“most people don’t simply want to live until 110. They want to extend the amount of time they live free of serious disease, a concept known as health span. That’s why the most sensible approach is to reduce the toll of three major age-related diseases: cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease. It may be less flashy, but it’s more attainable than ever. It’s estimated that at least 80 percent of cardiovascular disease cases, 40 percent of cancer cases and 45 percent of Alzheimer’s cases are preventable. Even with a long lag — these diseases can each … Read More
All posts by Anupam
Have American elites—influential journalists, powerful policymakers and other cultural arbiters—learned the lessons of 2020-21? Do they want to? “by 2020, in response to a global pandemic, the dominant part of America’s political and media class had turned the imperative to “follow the science” into an expression of almost religious reverence for the judgment of experts. Many educated and otherwise intelligent Americans, meanwhile, made a single, bespectacled government scientist their idol: “In Fauci We Trust” read their lawn signs and bumper stickers. Their faith was misplaced. Credentialed experts, especially those in the fields of epidemiology and public health, had tied themselves … Read More
The Luddites lost the fight to save their livelihoods. As the threat of artificial intelligence looms, can we do any better? Excerpt – The Luddites rejected the moral and political authority of a system that had abandoned long-held principles of fairness, quality, and mutual obligation. Under feudalism and mercantile capitalism, Britain’s rigid class structure placed the gentry at the top, merchants and professionals (such as doctors, parsons, and lawyers) in the middle, and the vast majority in the “lower orders.” Yet this social hierarchy was accompanied by labor-market regulations—both formal and informal—that provided some measure of reciprocity. Skilled trades were … Read More
“What exactly does it mean to know yourself? For neuroscientists, the answer is straightforward enough: Self-knowledge is the combination of two forms of information, direct appraisals (your own self-beliefs) and reflected appraisals (your perception of how others view you). The first generally employs the parts of the brain associated with a first-person perspective, such as the posterior cingulate; the second with regions associated with emotion and memory, such as the insula, orbitofrontal, and temporal cortex. [..] they [oracles at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi] no doubt meant “Know thyself accurately.” That is a much taller order, requiring a huge … Read More
A plan was set in motion with no idea of how to stop it. “While federal public-health officials made recommendations regarding schools, the actual closures were carried out at the state and local levels, in response to misplaced public fears and aggressive campaigning by teachers’ unions. Randi Weingarten, the high-profile head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a February 8, 2021, New York Times article that she hoped things would be “as normal as possible” by the following fall. Class-action lawsuits in multiple states had been filed on behalf of children with special needs on the claim that … Read More
“Surgical problems often involve rapid decision-making with limited time for deliberation and require proficiency discussing interventions ranging from elective outpatient procedures to an emergency operation in the setting of life-limiting illness. For patients and families, the concept of surgery may incite strong emotions, with many discussions occurring without a previously established patient-surgeon relationship. [..] Attend to Emotion Receiving bad news such as a new cancer diagnosis or an unexpected postoperative complication often takes patients and families by surprise. Without warning about difficult news, they may fail to process what has happened. To anticipate and attend to their emotions, surgeons can … Read More
“The results Lilly announced came from a clinical trial involving 559 people with Type 2 diabetes who took the new pill or a placebo for 40 weeks. In patients who took orforglipron, blood sugar levels fell by 1.3 to 1.6 percent, about the same amount in that time period experienced by patients taking Ozempic and Mounjaro in unrelated trials. For 65 percent of people taking the new pill, blood sugar levels dropped into the normal range. Patients on the new pill also lost weight — up to 16 pounds without reaching a plateau at the study’s end. Their weight loss … Read More
The consumer-price index tells us nothing about changes in affordability. We need another measure. “For decades, business advisory firms such as Boston Consulting Group and Bain & Co. have documented “learning curves” across a range of industries, from mining to microchips. These curves, which track performance improvements over time, demonstrate that real prices of goods and services tend to drop between 20% and 30% with every doubling of units sold. Going beyond economies of scale and efficiency, learning curves feed on growth of entrepreneurial knowledge, springing from improvements in every facet of production, design, marketing and management. Crucially, the curve … Read More
MIT economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan says it is in humans’ power to put AI on a path to help us rather than replace us “[WSJ] What’s wrong with how AI tools are being developed and deployed? [Mullainathan] Every time Anthropic or OpenAI or Google releases a new model, you’ll notice they always talk about, oh, we did better on these benchmarks. That’s the way they keep score. In many ways those benchmarks dictate what these models are asked to be good at. We pick an area and then we say, “Can this thing do this as well as people?” So … Read More
“Health care spending as a proportion of total national spending has been flat, at approximately 17%, since the late 2000s, meaning that health care cost growth hasn’t exceeded growth in the gross domestic product, on average. Per-beneficiary Medicare spending grew at an average rate of 6.6% per year between 1987 and 2005, but by 2.2% per year between 2013 and 2019. [..] low growth has persisted well beyond the Great Recession for all types of insurance. Putting aside the spike in health care spending that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, growth in per-capita national health expenditures has been low by … Read More