Today’s Science Lesson
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics.
You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics.
You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
Shutterstock He came to the ER with chest pain, shortness of breath, and atrial fibrillation with a heart rate of almost 120 beats per minute. It wasn’t a heart attack, and it wasn’t some rare disease. He was emergently ill because his physician overreacted to blood tests, and prescribed a thyroid pill he didn’t need….
Here is a nice, cautionary article from Consumer Reports reporter, Donna Rosato, on the downsides of high deductible health insurance plans: High deductible health insurance plans were supposed to help consumers cut healthcare costs. The idea was that since consumers would have to pay a large chunk of their own money for medical care before…
Here’s a picture from the Kaiser Family Foundation from late last year, showing what people want done to improve the US healthcare system: Plenty of work to do!
I recognize that correlation does not prove causation. But here is a picture illustrating the correlation between income inequality and the percent of a country’s population that is obese. The findings are provocative, to say the least. Making the relationship somewhat plausible is all the evidence we have now of the toll that income inequality…
This study came out a while ago, from ICYMI. The research team called up primary care practices and tried to make appointments for Medicaid patients. When states raised reimbursement rates, it became easier: Health insurance doesn’t do much good when patients can’t find doctors willing to accept crappy reimbursement.
The experiment was simple. A group of behaviorally-minded researchers tested whether patients are more likely to receive mammograms when those tests are automatically scheduled (meaning they can opt out if they want) versus when they have to opt in for the tests. Automatic scheduling should have increased mammograms. It didn’t. In one respect, it even…