Doctor

MINNEAPOLIS -- Two years ago, Dennis Laurion logged on to a rate-your-doctor website to vent about a Duluth neurologist, Dr. David McKee.

McKee had examined Laurion's father, Kenneth, when he was hospitalized after a stroke. The family, Laurion wrote, wasn't happy with his bedside manner. "When I mentioned Dr. McKee's name to a friend who is a nurse, she said, 'Dr. McKee is a real tool!' " he wrote.

McKee wasn't amused. He sued Laurion for defamation, and now the case is pending before the Minnesota Supreme Court.

BRIGHAM CITY -- Dr. Lance Bryce trades one front line for another when he goes from a local hospital trauma unit to ride along on Brigham City Police SWAT calls.

Maybe you had a granny whose raspy voice you still hear rattling around your head every time you feel a cold coming on. "Feed a cold, starve a fever." Or, wait, is it the other way around?

Maybe every time you stick a hand in the fridge, foraging for something yummy, you hear that ringing won't-go-away rhyme, the one about the apple-a-day and the doctor.

And before you let the incessant rhyme out of its cage, you slam the door and run for the cookie jar.

So here's the burning question: What's with all those aphorisms anyway? Is there any truth to the bits of medical folk wisdom we all know by heart, if not by practice?

LOS ANGELES -- As California's top prescriber of narcotic painkillers and other commonly abused drugs, Dr. Nazar Al Bussam made hundreds of thousands of dollars feeding the addictions of strung-out patients who packed into his offices in Downey and Los Angeles, according to authorities.

Federal prosecutors concluded it was "pure luck" that his reckless prescribing had not resulted in any known deaths.

A Los Angeles Times review of coroners' records, however, reveals that at least three of the doctor's patients died of drug overdoses in 2007 and 2008. Two other people died -- one from an overdose, the other by falling off a cliff -- with drugs in their systems and pill bottles bearing Al Bussam's name in their possession.

SALT LAKE CITY -- A judge took under advisement Wednesday defense motions seeking to toss out a Brigham City doctor's conviction last month for dealing narcotic pain killers.

SALT LAKE CITY -- A Utah doctor whose license was suspended in Maryland following a botched abortion has been fined by state regulators for lying about her criminal background in 2004.

ROY -- Dr. Bannick Riggs decided to go into family medicine because he wanted to follow his patients through a lifetime rather than a temporary fix.