Today’s Science Lesson

Here is the opening of an article I recently published in JAMA, available now online, in which I raise concerns about misguided congressional efforts to promote the use of high-value healthcare services, without doing anything to reduce the use of low value ones. Health care systems around the world are under pressure to restrain health…

Imagine you have been struggling for eight days with a bad cough, with what feels like a lifetime’s worth of secretions in your upper airways. When you called your primary care physician’s office, she wasn’t available, so you got an appointment with a nurse practitioner, who prescribed a course of antibiotics. Would you fill the…