Brief Essays

  • Medicare Can Save $4 Billion On Four Cancer Drugs — Can You Guess Which Ones?

    Medicare could save more than $4 billion by negotiating prices on just four drugs. Want to guess what those drugs are? Or what diseases they treat? Are they drugs for common diseases, with lots of people yielding lots of savings? Or for rare cancers, where the drugs are so expensive there is still lots of…

  • Upset About The High Price Of Your Hospital Stay? Medicaid Cuts Might Be To Blame

    Under the Big Beautiful Bill, the federal government is making steep cuts to Medicaid funding. Those cuts could increase the price you pay for medical care. Here’s why when the government cuts Medicaid funding, we all pay the price. Read more here

  • Are Nursing Homes Lying About Their Patients To Increase Profits? You Decide

    Imagine you are CEO of a chain of nursing homes. You know that the sicker your patients are, the more money you will get from Medicare. You also know that Medicare determines how sick patients are by counting how many diagnoses they have and assessing the severity of those diagnoses. Given these facts, what would…

  • Thinking About IV Hydration At A Nearby Medical Spa? Think Again

    On a hot summer day in Texas two years ago, Jenifer Cleveland visited a medical spa to receive IV hydration. Her primary care physician had not diagnosed her with dehydration, and probably wasn’t even aware she was about to receive the “treatment.” Entering one of the therapy suites, she laid down while a mixture of…

  • Hopping Mad Over Drug Company Product Hopping

    The state of California is suing Gilead Sciences over its delay of an HIV drug, a move that critics of the pharmaceutical industry call “product hopping.” Regardless of how the lawsuit comes out, the company’s actions strike me as deeply immoral and ought to leave all of us hopping mad. Here’s what we know.

  • Try To Guess Which Chemotherapy Saves The Most Lives

    You have metastatic cancer and must decide upon a chemotherapy. Here are your options, drawn from real clinical trial data. Chemo 1: Will increase your life expectancy from 12 to 15 months. Chemo 2: Increases your chance of being alive at one year by 12%. In other words, one out of every eight patients receiving…

  • Hope For People With Chronic Pain – Coping Skills Training

    Chronic pain often depends as much or more on the brain’s response to pain signals as it does on any bodily damage responsible for those signals. Thus, effective pain treatment could hinge on helping people develop ways to cope with their pain. Consider a treatment program called Pain Skills Coping Training. Read more here

  • Your Doctor Recommends Robotic Surgery – You Should Be Skeptical

    Your physician has received generous money from one of the companies that manufacture the robots. Consciously or unconsciously, that money could be influencing her recommendation. The positivity of physicians’ comments on X rises significantly among those receiving the most generous industry payments. Read more here.

  • A Suffocating Truth – Ban Research On Ethnic Bias In Healthcare And People Will Die

    In the ICU, accurate and timely knowledge of patients’ oxygen levels is crucial. But some machines used to assess oxygen levels are less accurate when patients have dark skin tones. Read more here

  • When The Doctor Is A Sieve, It Strains All Our Resources

    In residency, we had a term for ER docs who always seemed to find an excuse to admit patients to the hospital. We called them sieves. Recent evidence suggests that sieves in the ER drive up costs, workloads, and hospital utilization; but they do not save lives.

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.