After three months of physical therapy, her doctor told her that it was time to get an MRI. She had already paid off her annual deductible, meaning the imaging test would “only” cost her the $150 co-pay. An imaging center near where she worked charged $1500 for the test. Just two miles away, another facility…
Jay Singh had a nasty head cold. Not a “will-I-survive-this-plague” kind of infection, but also not one he thought, if left to its own devices, would blow over in a day or two. So he went to the primary care clinic near his exurban New York City home. The doctor spent ten minutes examining and…
Last time I checked, the mouth was still part of the human body. If I remember correctly, when people experience mouth problems, they ache just as much (often more) than if they experienced problems elsewhere in their bodies. So why do we still treat care of the mouth differently than other types of medical care?…
I have a book a coming out this fall. The book took many hours to write, with discarded chapters littering my Dropbox folder. My initial book proposal was rejected by every publisher I sent it to. After the withering critiques, I rethought the project and managed to convince the folks at Yale University Press to…
Yes, I’ve ranted about healthcare prices before. On more than one occasion. But I have a new rant for you. It’s not about the high price of new drugs It’s not about a couple pharmo-bro CEOs hiking prices of generic medications by 4 or 5,000% It’s about brand name drugs already on the market, that,…
As a father of two adolescent boys, I think often about the risks they face. I just came across a terrifying statistic that will haunt me: a huge proportion of deaths among adolescents occur as a result of firearms. (To read the rest of the article, please visit Forbes.)
Many of us have been told that urine is normally sterile, meaning that if bacteria show up in, say, a routine urine test, there must be something wrong—we need to get rid of those bacteria. But as it turns out, in many people with asymptomatic bacteriuria—people who have bacteria in their urine but no symptoms…
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is the number one cause of non-traumatic disability among young adults. MS is a chronic, incurable illness that destroys some of the body’s most basic neurological functions. Fortunately, there are now a slew of amazing medicines that often slow the disease considerably. These medicines can be the difference between whether or not a person…
More than 13,000 American women were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2018. More than 4,000 died from the disease that year. Those are tragic facts for lots of reasons, chief among them being that cervical cancer is often preventable. The good news is, there’s more ways to prevent cervical cancer than ever. (To read the…
Here are a few things we know to be true. ● Healthcare spending in the U.S. is too high ● Drug prices in the U.S. are growing rapidly ● Drug prices in the U.S. are higher than they are in other parts of the world Based on these facts, you’d think high drug prices are causing healthcare spending…