Everyone now and then, you meet a person who might be described as a “bullshitter”; Robert Goldberg, PhD, is one such person. Dr. Goldberg has a surprising talent for saying things that simply don’t represent facts, as if they did. Hearing him speak was like listening to the play-by-play for a second-rate magic show, or [...]
Tue, July 21 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
If you take Humira, Remicade, or any similar biologic drug, or if you have any illness that might need to be treated with a biologic, you might be interested in this post from the Wall Street Journal. Look at these numbers:
J&J is already a big player in the market with Remicade, which brought in $1.1 [...]
Thu, July 16 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
This striking graph compares the rise in veterinary costs to the rise in human health costs over the last twenty odd years. It was created by Andrew Gibbs of the American Enterprise Institute, and he argues it shows there’s nothing wrong with the increase in human health spending; rather, the problem is the level of [...]
Tue, July 14 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
The Institutes of Medicine just published its list of 100 priorities (.pdf) for comparative effectiveness research, the result of a process that began earlier this year with an online questionnaire and public hearings.
Among the top 25 items – ie, the highest priority – were the following:
Compare the effectiveness of dissemination and translation techniques to facilitate [...]
Wed, July 1 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
I emailed Dr. David Himmelstein, the corresponding author on the study of medical bankruptcy that I criticized last week. In our first exchange, I offered to run his data; he replied that he didn’t have institutional review board approval to release the data, which I figured would be the case.
So I replied with an extract [...]
Mon, June 8 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
This is what I’m talking about; look at these headlines:
The CNN headline is okay: you can say that upwards of 60% of bankruptcies are linked to medical bills, even if linked means the medical bills might account for less than 1/9th of the total debt. And clicking the Reuters link gave me the headline, “Medical [...]
Fri, June 5 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
Heard about that new study of medical bankruptcies? I don’t think it proves what it says it does. A lot of the blogging on the study has apparently been in response to the press release, but here’s the link to the actual .pdf of the study. Reading that document raises more questions that it answers.
The [...]
Thu, June 4 2009 » Uncategorized » 3 Comments
Ezra Klein posts a rundown of a new Kaiser/NPR poll (.pdf) on health care, from which he concludes:
This, I think, gets back to the need to change the behavior of doctors rather than consumers. Patients mainly know to ask for what their doctors tells them to ask for. That’s a bit less true in the [...]
Tue, April 28 2009 » Uncategorized » 1 Comment
One more post on Virginia Postrel, and then I will let it go. First, at the risk of being too macabre, Postrel is only two years out of her cancer fight; as far as I know, most epidemiologists would not consider that “survival”. So, yes, Herceptin might have help put her in remission, but she’s [...]
Tue, April 21 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
In his response to my post about Billy Tauzin and the patient’s perspective, Ken Johnson said:
Fortunately, both of you continue to beat the odds.
He meant me and Mr. Tauzin: I have Crohn’s, Mr. Tauzin had stomach cancer. You can read more about how Tauzin beat the odds in a previous post; now I want to [...]
Fri, March 27 2009 » Uncategorized » No Comments
A novel crime against decency by Duncan Cross
