokeswoman for the hospital said in a statement: "We can sadly confirm that a child died at Birmingham Children's Hospital on Friday evening. "The ...

Iran's government will allow a demonstration at Tehran's Ghoba mosque Sunday, CNN has confirmed. The gathering is officially meant to honor Mohammad Beheshti, a hero of the 1979 Islamic Revolution who was killed in a bombing on this date in 1981. The demonstration comes after two weeks of protests against the official results of the June 12 presidential elections, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won. A post on a Web site associated with opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi urged people to ...