You may have heard the saying, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” There ought to be a similar formulations for other forms of distress, such as, “Just because you are neurotic doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to be worried.” Today the neurotics got affirmation that widely held […]
Read more...As someone with an elderly parent who takes a huge amount of costly medication to treat risk factors like high blood pressure rather than real diseases, I’ve been suspicious that this approach is less effective than claimed. And I have been particularly leery of the enthusiasm for statins (which lower cholesterol) which some cardiologists have […]
Read more...Grim news for the high-tech, health-minded set: office printers can emit micro particles that damage the lungs. From the BBC: The humble office laser printer can damage lungs in much the same way as smoke particles from cigarettes, a team of Australian scientists has found. An investigation of a range of printer models showed that […]
Read more...I’m going to tell a personal story and hope you regard it as useful rather than self indulgent. As regular readers may know, I am currently on a cruise with my family. If you ever think of going on a cruise, and you value your life, avoid Oceania Cruises. Safety is paramount, and they blew […]
Read more...MarketWatch reports tonight that this year is showing the smallest year-to-year increase in retail drug prices since 1995. I happened to catch a buddy who is an FDA lawyer/biomedical engineer and before that, worked for the National Institutes of Health and one of Big Pharmas. She attributes the slowdown in price increases to three things […]
Read more...Disclosure: I used to be a huge fan of the Economist, because it was well written, broad ranging, intelligently non-partisan, and (at least politically) often contrarian. But ever since the start of the Bush era, it has taken a marked shift to the right, in both its political and economic coverage. Take this story from […]
Read more...Height is influenced by the quality of nutrition in childhood and as a result, in many societies, it has also been a class indicator. One example: Winston Churchill, who as a Liberal Party member and Home Secretary, was instrumental in the passage of minimum wages and the Liberal Reforms, which among other things, provided for […]
Read more...A sad day for therapists, a boon for big Pharma. From Press Esc: MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice, according to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Researchers from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory hope that their work could lead to the first […]
Read more...Although this is a bit off topic for this blog, I find Paul Krugman’s op-ed pieces on health care to be among his best work. He manages to cover a good deal of ground in a confined space, and convey useful data without losing generalist readers. Although he never mentions Michael Moore, Krugman’s piece, “The […]
Read more...The headline in Mark Thoma’s blog is more colorful: “To Reduce Crime, Get the Lead Out.” His post points to a Washington Post story, “Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity,” in which economist Rick Nevin says lead exposure is the biggest factor behind crime. Now as any statistician will tell you, correlation is not causation, […]
Read more...Stephen Cecchetti, professor of finance at Brandeis’ business school and former director of research for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, makes an elegant and persuasive argument at VoxEU in favor of a single payer medical system: it’s inevitable. Why? Cecchetti starts from the premise that improved genetic testing will provide foreknowledge of an […]
Read more...Most news stories touting the findings of a ten year investigation of organic versus conventionally farmed tomatoes make broader claims (example; CNNMoney “All-natural veggies good for heart“) than the study’s immediate findings, namely that the fruit, when raised organically, has nearly double the level of some key flavinoids (quercetin and kaempferol. Flavinoids have been found […]
Read more...This article on the Guardian’s website, on the failure of the Food and Drug Administration to be sufficiently pro-consumer, pro-safety in its drug approval process, does a nice job of summing up the issues (and poking holes in the FDA’s lame defenses). One particularly fine observation: Let’s not forget that a provision in the FDA […]
Read more...Mark Thoma’s blog featured The Commonwealth Fund’s latest comparative survey of health care in six countries – Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US – and the US comes out dead last. Having lived in Australia, which gets a rank of 3 at a cost less than half of America’s (also true […]
Read more...One of the obstacles often cited in reining in US medical costs is that doctor salaries would have to fall, and therefore good people would no longer come into the profession (they’d either launch a hedge fund or go into the unregulated, better paid part of the business, like plastic surgery). But that assumes that […]
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