The importance of sleep is perhaps most realized when we become sick. When we are hospitalized and most in need of every ounce of health, though, hospital care practically guarantees that we won’t get good sleep. Fortunately, two approaches hold promise to improve sleep for patients: one organizational, and the other a common trick of…
If you use a smaller plate when you eat, you’ll eat less food. Here’s a rather wonky summary of research on plate size, a “meta-analysis” showing that smaller plates mean you put less food on the plate and, thus, eat less food. Less pie on your plate; less pie in your pie hole!
In recent years, it feels like we’ve been inundated by stories of greedy pharmaceutical companies jacking up the price of important generic medications. In 2015, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli, recognized that no other generic companies were manufacturing Daraprim, a drug used to treat infections common among people with AIDS. So he raised the price of…
Most conservatives agree that Medicaid costs are too high. Most liberals agree that Medicaid patients should receive necessary medical care for free. And both conservatives and liberals agree that we should embrace ways to encourage Medicaid patients to obtain important preventive care services, in hopes that such services will lower healthcare costs by promoting public…
The Atlantic recently reproduced a figure showing just how much people like things when they are free. Specifically, they looked at health interventions and show that people are more likely to take up these interventions, or products, when they don’t cost anything. And certainly, free is better than expensive, but free is also a whole…
Cancer drugs have become increasingly expensive in recent years. No one blinks anymore when a new lung cancer or colon cancer treatment comes to market priced at more than $100,000 per patient. In part, we don’t blink because we have simply gotten used to such prices – the shock has worn off. Moreover, many of…