Brief Essays

  • 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.

  • Four Steps To Saving Money On Hospital Care

    The research team hunted for healthcare prices online at 60 US hospitals. Then they had “secret shoppers” call the hospitals to get prices. Two chances to get information, in other words; two opportunities to find out what things cost. And what did the study show? Read more here

  • The Most Expensive Medical Condition Is Not What You Think

    In a minute, I’m going to ask you what the most expensive medical condition is in the American healthcare system. Before you guess, however, I’m going to explain what I mean by “most expensive.” I’m not talking about cost per patient. Some people with cancer receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of chemotherapy per year,…

  • My Kidney Cancer Taught Me That Patients Aren’t Consumers

    My cancer journey began when I went to the bathroom and noticed bright red urine. I remember feeling simultaneously shocked because my urine was full of blood and disappointed that I hadn’t felt pain that would signal a benign problem like kidney stones. “Shit,” I thought to myself, “could I have cancer?” Read more here.

  • Time To Abolish High-Deductible Health Plans

    Euphemistically referred to as Consumer-Directed Health Plans, high out-of-pocket insurance is in theory supposed to incentivize people to scrutinize the cost and quality of their medical care, thus bringing pressure on providers to lower the price and/or raise the quality of their services. This theory isn’t borne out in practice. As a matter of practice…

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.