Healthcare

Lenexa man’s exercise obsession underscores eating disorders’ gender neutrality

At one point when he was in college at Kansas State University, Jon Smith would jog as many as 20 miles a day. “If I wasn’t in the library and not in class,” he said, “I was running.” But Smith was far from healthy. His over-the-top regimen was a manifestation of an eating disorder known…

Read More >
Piper Wilcher

Blue Cross picket highlights insurance conundrum with eating disorders

The business day was ticking away as Sarah Wilcher waited on the phone. She was an hour into a desperate protest of an insurance decision about her seriously ill daughter, Piper. By around 5:10 p.m., she realized everybody was gone. “They just left me on hold,” Wilcher recalled recently of that day four years ago….

Read More >
John Smith, walking

Kansas City-area supporters strive to reopen eating disorder clinic

Approximately 30 million Americans – two-thirds of them women – battle a clinically significant eating disorder during their lifetime, and hundreds of thousands of these people live in Missouri or Kansas,

Read More >

California company finalizes agreement to buy two KC-area hospitals

The operator of two local Catholic hospitals has finalized their sale to a for-profit company based in Ontario, Calif. Ascension, the nation’s largest Catholic health system, said in a statement Tuesday that it had reached a definitive agreement to sell St. Joseph Medical Center in Kansas City, Mo., and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Blue…

Read More >
Dr. Lee Norman during a press conference.

The University of Kansas Hospital: Patient admitted Monday does not have Ebola

UPDATE 10/14/14 4:10 pm:  A man who was admitted Monday to The University of Kansas Hospital suffering from diarrhea and who worked recently near Africa’s west coast does not have Ebola, the hospital said Tuesday afternoon. Results of blood tests showed the patient has not contracted the virus, which has killed more than 4,000 people in the…

Read More >