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
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…
Recently, I posed some thoughts about why the stoplight warning symbols about to be used for food products in United Kingdom might be misleading. A blogger at BigThink.com picked up on my train of thought. Here is her piece: Color-Coded Nutrition Facts May Confuse Rather Than Inform Consumers by Natalie Shoemaker The obesity epidemic is…
In an article from the Atlantic last January, Joshua Lang wrote a wonderful article about the challenge of deciding whether surgical anesthesia actually makes people unconscious, or whether people remember parts of their surgery and are traumatized by them later. In the article, he quotes George Wilson, a Scottish chemist who had his foot amputated…
This idea is so crazy it might just be the best one I’ve heard all week: a subway station in Moscow provides free tickets to commuters who stand in front of a monitor and squat or lunge 30 times. I love this idea. Have any of you heard of any other nudges like this? (Click…
In a wonderful article on deep cave exploration, Burkhard Bilger shows how powerful comparison can be in putting an unfamiliar topic into context. He is describing the arduous work involved in deep cave exploration. He is describing the risks of being far, far inside the cave when a heavy rain on the surface begins to…
Antibiotic prescribing is rampant, even among asymptomatic patients.