Wellpoint Insurance has paired up with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York to use the IBM Watson supercomputer to help physicians working with cancer patients.

It's routine practice for drug companies to lavish gifts, lunches, research grants, samples, discounts, contributions, club memberships and more to physicians in order to sway them to prescribe their products and speak on their behalf.

A new report just published in the Archives of Surgery says that one out of every six US surgeons has a drinking problem.  Medical negligence due to physician alcohol abuse is a growing concern, according to new report. 

Every year, close to 100,000 drug-induced hospital-stays take place across the United States among those 65 or older. Recent research that took place at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta found that there were four main types of drugs that had caused two-thirds of those medication-related hospitalizations.

A recent study proving that niacin doesn't help prevent heart attacks and strokes actually rips the facade off one of the biggest medical rackets in the world -- statin drugs.

It's been a bad month for the lucrative health-screening-test industry. Those of us who have been poked, prodded, scraped, and radiated to get our annual tests may be somewhat dismayed to discover that all the money and time spent may have been for naught -- or to be kind, very little.

A recent study that took place at Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel, found that lab coats, scrubs, and other articles of medical clothing were more often than not contaminated by various types of bacteria, including the potentially deadly MRSA. The researchers tested the garments worn by 60 doctors and 75 registered nurses on duty and discovered illness-causing bacteria on more than 60 percent of them.

Whatever you do, laugh. One recent study has found that laughing literally opens the blood vessels. A second study found that laughing and music lower blood pressure significantly -- and the benefit continues for months.

It is the expected norm within the medical community that women -- especially those over 40 or with a family history of breast cancer -- should get their annual mammography without fail.  But how effective of a tool is it in actually saving lives? According to a recent study by an international team of researchers at various European institutions, the answer is that it's not especially effective.  Breast cancer screening was not shown to have a major impact on the reduction of breast cancer mortality in the recent past.  While the mortality rates from breast cancer have certainly gone down in most developed countries in the last two decades, it would seem that the lower numbers might not be attributable to mammography.