Gerald Ashley (twitter handle @Gerald_Ashley) recently tweeted a photo of what was SUPPOSED to be a helpful nudge, reducing the odds that people would bump into each other going up and down the stairs. Can you see what might not be helpful here?
What would you like first: the good news or the bad news? Let me start with the bad. Life expectancy among patients in the U.S. with thyroid cancer lags behind that in Korea. In fact, the vast majority of patients diagnosed with thyroid cancer in Korea are cured of that illness, a statement I can’t…
Want to lose weight? Then what are you going to do to try to accomplish your goal? Specifically, what will you do to change your eating habits? Probably the best thing you can do – eating habit wise – to lose weight is to eat less food. But as you will see from this picture…
It is well accepted among health economics wonks that the lion’s share of pharmaceutical company profits come when these companies hold exclusive rights to their products. Once their blockbuster pills go “generic,” competitors enter the marketplace and profits plummet. Consider captopril, a groundbreaking heart failure medication introduced in the early 80s by Bristol-Myers Squibb under…
I realize that I do not have the most focused blog in the world. Some people blog about nothing other than, say, capital punishment or new developments in whiskey. I write about psychology, behavioral economics, ethics, the doctor-patient relationship, health policy, political partisanship… a relatively wide range of things, but topics often linked by the…
In the last few years, the U.S. health care system has seemingly been gripped by “back to the nineties” fever. Back then, we had a Democratic president working to reform the health care system. Experts from across this system were promoting the importance of controlling health care costs; the growth of health care expenditures even…
Bret Stephens won a Pulitzer Prize for his foreign affairs column in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Only in his early 40s, Stephens can already boast of an enviable number of accomplishments. He has already been Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post. And he is now Deputy Editor at the Wall Street Journal, one of…
Atul Gawande has received appropriate praise for his new book. Read it if you haven’t. Meanwhile, here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, to whet your appetites: Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even…
Hepatitis C has been in the news lately, because of amazing (and amazingly expensive) new treatments that promise to cure their life-threatening illness. While we ought to debate the expense of these treatments, we should also remind ourselves of how much we’ve been spending caring for patients with advanced disease. Here’s a picture showing the…
Every once in a while on my blog, I like to highlight great writing. In part, I guess, because my own writing has yet to rise to such a level. Anyways, here’s Robert Ballard in the Smithsonian trying to help readers understand why the topography of the ocean simply can’t be appreciated if you rely…