Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Conventional wisdom holds that it takes 17 years from medical innovation to adoption in the real-world. However, with advances in information technology, perhaps adoption timelines have shortened. A paper by DiCicca et al. (2024) examines how new clinical trial evidence on breech births impact practice patterns. Specifically, they note that: Using the United States Birth…
Technology is amazing. From The Economist: Fourteen years ago, Melanie Reid, a journalist, fell off a horse and broke her neck. The injury to her spinal cord left her paralysed, limiting the function of her four limbs and torso—a condition known as tetraplegia. For more than a decade her left hand was incapable of either…
The 4 pillars of medical ethics are: Beneficence means that practitioners should act as they believe is in the best interest of the patient. Unlike non-maleficence, it goes beyond simply doing no harm and encourages to actively help others. Beneficence is important because it ensures that healthcare professionals consider individual circumstances and remember that what…
The 2022 Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Svante Pääbo. Unlike many former winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Dr. Pääbo never actually invented any specific medicine or class of medicine. Rather the award was given “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. The press release from the Nobel…
Interesting study from Taylor et al. (2022), which aims to examine to what extent psychotic experiences become less heritable when adolescents are exposed to more environmental risk factors? The methods are outlined as follows: This twin study, conducted from December 1, 2014, to August 31, 2020, included a UK-based sample of twin pairs aged 16…
David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian have won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.” Here is a summary of Professor Julius’ contribution from the BBC: Prof David Julius’s breakthrough, at the University of California, San Francisco, came from investigating the burning pain…
When should you schedule an appointment with your doctor or dentist? I had always thought that being one of the first appointments of the day was beneficial because the doctor’s aren’t yet tired from a long day of work. For instance, I try to schedule my dentist appointments early in the morning just for this…
This is the question a paper by Chambers et al. (2019) aims to answer. The authors analyzed coverage decision of 204 drugs (or 409 unique drug–indication pairs based on information from the Tufts Medical Center Specialty Drug Evidence and Coverage (SPEC) database. This database contains coverage information for 17 or the top 20 health plans…
As an economist, I typically measure treatment value based on clinical trials, real-world data and other sources. However, sometimes medicine is more an art than a science. Consider the cases reported in the Early Modern Medicine blog of the man with the elephant nose: In sixteenth-century Leuven, a troubled man sent for a physician to…
That is the topic of a recent paper by Catillon, Cutler and Getzen (2018). In 1800, life expectancy in the US was only 43 years; by 2014, this number had increased to 79 years. Using vital statistics data from the U.S. generally and specifically from the state of Massachusetts, they find the following: …there is…