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For several years, Medicare’s Hospital Compare initiative has published quality measures for hospitals. While the data are intended to help patients make better decisions, some experts have noted that the public nature of the information might also help spur lower-performing hospitals to shape up, improving the quality of care.

A number of prescription and nonprescription creams are marketed as giving you lush beautiful eyelashes. At least one is actually FDA approved. Leslie Yazel on Lunch Break looks at the research as well as the pros and cons.

Read the original here:  Creams That Promise Beautiful Eyelashes/a>

It’s awfully hard for patients to participate in decisions about their medical care if they don’t know all their options.

But that’s exactly what seems to be happening, at least with many Medicare patients who received a stent procedure for coronary disease or prostate surgery for cancer, according to a new study.

The research, published online by the Journal of General Internal Medicine, surveyed 685 patients who had prostate-cancer surgery and 472 who had stents for coronary disease about their decision-making process.

If you developed a seriously painful toothache, would you head to the emergency room to get it taken care of?

In an ideal world, probably not. But lacking access to regular care from a dentist, an estimated 830,590 Americans sought help for their dental ailments in the E.R. in 2009, according to a report released yesterday from the Pew Center on the States.

A new study suggests that people who take sleeping pills are more likely to die within a couple of years than those who don’t, though it doesn’t prove that the pills caused people to die before they otherwise would have — and outside experts say patients shouldn’t panic and toss their medications.

The study is published in BMJ Open, an open-access online journal. (Here’s its open peer-review policy.)

There’s an ongoing quest to figure out how to get more people to take their medications as directed, a particular issue for those with chronic diseases that don’t have symptoms.

The results of one such effort, to improve adherence among people taking osteoporosis drugs, have just been published online by the Archives of Internal Medicine, and they only underline how difficult the effort can be.

Stem-Cell Discovery: Research published in Nature Medicine suggests a way to take stem cells from a woman’s ovary and convert them into normal immature eggs that appear to be viable, the WSJ reports. While scientists say the development, if borne out, offers a potential research avenue for fertility treatments, they also caution that many obstacles remain.

The CFIDS Association of America says that $2 million in funding — backed by individual gifts including a $250,000 donation from best-selling writer Laura Hillenbrand, who has chronic fatigue syndrome– is going to grants and projects designed to accelerate the development of treatments for CFS.

One of the new projects: an attempt at so-called drug repurposing, when already-approved drugs for one indication are tried in a different disease.