Today's Globe: hospice volunteers, insurers' doctor rankings, psychiatrist inquiry, pain of debt, prostate cancer clue

Young people who saw what hospice care did for their grandparents or other relatives are stepping up to do what they can to ease the final days of other dying patients.

Health plans that rate doctors individually are spreading beyond the state's Group Insurance Commission, despite the Massachusetts Medical Society's opposition to the ranking systems.

Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have launched an investigation into three psychiatrists whom US Senator Charles E. Grassley has accused of not fully disclosing payments they received from drug companies and are reviewing procedures for researchers to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

The stress from deepening debt is becoming a major pain in the neck - and the back and the head and the stomach - for millions of Americans.

Researchers believe they have found a compound produced by aggressive prostate tumors and said yesterday that they hope they can use it to design a urine test to detect the most dangerous tumors.