Health, Fitness & Medical News

Dining at some restaurants will be a new experience starting today, when California becomes the first state to require that chain restaurants supply calorie counts for virtually everything they serve.

A once-prominent Sacramento obstetrician with a criminal past could face new discipline from the state medical board, which has accused him of improperly handling controlled substances.

Three years ago, San Francisco turned itself into a laboratory for remaking the country's health care system with a bold experiment to expand services to the uninsured, working poor and medically underserved.

California lawmakers are looking at requiring prescriptions for popular over-the-counter cold and allergy medications that contain pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in the illicit manufacture of meth.

The poor economy has caused many nurses to put retirement plans on hold, but when finances re-align, the subsequent anticipated exodus could lead to fresh shortages in the profession.

Grim-faced and subdued, two mothers and a father gathered in a hospital meeting room on Monday to thank everyone who helped their badly burned children escape from a day care fire and reach relative safety in Sacramento.

Health care advocates worry that thousands of college and high school seniors are graduating this year into the ranks of the medically uninsured, further burdening a system already under stress.

Two more children badly burned in the Mexican day care center fire were expected to arrive late Sunday in Sacramento for treatment, while the two already hospitalized here remain in critical condition.

The number of registered nurses in California grew by more than 9,500 last year and many thousands more are enrolled in nursing programs that state officials hope will continue to ease the chronic shortage.

For Mitch Ball, breakfast is a dizzying array of medication and cans of high-protein liquid formula, poured or pumped into his stomach through a tube.

Nearly a million Californians, perhaps hundreds of thousands more, cross the border to Mexico every year because they cannot afford the rising cost of health care in the United States, according to UCLA researchers.

People visit loved ones at cemeteries on Memorial Day weekend, bringing flowers for the built-in vases and adding some water. Standing water. You know what that means.

Needles don't faze 16-year old Lucas Myers.

Spending two hours daily flat on your back in a hyperbaric chamber is no one's idea of a good time.

Every time an elite athlete dies suddenly from heart failure while competing, disbelief and concern are the dominant reactions.

As Davis High School cross-country and track distance runners, Charlotte ter Haar and Hilary Teaford are used to competing in races, not organizing them.

If you have questions about the practices of your managed-care coverage, ask the experts at the state Department of Managed Health Care.

Everybody gets so jittery about the caffeine content of coffee. So they forgo their cup o' Joe and often substitute some other libation they believe won't give them the caffeine shakes.

If you're like many Americans these days, chances are you'd like to slim down and improve your health.

A pack of cyclists rolled out of the parking lot of the Folsom coffee shop just after 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday, primed for a 40-mile ride promising high speeds and burning lungs.

LIVERMORE – State workplace safety officials and leading home builders and contractors are turning to a different kind of tool – the Web – to counter the growing nail gun injury problem in California's construction trade.

1. Pick a firing system suited for your job. Avoid a contact trip nail gun if you're mostly firing single shots. If space is too tight for a big nail gun, use a hammer.

With a 2 1/2-inch nail deep in his chest, construction worker Manuel Murillo slid into a pickup truck, bracing himself for a desperate seven-mile drive down a snowy Sierra road.

For Scotty DuPriest, the safety and risk manager for Sacramento-based general contractor Otto Construction Inc., it was a puzzling problem. His company had cut its work accidents overall, yet 11 workers had suffered nail gun injuries over three years, ranging from minor puncture wounds to more serious damage.

Once touted by retailers as the nail gun that built the West, the Hitachi NR83A framing nail gun has been implicated in more serious workplace injuries reported in California than any other brand or model.

April 1987: University of British Columbia medical researchers John Le Nobel and Peter Wing identified 1,977 nail gun injuries between 1973-1982 from claims filed with British Columbia's Workers Compensation Board. They investigated 32 cases where men shot nails into their knees, reporting their findings and expressing concerns in Clinical Orthpaedics. A third were hurt during their first week using the tool. The researchers called for more training and "stricter regulation," recommending: "a triggering method that would permit only single firing of nails, rather than a rapid succession, would improve safety."