Not long ago, I spoke with a freelance journalist, Charlotte Huff, who put together a really nice article in Cancer Today, describing how cancer patients can get more engaged in their care. I thought I would share a bit of that piece with you today: Gloria Full wasn’t surprised that the recommended chemotherapy regimen was aggressive….
In The Theory That Would Not Die, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne brings to life many famous scientists and statisticians, the one of the moments that struck me most was when she described one of those people as he faced his death. That person was Jerome Cornfield, a prominent statistician at the NIH. Cornfield had been diagnosed…
I have been writing a lot lately about out-of-pocket costs for health care in United States. In my research on this topic, I came across the following picture, which shows how much insurers are spending on healthcare, among people in the United States receiving insurance through their employers, and also how much those employees are spending…
I recently read Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die, which recounts the controversial history of Bayes theorem in the world of statistics. To oversimplify quite a bit, Bayes theorem requires those using it to make an initial guess about, say, the probability that one outcome is more likely than another, and then…
A while back, DVD companies hoping to sell their products in countries like Poland faced a dilemma. They could sell their products at a nice profit in the booming U.S. market, but to sell products in those other countries, they had to lower their prices. Such variable pricing is a common business practice. All kinds of services…
For years now, the pharmaceutical industry has justified its prices and its profits by reminding us that their products eventually go off patent, and are then offered cheaply to people around the world in generic form. They warned us that the pipeline for new and innovative drugs is less and less promising, because so many…
When people mention Bayes’ Theorem, the cornerstone of much of modern probability thinking, most do not realize that much of the thinking to develop this theorem was done by Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French astronomer and mathematician. As if his work on that theorem was not enough to make him one of my heroes, I recently…
A recent story on the Atlantic website described a clever way to demonstrate the benefits of bicycling in congested cities. It involves an app that quickly shows people how long it will take to get somewhere by bicycle versus car. And with the crowded cities, bicycles more than hold their own, as this picture shows: And…
I thought I would pass along this hilarious cartoon, suggesting a new way to “nudge” patients to use fewer antibiotics. Of course that nudge requires your doctor to be Batman, and Batman to be a pretty assertive type of physician: (Click here to view comments)
I recently opened up a mysterious package that arrived at my front door, and discovered the German edition of Critical Decisions. At first I assume the title was somehow referring to me as a gutter rat, or signifying that my book was the kind of thing you can find in a sewer. But now I…