Lisa Aliferis

It's now legal for doctors to prescribe lethal medications to terminally ill patients who want them. But many doctors say they feel queasy about it. Lonny Shavelson wants to help them with that.

A package of tobacco bills signed into state law this week aims to cut the use of tobacco and e-cigarettes by adolescents and young adults, proponents say. Military personnel can still buy at age 18.

An unusual medical education program at the University of California, Berkeley is known for producing primary care doctors, unlike other schools. But it could be axed due to budget shortfalls.

Terminally ill Californians will legally be able to get medicine from doctors to end their own lives. The end of the state's special legislative session Thursday made it official.

Just 1 percent of doctors are linked to nearly one-third of all paid malpractice claims, an analysis by researchers at Stanford finds. And the physicians who account for an outsize share of the claims have a set of distinctive characteristics.

The researchers said that the claim-prone physicians were disproportionately male ...

Maybe it was last January's big measles outbreak at Disneyland that scared more California parents into getting their kids vaccinated. Or maybe health campaigns have become more persuasive. Or maybe schools getting stricter about requiring shots for entry made a difference.

Whatever the reasons, childhood vaccination rates last fall went ...

Characters on television who consider or obtain abortions don't reflect the demographics of American women who choose them or their reasons for doing so, according to a recent analysis from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

The group looked at all depictions of abortion on U.S. ...

Sophie Sartain had long worked in documentary filmmaking as a writer and editor. For her first film as a director, she turned the camera on her own family.

Starting in 2009, she began filming her grandmother Mimi, then 92, who had cared for Sartain's aunt, Dona, for decades. Dona has ...

The number of confirmed cases of Legionnaires' disease at California's San Quentin prison is holding steady at six, one of three outbreaks of Legionnaires' around the country that have sickened dozens and killed 20.

Another 95 San Quentin inmates are under observation because of respiratory illness, state officials said, ...

Just over two-thirds of Californians who did not have health insurance before the Affordable Care Act went into full effect in 2014 are now covered, according to a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The newly insured are much less likely to say that paying for health care is a ...

Monthly premiums for California's 1.3 million Covered California customers will rise a modest 4 percent, on average, officials with the agency said Monday. This increase is slightly less than last year's increase of 4.2 percent for consumers who bought policies on the state's health insurance marketplace.

Some consumers could ...

Recognizing they lacked votes in a key Assembly committee, authors of legislation that would have allowed terminally ill Californians to legally end their lives pulled the bill Tuesday morning.

Senate Bill 128, the End of Life Option Act, had already cleared the state Senate, but faced opposition in the ...

Just over half of all pregnancies in America are unplanned.

The most effective reversible birth control methods are hormonal implants and intrauterine devices. Less than 1 percent of women using these long-acting contraceptive methods will become pregnant over the course of a year. That's compared to 9 percent ...

As more and more parents choose to skip vaccinations for their children, public health professionals and researchers have been looking at new ways to ease the concerns of parents who are hesitant.

But that turns out to be tough to do. Studies have found that simply educating parents about the ...

The colonoscopy: It may be the most dreaded screening test out there, and it's the next step in KQED's PriceCheck project.

On PriceCheck, we're crowdsourcing prices of common health tests and procedures. KQED, along with our colleagues at KPCC in Los Angeles and ClearHealthCosts.com, a ...

Lately, Californians have been focused on a measles outbreak that got its start at Disneyland. But in the last five years, state health officials have declared epidemics of whooping cough twice — in 2010 and in 2014, when 11,000 people were sickened and three infants died.

...

Back in 2007, Christin Kearns attended a conference for dentists like herself to learn about links between diabetes and gum disease.

She was handed a government pamphlet titled, "How to Talk to Patients about Diabetes," and was surprised to find that the diet advice didn't mention reducing sugar intake. She ...

Covered California open enrollment ends this Sunday. Sort of.

For starters, the agency announced Thursday that people who start an application by this Sunday get until next Friday, Feb. 20, to finish it. That's similar to steps that Covered California has taken in the past.

But advocates ...

The father of a young child who had leukemia has a plea for other parents: Please vaccinate your children because people with compromised immune systems, including his son, can't be vaccinated.

Carl Krawitt has watched his son, Rhett, now 6, fight leukemia for the past 4 1/2 years. For more than three of those years, Rhett has undergone round after round of chemotherapy. Last year he finished chemotherapy, and doctors say he is in remission.

Now, there's a new threat, one ...