Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
If you observe two things occuring, how can you know whether event A causes event B. For instance, consider the case of patients who use a given treatment and finding that they have better health outcomes. While this relationship could be causal in nature, it may not be. For instance, if only people with higher…
Oftentimes, you will ready a study that says, treatment A reduces the rate of something by X%, or the treatment reduces the risk by Y%, or reduces the odds by Z%. These are basically the same thing, right? That is not entirely correct. While all these concepts summarize the frequency or likelihood of something occuring…
The placebo effect is well-known in medicine. Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients — especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence — will improve. Tell someone a normal…