Brief Essays

  • Can A Positive Attitude Prevent Colds? Your Race Could Influence The Answer

    People whose immune systems are temporarily or permanently weakened can be susceptible to colds. Consider chronic stress. Ask a group of college students about their emotional lives, and those who report higher levels of stress will be more susceptible to cold symptoms. We know that because researchers have exposed healthy college students to cold viruses…

  • Experts Split On Whether Breast, Lung, And Prostate Cancer Screening Saves Lives

    Mammograms for breast cancer; the PSA blood test for prostate cancer; CT scans for lung cancer; and things like stool blood tests and colonoscopies for colon cancer. Each of these screening tests is designed to find cancers, or precancers, before they become symptomatic, the goal of early detection being to enable clinicians to eradicate growths…

  • Impending Spending Disaster – A Warning From Japanese Nursing Homes

    Populations across many wealthy countries are aging. That means a huge swath of people will soon find themselves needing some kind of long-term care. Here is a quick look at what the aging of a population means for how much a country spends on long-term care. The data, published in the journal Health Affairs, come…

  • This Is What Happens When Medicare Minions Micromanage Microorganisms

    Sepsis is a brutal killer. It often starts after a microorganism gets loose in your bloodstream, spreading to organs far and wide, releasing deadly toxins along the way. In response, your body releases toxins of its own, chemicals designed to kill the invading organism but that, all too often, damage your body, too, leaving you…

  • Breast Cancer Chemotherapy – Here Is What Happened When Outrageous Prices Met The Free Market

    Nine to twelve years. That’s about how long most drug companies have to make serious money on new products before their patent protection ends. Then, generic companies enter the fray and prices, typically, plummet. Yet, two decades after coming to market, Herceptin (a drug used to treat breast and stomach cancer) was still priced at…

  • Two And A Half Decades Later, OxyContin Marketing Is Still Deadly

    Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin in 1996, and soon began an aggressive marketing campaign for this powerful and addictive drug. The campaign is over, but its effects are still deadly. How do we know this? Because Purdue’s marketing wasn’t sprinkled evenly around the country. Instead, Purdue rolled out its campaign in different markets at different times…

  • The Verdict Is In—Price Gouging Harms People With Gout

    The patient arrived in my clinic, their right big toe the color of a spring strawberry. The lightest touch caused exquisite pain. Fortunately, I was able to prescribe a pill (an ancient medicine, actually) and the patient was better by the next day. Too bad that simple treatment is becoming unaffordable, through a maddening combination…

  • Peak Pandemic–Guess What Was Killing More Young Americans Than Covid-19

    Covid-19 killed approximately 60,000 young Americans between 15 and 54 years old in 2021. By any measure, that is an awful statistic, representing a staggering number of loved ones lost to the virus. But as awful as that statistic is, guess what killed even more young Americans.

  • The Crushing Cost Of Tracking Healthcare Quality—One Hospital’s Story

    A whole industry is devoted to measuring, tracking and even incentivizing the quality of American hospital care. Unfortunately, that industry is horribly inefficient, costing us billions of dollars. Quality measurement is inefficient in large part because there is no single source that hospitals (and provider systems, more generally) can use to track the quality of…

  • Preventing Diabetes – What Medicare Administrators Could Learn From Shark Tank

    The Medicare Diabetes Prevention Program is a lifesaver. Consisting of of at least 16 class sessions that provide practical training about healthy eating, physical activity, and other strategies for weight control, the Program reduces the chance that people at high risk for diabetes actually develop that life-threatening condition. However, the Program is floundering, with distressingly…

Here are some things, other than books and blog posts, that I wrote with a general audience in mind:

And here are some non-technical “academic” articles:

If you’re interested in a complete list of my academic research, access a PDF of my CV here.