Animal research has long been controversial. The medical benefits can be significant, although not always, and opponents argue the benefits are often outweighed by the pain and suffering inflicted on the animal.

Eighty-two percent of Americans said the U.S. health care system should be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt. But how to do it?

Membership in the church has declined in recent decades, but some Christian Science practitioners, as they are known, still treat large numbers of people through spiritual healing.

In Malawi, one out of every four children dies before reaching the age of five. Famine is chronic, and AIDS has left tens of thousands of orphans, often in the care of struggling grandparents.

Every summer, first-year medical students from throughout Maryland gather with family members of people who donated their bodies to science.

Ben Carson knows a lot about risk. As one of the leading pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, Carson makes life and death decisions nearly every day.

Read Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly’s web-only interview with Vincent Lam, a Canadian doctor and writer whose acclaimed first book, BLOODLETTING & MIRACULOUS CURES (Weinstein Books, 2007), was awarded the 2006 Giller Prize for fiction.

Have you ever had the feeling that your doctor doesn't have enough time for you, or, if you're a doctor, that you are under so much pressure it's hard to be compassionate with your patients? There is a physician in Northern California who thinks medicine is losing its soul, and she's trying to rescue it.

A doctor and a multimillionaire businessman are working together to give provide aid and medicine to people in need.

"There are a lot of medicines out there that have never been tested on children so it leaves the doctors high and dry in a legal quagmire, using them without FDA approval because they have evidence above 12, above 18, but not for younger children," says pediatrician and researcher Dr. Richard Schwartz.