Brief Essays

  • Work Requirements For Safety Net Programs – They’re Not Working

    Anyone who has raised kids knows what happens when you give them a monthly allowance without requiring any work in return: they plop in front of their new videogame consoles while their dirty dishes collect in the sink. That’s the logic behind Republican plans to establish work requirements for people who receive safety net benefits—if…

  • People With Chronic Pain Deserve Better Than To Be Told There’s Nothing Wrong

    I am going to be writing about chronic pain: diagnosis, treatment, mistreatment, etc, in upcoming posts. In my first post, i describe part of my own pain journey. The post is here. And it starts with me standing “in the back of the conference hall panicked that I was going blind.”

  • Medicare Drug Coverage Is Often Inadequate—Here’s Why

    Your father’s rheumatoid arthritis medicine was working well, fighting off that otherwise debilitating illness. Then he found out that Medicare would no longer pay for the drug. Your aunt’s multiple sclerosis was flaring and her neurologist recommended a promising new treatment. But she learned that she would have to try, and “fail,” on two other…

  • Paying Too Much For Healthcare? Your Boss Might Be To Blame

    Many companies are large enough they self-insure—they take on the financial risk of paying for their employees’ health expenses. In these cases, there is no insurance company around to negotiate prices. Instead, your employer must bring itself to the negotiating table (or maybe, these days, to the negotiation-Zoom-room?). That might mean that your costs, including…

  • Getting A Colonoscopy? Ask Your Doctor About Using An AI Copilot

    Colon cancer is often preventable with timely screening. One way to be screened is through a procedure called colonoscopy, where a physician examines your colon with a camera to look for precancerous polyps. Unfortunately, some physicians are not as thorough as they should be and overlook growths they should be removing. It might be time…

  • Warning To RFK Jr: Mess With Medicare Payment And Physicians Will Fight Back

    The starting salary of an orthopedic surgeon in the United States is $565,000. Family medicine physicians, by contrast, can expect a starting salary closer to $250,000, a good living by almost any measure, but a pay disparity that doesn’t strike most experts as reflecting the value, or importance, of these two specialties. If Kennedy wants…

  • 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…

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.