Blog Posts (15)
April 18, 2013
Is it the white coat? That’s what I wondered in medical school when I would find patients asking me for advice on topics they simply had to know more about than me. Mothers would ask me how to get their newborn babies to sleep through the night,...
April 5, 2013
In this two-minute video, I explained why it can be hazardous to take a guess at what your lifetime risk is of experiencing cancer. I describe a study I conducted with, among others, Angie Fagerlin. This is one of my favorite studies, because it is rea...
March 26, 2013
According to a CDC study, about 1/3 of American families either struggled to pay medical bills in 2011 or outright couldn’t pay them!
Not surprisingly, this problem is especially big for people with limited financial resources:
Just another piece o...
March 18, 2013
“I can fix this.”
The neurosurgeon was nothing if not confident.
“The cyst is pushing on your spinal cord. If it continues to expand, it will damage your nerves and you may lose the ability to walk. But I can remove the cyst, and cure...
March 7, 2013
KARAN: You referred to patient education earlier, not just in terms of treatment information but also the types of questions to be asking. But what about the former? Our generation is definitely comfortable using technology to look up health informatio...
March 6, 2013
In a recent Atlantic post, James Hamblin reports on the increasing frequency with which surgeons perform hysterectomies with the assistance of robots. Here is a picture from that post:
To be clear: robotic surgery doesn’t mean a robot performs the...
March 5, 2013
KARAN: Though I hope our readers all read your book, for those who haven’t just yet, I want to start with an example that touches on the issues it discusses. I recently got a bad ankle sprain. The following week, I went to a local orthopedic surgeon...
March 4, 2013
Before patients can become savvy consumers of healthcare, they need information about their healthcare choices. Too often, such information is nearly impossible to get, especially when it requires doctors to give patients useful statistics about thin...
February 21, 2013
In a recent blog post, David Berreby writes about some work that George Loewenstein and I have done on people’s inability to predict how illness or disability will make them feel, and what this inability means for things like “pain and suffering”...
February 15, 2013
Since the recession hit hard a few years ago, health care expenditures have slowed dramatically. It now looks like, at least for medications, cost increases are making a comeback. For instance:
Nexium, a heartburn drug, had a 7.8% price hike to a $26...
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