Free Republic

Embattled Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes is a victim who has been "totally attacked," venture capitalist Tim Draper told CNBC on Tuesday. Holmes has been under fire since a series of reports by The Wall Street Journal suggested the blood-testing start-up's testing devices were flawed. "Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked," the founding partner of Draper Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson said in an interview with "Closing Bell." "This is a great entrepreneur who...

When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease. Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif. Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the...

More than 9 out of 10 doctors surveyed admit that they practice some form of "defensive medicine” – ordering unnecessary tests or jettisoning potentially troublesome patients to head off malpractice lawsuits. The survey of 824 Pennsylvania physicians in six high-risk specialty practices, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found: Almost 60 percent said they often ordered more diagnostic tests than necessary. 52 percent referred patients to other specialists even when the referral was unnecessary. About 42 percent said concerns about malpractice lawsuits had forced them to restrict some practices – eliminating procedures prone to complications, such...