When Dr. Jeffrey Rice needed to schedule outpatient foot surgery for his son three years ago, he called the recommended facility to find out what it would cost. The estimate was so high — $15,000 to $25,000 — that Rice asked the surgeon for a second option. The cost for the same one-hour procedure at…
An interesting article by Peter Schwartz in the latest Hastings Center Report on whether patients, facing difficult medical decisions, ought to get precise numbers on the risks and benefits of their alternatives. I contributed a commentary, urging researchers to keep developing better ways to help patients make rational use of the numbers.
When I lived in Ann Arbor, my children attended a public school where upwards of 15% of kids were not vaccinated for mumps because their left-wing parents didn’t trust the vaccine industry. Meanwhile on the right end of the political spectrum, Tea Party heart throb Michelle Bachman famously accused vaccines of causing… (Read more and…
Medical experts now agree that as a result of aggressive screening programs, we have an epidemic of cancer overdiagnosis in the United States. With mammograms finding tiny cancers and PSA tests discovering unpalpable prostate cancers, we are now unearthing some cancers too early for our own good. What do experts mean by “overdiagnosis,” you ask?…
Paying someone to mow your lawn is a pretty straightforward affair. Ryan the lawn guy will look at the lawn size and maybe the hilliness of your yard and you’ll settle on a price for mowing and trimming it. When you decide to contract for Ryan’s services on a more regular basis, payment might get…
Risk isn’t all it is cracked up to be, as Amanda Dillard argues (with me as a co-author) in a new paper available on line at the Annals of Behavioral Medicine. At high risk for breast cancer? May not matter, in terms of getting you interested in taking a pill to reduce that risk. But FEELING at high risk? That is a different story. As Amanda shows quite persuasively, after you control (statistically speaking) for women’s actual risk, it is the way they feel about that risk that determines their behavior.
