The Placebo Blocker
Courtesy of xkcd.
Category: Miscellaneous
On being well-informed
HT: Justin Wolfers via The Incidental Economist.
Health Benefits of a Vacation
The Healthcare Economist will be off through Labor Day, taking a vacation to San Diego. Inspired by this trip, below is a study that finds that people who take vacations are healthier. Although not a randomized trial, this evidence is suggestive. The Huffington Post paraphrases: In a study of 13,000 middle-aged men at risk for heart disease, those who…
3000th Blog Post
Today I am writing the 3,000th post at Healthcare Economist. I started this site way back in January 2006 with this post and the site has grown ever since. Every post is authored by myself, Jason Shafrin. In case you’re late to this party, below I recap some of my most popular posts. The “Healthcare Around the…
The role of coaches and student-athletes
Today I take a break from my traditional blogging on healthcare and briefly discuss two issues related to student-athletes. These questions include: Are coaches employers or educators? Should students get unlimited meal plans? I discuss each below. Much of the content is drawn largely from one of my favorite non-healthcare blogs, Wages of Wins. Are…
The importance of genes
…may be smaller than previously thought for many chronic conditions. A paper by Thompson (2014) uses data from 125,000 parent-child pairs to determine that: children with a parent who has a specific chronic health condition are at least 100% more likely to have the same condition themselves. To assess the role of genetic mechanisms in generating…
Group of Death?
Typically, when the Healthcare Economist talks about death, it deals with sad topics: mortality rates, preventable deaths, etc. Today, I will discuss a happier death-related topic: the feared “Group of Death”. The World Cup Groups were unveiled today and popular press is claiming that the U.S. team is placed in the Group of Death. There…
Why is health journalism is often wrong?
One of the reasons is that health-related academic research is often wrong. Biostatisticians have studied the question of just how frequently published studies come up with wrong answers. A highly regarded researcher in this subfield of medical wrongness is John Ioannidis, who heads the Stanford Prevention Research Center, among other appointments. Using several different…
How to reduce compliants
Simple, increase the amount of occupied time. For a more detailed explanation, check out this article from NPR to find the answer. With respect towards complaints waiting for baggage at airports. A few years ago, The New York Times reported that airline passengers in Houston were complaining bitterly about how long they had to wait…
Using American Idol to Choose Kidney Transplant Recipients?
Don’t laugh. De Grote Donorshow was a real show that aired in the Netherlands that used an American Idol-style public voting system to determine who should be a worthy receipt of a kidney (see a YouTube video). Or was it? The program involved a supposedly terminally ill 37-year-old woman donating a kidney to one of…