Action Movies Create Couch Potatoes
ICYMI: When people watch action movies, they consume more calories.

ICYMI: When people watch action movies, they consume more calories.

A while back, I wrote a piece in the Hastings Center Report proposing a better way of teaching ethics to professionals, like medical students. I thought such education should be grounded less in philosophy and more in understanding the psychology of our moral behavior. Glad to see that my ideas have been picked up, in…
“Rationing By Any Other Name” – The New England Journal of Medicine
It is hard to make money treating rare diseases. There simply aren’t enough customers to generate many profits. That’s why the U.S. government passed the Orphan Drug Act in 1983, a law which created a series of incentives to encourage drug companies to develop treatments for rare or “orphan” diseases – conditions affecting less than…
The first time scientists sequenced a person’s entire genome, it took more than a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently, such sequencing takes less than twenty-four hours and costs less than $5,000: To put that into perspective, Myriad Genetics charges $3,000 to test for mutations in just two genes associated with breast…
A number of years ago, I wrote a book – You’re Stronger Than You Think – which explores the surprising resilience of people with chronic illness and disability. I’ve done a bunch of research on the topic, but in the book I wrote not only about such research, but also about real people, who overcame…
All else equal, it would be wonderful if hospitals had an incentive to provide high quality care. It does not seem fair to pay the same amount of money to a hospital that does a great job of caring for its pneumonia patients and one that does a lousy job. For the most part, however,…