Better Off Not Knowing
“Better Off Not Knowing” – Archives of Internal Medicine
“Better Off Not Knowing” – Archives of Internal Medicine
Shutterstock How excited would you be about a medication that lowered your risk of cardiovascular death, heart attack, or stroke by 1.5%? Excited enough to spend a few thousand dollars a year on the drug? I expect not. What if, instead, the drug reduced those same terrible outcomes by 20%? That’s probably enough benefit to…
I got a really nice email the other day, from one of the provosts at my university. Here is the highlight: “During the 2015 fall semester, in the categories of Quality of Course and/or Intellectual Stimulation, your course evaluations were among the top 5% of all undergraduate instructors at Duke.” Which just leaves one question:…
On March 14, 1942, an American soldier with bacteria coursing through his bloodstream was treated with penicillin, a new wonder drug that saved his life. That single treatment exhausted half the nation’s supply of the drug. Two years later, as U.S. troops prepared to launch the D-Day invasion, America had more than 2 million doses of the drugready…
Let’s face it – us men are disgusting. So public policy experts are left to figure out how to keep us from behaving in our normally disgusting manner. Here’s one approach (thanks to Geoff Riley for bringing it to my attention): Think it will work?
It is notoriously difficult to change physician behavior. When it’s discovered that primary care physicians are, say, prescribing too few cholesterol pills or too many antibiotics, it will not be easy to change those behaviors. Physicians are strong-willed people, with lots of things competing for their attention and with many well ingrained habits. That’s why…