Healthcare policy

Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home. Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo. New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…

After I wrote in my Atlantic article about getting my serotonin transporter gene assayed (which revealed that I carry that gene's apparently more plastic short-short form), I started getting a lot of email â several a week â from readers asking how to have their SERT gene tested. This led to an interesting hunt. It was a hard question to answer. I couldn't just tell people to do what I did, for a psychiatric researcher/MD I'd known for years, who specializes in depression and serotonin, had done mine as a sort of favor to science and journalism. That researcher also stood by, had I needed…

from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog. Brain and Mind Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning. As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…

Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs. Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things) While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…

Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller. Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, "It's often my first stop -- never my last." Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey and brings to us The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile. He found that readers are going digital, but not to ebooks, possibly because they still love paper books, and some other good stuff. While Carl's Mac was crunching the data, he peeked Through the Sexual Looking Glass. A new…

BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development.   Slate's Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried women. The Bay State's AG finds that Massachusetts Hospital Costs Not Connected To Quality Of Care Ezra Klein asks a good question: Was Medicare popular when it passed? Apparently not. Jeff Jarvis…

The Science of Reading is the Harvard library's nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science. BBC News - Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen       Indiana Jones & the Ants - The New York Review of Books In her review of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill, in the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Margaret Atwood encourages anyone interested in ants to "take a look at the daring eco-…

We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust. Genetic material Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened. The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective Culture and the human genome From the excellent A Replicated Typo. (That's gene humor, is 'replicated typo.') Going to J School State of the Media, By the Numbers : CJR A review of a review: Columbia Journalism reviews Pew's "State of the Media" report. Eye-popping numbers and…

Helen Branswell, ace flu reporter, delivers the goodsl: TORONTO A landmark study looking at how to limit the spread of influenza has shown what experts have long believed but hadn't until now proved: Giving flu shots to kids helps protect everyone in a community from the virus. The study, led by Dr. Mark Loeb of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., showed the risk of catching the flu was lowered by nearly 60 per cent in communities where a substantial portion of kids aged three to 15 got flu shots. That level of indirect protection is nearly as good as what healthy adults might expect…

We're not on health care now," Mr. Reid said. "We've talked a lot about it in the past. via nytimes.com With friends like this ... Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

We don't have a government-run system. But our system is so expensive that our government's partial role is pricier than the whole of government-run systems. via voices.washingtonpost.com Absorb that: Our supposedly efficient supposedly free-market healthcare system costs us more in government spending alone than other countries spend on government-run systems. Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

Pardon my light posting lately. Flat out with big projects, travel, and the stacking of the wood for the winter. This, however, is what has jumped out at me from the intertubez of late: Meet the New Health Care Reform, Same as the Old Health Care Reform At Top Schools, More Than Half the Profs Have Industry Ties US: Shortage of flu vaccines leaves healthcare workers vulnerable Our lack of readyness for this thing is sobering -- as is the complacency about same. In my own town, our much-delayed swine flu vaccines for kids is finally being administered this coming Monday. How'd I hear this? It…

A bit early yet, but as I'm traveling the rest of the month, here's my top 5 over the last month. 1. The Weird History of Adjuvants, in which we ponder the inclusion of eye of newt and such in vaccines, and the strangeness of the fact that dirty is good. 2. Why is the swine flu vaccine so late? Who are you to ask such a question? was a close runner-up despite appearing only yesterday. Includes bonus trash-talk from a Canadian. 3. Embargo? Embargo? The case of the missing swine flu paper In which rumor runs not just amok, but quite a bit of policy as well. A particularly interesting…

The healthcare debate in Lincoln, NE, earlier this year. photo: Nat Harnik, AP, via the NY Times The tone of discussions of reform in both Congress and the blogosphere has changed remarkably over the last few days. It's gone from pessimistic to optimistic, and from a sense of retreat and a whittling away of substantive reform toward a careful expansion of reform -- including the inclusion of a public option. Many a slip between cup and lip, of course, and things could (and almost certianly will) bounce around some more yet. But it's certainly getting more interesting. My own short list of…

Ezra Klein thinks it might. "We're America," Max Baucus likes to say. "Which means we have to write a uniquely American solution." But the health-care solution that actually seems to be emerging in Congress -- which looks like the health-care solutions proposed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards during the campaign -- isn't all that unique. Not only does it look like another country's health-care system, but it also looks like a European country's health-care system. Quel Horreur! In truth, it's seeming more and more likely that America is going to go Dutch. And that's not a…

Some things you can't hear too many times. By Jacob Goldstein If there's any way out of our current health-care morass, it's this: In health care, more expensive care is often no better than less expensive care. We were reminded of this fact by a front-page story in this morning's WSJ, which points out that Pennsylvania is the rare state that requires hospitals to publicly report a wide range of data -- and those data show hospitals with good outcomes are often cheaper than hospitals with bad outcomes, even after you adjust for the patient mix. via blogs.wsj.com Posted via web…

The morning papers are filled with relevant health reform stories, but two stand out. They weren't reported by journalists, but were experience-based opinion pieces offered by people on the front lines of delivering and insuring health care. The first comes from the Washington Post, where a family practice physician reports on the battery of tests he received after checking into the local emergency room for excruciating eye pain while on vacation. Despite an ultimately accurate self-diagnosis of shingles, he submits to his physicians' orders for an ever escalating battery of tests. My…

A few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth to a daughter, her second child. A few weeks into the child's life, it became apparent she was suffering from cerebral palsy. Not long after, my friend, whom I'll call Carol, bumped into her ob/gyn doctor on the street and told him about her daughter's diagnosis. In a good world, the moral and legal context of such a conversation would encourage the doctor to express sympathy. But the doctor, looking stricken, and clearly terrified about being sued, immediately said, "Well I hope you don't think it was because of anything I did." Carol, who was…

Never know what'll top the charts. Top post was a post I put up in January, "Pfizer takes $2.3 billion offl-label marketing fine." That post reported the news (via FiercePharma) that Pfizer had tucked away in its financial disclosure forms a $2.3 billion charge to end the federal investigation into allegations of off-label promotions of its Cox-2 painkillers, including Bextra. (Lot of money ... but it didn't quite wipe out the company's 2008 net income.) The company had set aside the money as part of a deal it was negotiating Justiice. Finalizing the deal, however, took until September. At…

As Congress debates healthcare reform, we often hear that hopes for comprehensive reform -- fundamental changes, like a public plan or a radical, Netherlands-like overhaul of regulation -- simply aren't realistic. I hope to explore later why this seems so to those casting the votes. In the meantime, a couple reports make an interesting juxtaposition: The first reorients the context of, if not the debate, then the original reasons the subject came up. The WSJ Health Blog reports briefly on some truly alarming projections of healthcare economics 10 years from now. A sampler: In every state,…