HowStuffWorks Newsletter
Taking care of your health involves choosing a doctor and understanding how to best get the care you need. This section will help you deal with these issues and provide some fun and shocking facts about the medical field.
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Battles won — and lost — against AIDS hold valuable lessons for managing COVID-19.
Who do you call when there's a new disease outbreak? An epidemiologist. These disease detectives investigate the who, what, why, when and where of disease epidemics worldwide.
Medicare supplement plans, or Medigap, covers costs that Medicare doesn't. But there are a lot of things to beware off before you buy one.
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Doctors' waiting rooms often have signs that a fee will be charged for no-shows or late arrivals. So, should patients ask doctors for reimbursement when they have to wait a long time?
By Alia Hoyt
The intent of Right to Try is to make the process of obtaining last-ditch, potentially life-saving drugs easier for terminally ill patients by avoiding FDA strictures altogether.
By Carrie Tatro
The FDA already has a program that does almost exactly the same thing for patients, but is anyone aware of it?
By Carrie Tatro
Hospice is too often seen as a last resort — a sign that someone has given up on life. But it can actually be a very life-affirming service, an end to suffering and sometimes even a health improvement.
By Alia Hoyt
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A huge number of clinical trials — many of which are testing life-saving drugs — languish due to low participation levels. Why is that, and what can be done?
By Alia Hoyt
A series of papers showed that overuse and underuse of medical care is a global health crisis. Here's how to address it.
By Alia Hoyt
The American Academy of Pediatrics is supporting doctors who refuse to treat children whose parents won't have them vaccinated. Good move?
By Alia Hoyt
Although several states have proposed legal action banning the question, only Florida has actually passed a controversial law addressing the issue.
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Despite a much-loved article that said doctors died in hospitals less frequently than their patients, new research shows no difference.
Docs are no different from the rest of us — they bring their unconscious biases into the workplace. But is there a way to lessen the impact of these biases on patients?
By Alia Hoyt
If Florence Nightingale illustrates the illustrious history of nurses, who will represent the future? That man or woman will have an entire new health care world to inhabit.
Family medicine isn't just for kids and their parents. The idea is that a physician sticks with you from birth to death, treating your whole body throughout your whole life. And it's changing with the times.
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Working in health care is inherently stressful, but some jobs have higher rates of worker burnout than others. Would you rather provide nursing care or work in a hospital billing department?
With Americans living longer, a wealth of new, innovative jobs in the health care field will be coming online. Some are already in play. Anyone want to be a medical roboticist or genetic counselor?
When you pack a lot of people with infections into one place, sometimes even more occur. Here are 10 that are keeping hospitals really busy.
These 10 hospitals have the best doctors and facilities in the United States. See what makes Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic and others the best hospitals
By Mara Betsch
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As professions go, nursing is pretty new -- and in the mid-19th century, anyone who served as a caregiver could be considered a nurse. But today, training and certification helps set the different types apart.
Whether in the hospital or a variety of other health care settings, nurses are at the frontlines to ensure that patient needs are being met.
Nurses perform critical duties under high pressure as part of a day's work. What parts of a job with lives on the line can be called the most challenging?
Nursing is a valuable and vital profession, but it's not for the faint of heart. And once you put aside the TV stereotypes, you'll find there's a lot more to the field than just wearing white.
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Since the late 1990s, it's largely been an accepted fact that the U.S. is dealing with a nursing shortage. And even with an infusion of workers during the recession, demand continues to outpace the supply. But why?
Before the end of the 19th century, most nurses didn't have any formal training. It wasn't until the extraordinary women and men on our list pioneered a path for nurses from bedpan to bachelor's degree that the seeds of modern nursing were born.