- Can drinking water lower your stress level?
- 85% of patients say compassion is more important than price when choosing a doctor.
- 71% of patients say they have gone to doctors who were not compassionate.
- Chatbots are helping doctors find the words to break bad news or express concerns about a patient’s suffering. (NYT)
- Zuckerberg: Establishment asked to censor COVID-19 posts that ended up being true.
- Historians rate Woodrow Wilson as a near-great president and Warren Harding as among the worst. Graboyes: the reverse is true.
Category: John C. Goodman
The Downside of Wildfires
Matt Yglesias writes:
There’s extensive evidence that the fine particulate matter that’s floating in the air on high pollution days impairs cognitive abilities. On high-pollution days, investors make worse trading decisions, baseball umpires blow more calls, chess players make more blunders, and British MPs speak at a lower grade level. This is also true of work that’s normally thought of as less-skilled — we see lower efficiency at pear-packing factories on high-pollution days. Prolonged exposure to pollution increases the risks of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Saturday Links
- A benefit of wildfires: they make temperatures unseasonably cool.
- Study: CMS delay in approving treatments for Alzheimer’s disease impose a social cost ranging from $13.1 billion to $545.6 billion. Part of these losses stems from increased private and public healthcare spending ranging from $6.8 billion to $284.5 billion.
- Hospital finances: profits and cash reserves are up; charity care is not.
- Another SS horror story: Social Security demands return of $6,000 from an 81-year-old widow for mistaken payment 45 years ago.