Duke Alumni Magazine Feature: Sick to Debt
The Duke Alumni Magazine just published a Q & A about my new book, Sick to Debt. Here was the picture accompanying that article. Y’all agree that this should have been the “author photo” on the back cover?
I know, I know: correlation does not mean causation. But it is still suspicious that when industry employees join as co-authors in medical journals, the randomized trials they are writing about are more likely to show positive results – results that make industry products look good. At least that was the finding from a study…
If you only paid attention to popular media, you’d think cancers primarily strike young people. Here’s a picture from a medical journal contrasting media coverage of cancer to actual occurrence of cancer in younger and older people:
Here, from the Financial Times, is a picture showing that the lower your income, the less increase you’ve gotten in life-expectancy the last four decades: Income inequality is one of the largest human problems of this century.
Many people have warned us that Obamacare will drive up the cost of healthcare insurance, but recent evidence suggests that the problem is bigger than that. According to the Commonwealth Fund, healthcare insurance costs are rising even more quickly outside of the Obamacare exchanges than inside them:
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Obamacare is a large, unwieldy law. Despite its complexity, most people are familiar with its most important elements. They know it created a marketplace where people can shop for healthcare insurance; many are even aware that the cost of that insurance is subsidized for people with lower incomes. Others realize…
A study shows that a medication causes more harms than benefits, and physicians like me keep prescribing the pill anyway, either because we don’t learn about the study, don’t believe the study or are simply stuck in our ways. Even professionals have a hard time breaking bad habits. So what do you think happened when…