Age and happiness
As we get ready to turn the clocks on a new year, it is good to remember that for most of us, our happiness increases with age. See this recent news article which talks about some of my old, ahem, research on aging and happiness.
As we get ready to turn the clocks on a new year, it is good to remember that for most of us, our happiness increases with age. See this recent news article which talks about some of my old, ahem, research on aging and happiness.
Warning – the warning labels pictured below are graphic but, according to a recent study, they increase the chances that people will quit smoking. Now we need to find a way to get legal permission to use such pictures, so we can shock people out of their habits.
Just came across an interesting way to try to motivate people to exert themselves: post calories-burned-counts on the stairs. Would that work for you? For me, it would probably make me look down while walking up, only to trip, fall backwards, crack my head, all the while asking myself: “What the heck is a kcal…
Rates of cigarette smoking have dropped substantially in the US over the past few decades. But lots of Americans still smoke, and the burden of tobacco-related illness does not fall evenly across our population. That is tragic under normal circumstances, with tobacco use leading to heart attacks, strokes, cancers, and emphysema, to name but a…
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 (Click here to view comments)
In a recent Health Affairs article, David Asch and I wrote about how hard it can be to stop screening aggressively for things like breast and prostate cancer even when the evidence suggests we are doing more harm than good. Well, journalist Steven Petrow has a nice piece in the Washington Post looking at the…
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!