When I began covering health for The Bakersfield Californian, I frequently heard sources mention the high number of foreign-trained doctors serving the Central Valley.  So many of our county’s physicians, they said, had attended medical school overseas. Even within our newsroom, colleagues commented about their personal experience seeing international medical graduates for almost all of their medical care. We discussed how to cover a topic that seemed ripe for exploration – and especially relevant given the overall doctor shortage and recruiting challenges present in the valley – but too intangible to report in any substantial way.

Before we could do anything ...

In the past few years, pharmaceutical companies have been required under federal law to publicly disclose their payments to physician consultants and speakers, opening up a whole new avenue for journalists, including the writers of the Connecticut Health I-Team.

Each time another pharmaceutical company begins posting its payment disclosure data online -- often in a hard-to-find link on its website -- I've taken a look through, to check on Connecticut doctors. As in most other states, hundreds of doctors here earn thousands of dollars to promote drugs marketed by pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Cephalon, Eli Lilly, Janssen.

In the spring, I ...

The overdose death of a 15-year-old suburban girl was front-page news in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Maddie Kiefer had been dumped, dead or nearly dead, in the front yard of a friend’s home on a chilly Sunday morning.

The shock expressed by the community, including the more than 1,000 mourners at Kiefer’s funeral, made us want to know what led to her death. But we also had a larger question: Just how common was it for people to overdose and die not from heroin or cocaine, but from prescription drugs?

Two tiny pills, each a different prescription ...