www.gfn.com/recordDetails.phpWouldn't it great to have instant access to your medical records? Whether it's day-to-day living or an emergency situation, having this information, and giving it to a medical professional could spell life or death.
The two biggest players vying to store our records are Microsoft's HealthVault and Google Health. Their methods for gathering this information vary quite a bit, though, and privacy concerns abound. GFN explores the differences -- and advantages -- of each service.
It's hard to complete a cross-training program without the coaching and equipment, however there are plenty of ways to exercise and maintain your fitness that don't require much time or special equipment. You might not improve much on vacation time, but you certainly don't need to fall off the wagon and gain weight either.
At a time when the number of new cases among older gay men is dropping — by 22 percent in New York City — AIDS experts are focusing on what they say is a worrisome and perplexing growth of HIV infection among young men.
Experts say the significant factors feeding the trend appear to be higher rates of drug use among younger men, which can fuel dangerous sex practices, optimism among them that AIDS can be readily treated, and a growing stigma about HIV among gays that keeps some men from revealing that they are infected.
A research team announced that it has identified 273 human proteins that the HIV virus apparently needs to infect a person. The groundbreaking findings may offer hundreds of potential new targets for drug therapies that could halt the virus.
The discovery was made with a technique called a "genome-wide scan," which offered a much more comprehensive inventory of proteins than has existed before.
A new variety of staph bacteria, highly resistant to antibiotics is spreading among gay men in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles, researchers reported Monday.
The germ typically causes boils and other skin and soft-tissue infections and, despite its resistance to some drugs, is still treatable by surgical drainage and several classes of antibiotics. What is unusual in this case is the high percentage of infections - up to 40 percent - occurring in the buttocks and genitalia.
Since it was widely reported this week that a drug-resistant staph has hit gay men in some alarming numbers, more than a few anti-gay media outlets have jumped on the most sensational parts of the story without thought to the pesky notions of reporting the true medical facts or the full story.
In this light, GFN offers a brief overview to separate vital information from the salacious, and the simple things you can do to protect yourself from getting it in the first place.
If you live in California, and you rely on medical marijuana - which is legal to use in the state - you can get fired from your job. Even if it's legally prescribed.
In another setback for California's ongoing battle with federal law over medical pot use, the California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a lower court ruling that a Sacramento telecommunications company's firing of a man who failed a company-ordered drug test was legal.
The challenges of getting and maintaining health insurance are well known to gay men and lesbians, particularly when it comes to preexisting conditions, like HIV or cancer.
Now we're seeing that the challenges of getting health insurance may be complicated just because the person trying to get coverage was once insured through a domestic partner's insurance plan.
The owners of a Salt Lake City gym that caters to gay men, gets to keep their license and remain open after undercover officers find men having sex in the gym's steam room.
A judge rules that the sex acts between the men "were not lewdness offenses committed by patrons, but offenses by the Gym for violations of City ordinances." Salt Lake City's ordinances prohibit a business from allowing or permitting certain kinds of lewd conduct on their premises.
According to a new survey, nearly one in four gay and lesbian adults lack health insurance and are nearly twice as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to have no health insurance coverage.
A new study confirms what many gay people probably know all too well -- a majority of older gay men and lesbians queried had provided care to one or more people during the previous five years.
"These findings contradict old myths about elderly gay people leading lonely lives of quiet desperation,” said Dr. Robert-Jay Green, executive director of the Rockway Institute, a national center for gay research and public policy.
After years of hearing about the supposed health properties of green tea, researchers in Japan have concluded that a component of the tea can stop HIV from binding to healthy immune cells (which is how the virus spreads). Their laboratory tests suggest a chemical found in green tea called Epigallocatechin Gallate, or EGCG, protects cells...
Gay and bisexual men in San Francisco are signing up to take Gardasil, the vaccine intended to prevent the human papilloma virus, or HPV, in women. Jason Riggs, spokesman for San Francisco's STOP AIDS Project, reports gay men are asking their doctors for the vaccine in the hope that it will ward off anal and penile cancer which are also caused by HPV.
"The prevalence of anal cancer among gay and bisexual men is very high. That's why some people are looking at this as a possible preventive cure."...
One of the leading experimental AIDS vaccines has failed to prevent test subjects from becoming infected with HIV, subsequently prompting its sponsor to abruptly shut down the trial.
Merck & Co., testing their AIDS vaccine in a network funded by the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, had spent a decade developing the vaccine...
Since it was widely reported this week that a drug-resistant staph has hit gay men in some alarming numbers, more than a few anti-gay media outlets have jumped on the most sensational parts of the story without thought to the pesky notions of reporting the true medical facts or the full story.
The challenges of getting and maintaining health insurance are well known to gay men and lesbians, particularly when it comes to preexisting conditions, like HIV or cancer. 
A new study confirms what many gay people probably know all too well -- a majority of older gay men and lesbians queried had provided care to one or more people during the previous five years.
