A Thought on Mental Illness
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly.
-E. Fuller Torrey
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly.
-E. Fuller Torrey
In 1996, a man wrote to Carl Sagan asking him the distance to heaven. Sagan was a very public agnostic. He replied brilliantly: “Thanks for your letter. Nothing like the Christian notion of heaven has been found out to about 10 billion light years. (One light year is almost six trillion miles.) With best wishes…”…
The HPV vaccine saves lives. It does so by reducing a person’s chance of being infected by the human papilloma virus, a virus that causes a whole range of cancers including, most importantly, cervical cancer. Vaccinate your teenage daughter against HPV, and you will increase the chance she will live to old age. Simple as…
In high school, I was taught not to repeat words too often in the same paragraph, or even within a relatively short essay. I know I am not alone in having been taught that way, because many of the people I’ve mentored over the years present me drafts of their writing which show that they…
I’m not sure why I didn’t notice this earlier, but I just came across a very gracious, even overly generous, review of my book, Critical Decisions in the leading journal of bioethics, The Hastings Center Report. I thought I would share it with you: When I finally got eyeglasses as a teenager, after denying the…
The first time Bill Clinton ran for president, his campaign chair was determined to keep the famously verbose candidate focused on one topic. So he coined a phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid!” That phrase comes to mind when I think about our country’s Medicaid programs. Medicaid is a federal/state partnership to provide healthcare coverage to…
So many foods beckoning us from the grocery store shelves – but which ones are healthy for us to consume? We could study Nutritional Facts labels, but that feels as challenging as the math portion of the SAT, with so much numerical information to process. The label tells us how many calories are in the…