With so much recent news about airplane disasters, it’s easy to become frightened about flying. I wonder if a risk graphic like the following will do much to help? As reported on recently in The Economist, the risk graphic comes from a new iPhone app called Am I Going Down? I’m skeptical this will work….
Gerald Ashley (twitter handle @Gerald_Ashley) recently tweeted a photo of what was SUPPOSED to be a helpful nudge, reducing the odds that people would bump into each other going up and down the stairs. Can you see what might not be helpful here?
People like me, trained to be physicians, have pushed hard to promote health insurance in the United States because we believe, with some evidence to back up our claims, that good health insurance promotes better health. When people don’t have insurance, they delay necessary medical care for too long, and their health suffers as a…
What would you like first: the good news or the bad news? Let me start with the bad. Life expectancy among patients in the U.S. with thyroid cancer lags behind that in Korea. In fact, the vast majority of patients diagnosed with thyroid cancer in Korea are cured of that illness, a statement I can’t…
Want to lose weight? Then what are you going to do to try to accomplish your goal? Specifically, what will you do to change your eating habits? Probably the best thing you can do – eating habit wise – to lose weight is to eat less food. But as you will see from this picture…
It is well accepted among health economics wonks that the lion’s share of pharmaceutical company profits come when these companies hold exclusive rights to their products. Once their blockbuster pills go “generic,” competitors enter the marketplace and profits plummet. Consider captopril, a groundbreaking heart failure medication introduced in the early 80s by Bristol-Myers Squibb under…
Experts in decision psychology and behavioral economics have conclusively shown that humans, those silly creatures, are not always rational decision makers. They let unconscious forces influence their thinking, and not always for the better. But of course, doctors aren’t human. Right? Well, here is some evidence of just how human we doctors are. The odds…
In June of 2013, the American Medical Association officially recognized obesity as a disease. The organization had its reasons. For starters, obesity leads to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, early-onset degenerative arthritis…and just about every other illness on the planet. In addition, people with obesity face a very difficult time overcoming their condition: Short of highly…
I realize that I do not have the most focused blog in the world. Some people blog about nothing other than, say, capital punishment or new developments in whiskey. I write about psychology, behavioral economics, ethics, the doctor-patient relationship, health policy, political partisanship… a relatively wide range of things, but topics often linked by the…
Here is a podcast I participated in, put out by folks at GWU. A quickish interview on the challenge of getting doctors to stop doing things they ought to stop doing. You can also listen to it on iTunes, or on Stitcher.