Cass Sunstein just posted a really nice write-up of the calorie count research I was lucky enough to conduct with Steven Dallas (now a law student at Duke) and Peggy Liu (a marketing Professor at University of Pittsburgh). Thought I’d give you a flavor of the write-up: A provision of the Affordable Care Act that…
Our Medical Decision Making Research Group is looking for an Associate in Research to join our team. Please see the job description below and the link to apply. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Associate in Research (RA) will support investigators on multiple research projects related to patient decision making and health communication. The RA will contribute to the…
I had the pleasure of recording a podcast organized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Avalere Health. Here is a link to the episode. You should also check out other episodes.
We have an epidemic of C-sections in the US, now accounting for almost 1 in 3 births. That represents a 50% increase since the mid-90s, despite all the advances we’ve seen in obstetrical care. Sometimes C-sections are critical to saving the life of either baby or mother. But C-sections are major surgical procedures, with commensurate risks….
In the U.S., we do a lousy job of paying for long-term care. We don’t help people cover the costs of nursing homes or home-health aids when they have chronic, life-threatening illnesses. As a result, more Americans die in the hospital than they would if we covered long-term care more generously. At least that’s the…
Most men diagnosed with prostate cancer don’t die of the disease. Between 2011 and 2015, 112.6 per 100,000 men per year were diagnosed with prostate cancer in the U.S., but only 19.5 per 100,000 men per year died of the disease over that same period of time. That is still far too many deaths. But the…
There’s plenty of price gouging in American healthcare. The pharmaceutical industry has gotten plenty of (well deserved) bad press for its pricing practices. At the extreme are people like “Pharma Bro” (and convicted felon) Martin Shkreli, who hiked the price of an important medication to treat infections in AIDS patients by over 5000%. But high and…
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…
I have written about medical marijuana before, relaying research findings showing that the legalization of medical marijuana is associated with a reduction in use of pain medications. Here’s another piece of evidence leading to a similar conclusion, from a study by the research team of Bradford and Bradford out of the University of Georgia. (Athens,…
The HPV vaccine saves lives. It does so by reducing a person’s chance of being infected by the human papilloma virus, a virus that causes a whole range of cancers including, most importantly, cervical cancer. Vaccinate your teenage daughter against HPV, and you will increase the chance she will live to old age. Simple as…