Check out my recent webcast interview with Duke University “Office Hours”:
I don’t think Tom Hanks will be starring in the movie version of my latest blog post, but click on this link to see an essay I wrote in a medical magazine about how to use insights from behavioral economics to improve patients’ sleep in the hospitals.
Quick: What do you get when you mix a Nobel Prize winner with a MacArthur genius? You get this: “The claims of some heavy drinkers and smokers that they want to but cannot end their addictions seem to us no different from the claims of single persons that they want to but are unable to…
Whatever you think of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill that the Obama administration decided to keep behind pharmacy counters rather than let women and girls buy it OTC, you have to admit that the New England Journal authors wrote a heck of a provocative sentence, after reviewing the number of scientific committees that had deemed the medication safe. (The article is by Wood, Drazen and Greene, from January 12.) After pointing out that adolescent girls can already buy lethal doses of Tylenol OTC without any questions asked, and after explaining that the only known risks of Plan B are nausea and delayed menses, they land a hard punch right on the jaw of the Obama administration:
“Any objective review makes it clear that Plan B is more dangerous to politicians than to adolescent girls.”
Ouch!
I have written a couple of pieces lately documenting the high percentage of physicians who refuse to take Medicaid patients, and some of the reasons for their refusal. One of my pieces prompted a physician to email me with his take on this matter. I am going to quote from that email, but take out…
In September of 2011, Laugesen and colleagues looked at why health care in the US costs so much. Part of their analysis explored primary care physician fees. It showed that primary care docs in the US make a bit more, per office visit, than their colleagues in 5 other countries. But Americans are much less…
It is pothole season in Michigan, with roads crumbling under the pressure of winter cold. Then again, with the condition of our state’s dismal economy, pothole season is becoming a year-round phenomenon here in the Great Lake State. Michigan’s government can no longer afford to fix roads like it used to, and the same goes…