Asimov on Scientific Discovery
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ [I’ve found it!], but ‘That’s funny.’ (Click here to view comments)
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Is Greed the Key to Losing Weight?
More than two-thirds of employers in the US are paying their obese employees in some form or another to lose weight. Some give health insurance discounts to employees based on target BMIs. Others literally dole out cold hard cash to overweight employees who meet weight loss targets. Employers are adopting these strategies because they work. At…
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The Obesity Epidemic Summarized in One Picture
One of my MBA students was kind enough to send me the following picture, from The Onion. It’s hard to think of a better image to summarize what is happened to the youth of America over the last generation. Parents Chart Child’s Width on Kitchen Wall
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The Availability Heuristic
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
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On the Undertreatment and Overtreatment of Strokes
In research I have had the pleasure of conducting with Darin Zahurenic, we are starting to find concerning data about the variability in how neurologists and neurosurgeons treat people who have strokes caused by bleeding in their brains – or what doctors call intracerebral hemorrhage. Darin recently presented some of this research at a medical…
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Toxic Side Effect: High Out-of-Pocket Health Care Costs
When is the treatment worse than the disease? When the high costs associated with care become a financial burden for patients and in many cases prevent them from protecting their health, contends Peter Ubel, MD, a 2007 recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. “We have reached a…
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Do Malpractice Fears Cause Physicians to Order Unnecessary Tests?
Ask physicians if our messed up malpractice system causes them to practice “defensive medicine,” and most will probably say yes – hard not to be paranoid with so many lawsuits affecting so many physicians. Some experts even contend that major reforms of our malpractice system could go a long way towards controlling spiraling healthcare costs. On the…
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On Personality and Professions
“An extroverted mathematician, goes an old joke, is one who looks at your feet while he’s talking.” Alex Stone recounts this joke in his book, Fooling Houdini, which I wrote about in a previous post. As a philosophy major, I love to think there might be a college major more full of nerds and introverts…
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Why PCORI Should Be Very Wary of Studying Medical Devices
In the New York Times on Thursday, October 17, Topher Spiro wrote an important op-ed expressing why we need to hold onto the medical device tax that helps pay for parts of the Affordable Care Act. Spiro backs up his argument by pointing out how profitable the device industry is. To his argument I would also add the fact…
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On the Psychology of Magic
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of reading Fooling Houdini, by Alex Stone. It is a marvelous book, part memoir about how his obsession with magic pulled him away from his career in physics, but also a wonderful explanation of the psychology of how magic works its wonders. Get rid of all those images…