The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour offers an on-the-ground look at the mental health crisis teenagers are facing. “[New York Times’ Ezra Klein] [..] What has always been difficult about being a teenager? [Clinical psychologist and author of “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers” and “Under Pressure” Lisa Damour] Well, we have a few cardinal rules in psychology, and one is that change equals stress. And if you look at an 11-year-old, which is typically when we mark the beginning of adolescence, and you look at a, say, 17 or 18-year-old, so someone who’s pretty far down the line of being a … Read More
All posts by Anupam
“In 2023, just under 2 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer. Many will endure multiple CT and MRI studies and intensive medical care, including surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or immunotherapy. Fortunately, advances in treatment and novel therapies have steadily improved survival following a cancer diagnosis. Cancer death rates have declined by 27% over the past 20 years. Unfortunately, many American cancer patients also face an unexpected adverse effect: financial toxicity. The costs of cancer are literally killing patients. But there is a clear solution. Patients diagnosed with cancer should not be responsible for any deductibles, copays, or other cost-sharing. [..] … Read More
“In her newest book, “Saving Time,” Jenny Odell, a visual artist and the author of the best-selling “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” argues that standard ways of thinking about time — particularly regarding work and what time is owed and to whom — can obscure potentially more humane and expansive, less self-centered notions of time, views that go beyond restrictive notions of efficiency or work-life balance. “I’m really trying to work against an instrumental view of time,” says Odell, who is 37, “where it’s either something that is going to help you or hurt you.” [..] [Marchese] … Read More
“Data and Methods Data We used data from the American Hospital Association (AHA) IT [information technology] Supplement Survey fielded between April and September 2021, an annual survey of hospitals on their IT capabilities and experiences. The AHA IT supplement is sent to Chief Information Officers and completed by those individuals or their delegates. [..] We combined this data with information on hospital characteristics from the 2020 AHA Annual Survey, the most recent year available. [..] Perceived information blocking [..] For health IT developers, hospitals were asked if they had experienced information blocking via price; contractual language; artificial technical, process or resource … Read More
From the article abstract: “[Objective] [..] We developed machine-learning models to detect CKD [chronic kidney disease] without blood collection, predicting an eGFR [estimated glomerular filtration rate in ml/min/1.73 m2] less than 60 (eGFR60 model) or 45 (eGFR45 model) using a urine dipstick test. [Materials and Methods] The electronic health record data (n = 220 018) obtained from university hospitals were used for XGBoost-derived model construction. The model variables were age, sex, and 10 measurements from the urine dipstick test. The models were validated using health checkup center data (n = 74 380) and nationwide public data (KNHANES data, n = 62 945) for the general population in Korea. [Results] The … Read More
“In his telling, Medicine 2.0 is oriented toward addressing the four chronic diseases of aging that will probably be the cause of most of our deaths, but only after they become problems. (Those chronic diseases are heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases and Type 2 diabetes and related metabolic dysfunction.) Medicine 3.0, though, aims to proactively prevent those things for as long as possible and allow us to maintain better health deeper into old age. How exactly? Not through any techno-fantasies of biohacking or wonder-drug supplements but largely with highly rigorous, detailed and personalized monitoring and treatment of our nutrition, … Read More
“At a 1992 conference on birth control, an official on the F.D.A.’s fertility and maternal health drugs advisory committee, Philip Corfman, noted that the birth control pill is safer than aspirin, which is available over the counter. The F.D.A. subsequently announced plans to convene a hearing to consider moving oral contraceptives over-the-counter. It was believed that this would greatly expand access to birth control by bypassing doctors, to whom millions of Americans then — as still now — had little access. But, as the historian Heather Munro Prescott has recounted, the hearing was canceled at least partly because of criticism from … Read More
Breakthroughs are the product of persistence, not magic. Excerpt – About 10 years ago, the management professors Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren encountered a paradox. On the one hand, we recognize that other people are more likely to make creative breakthroughs when they persist. Thomas Edison—for many the personification of creative genius—famously experimented with hundreds of materials before inventing the light bulb. On the other hand, when we feel stuck on a problem, most of us fail to see how successful we’ll be if we just keep trying. We tend to believe that our creativity plummets over time—that if our … Read More
“We used Elevance Health’s in-network pricing data and medical claims data. We focused on in-network prices because these are the prices negotiated by the payer, and out-of-network providers represent a small percentage of use for planned procedures. The formatting of the released data files follows the specifications provided by CMS. We limited our analysis to one state, Colorado, and one month, August 2022, to illustrate the concepts. [..] We split the prices into two components, the professional price and the facility price. Notably, these two components may not be the only costs associated with a procedure as there are often other … Read More
“When we are stuck on a hard problem, it usually isn’t because we can’t find the answer; it’s that we don’t even know the right question. Imagine that you are trying to figure out how fast food can make you healthier: You are overlooking the right first question—which is whether fast food can do this. That is precisely the problem with agonizing over finding the right job and career. “What am I supposed to do to find a career that makes me happy?” is not the right first question. The right first question is “Who am I?” Only after we answer that can we understand … Read More