Seniors are overmedicated. Ninety percent of seniors, age 65 or above, take a prescription drug. The average number of drugs seniors take increased 43%, from 3 in 2000 to 4.3 in 2020. Too often seniors get on prescription drugs and never get off them. They just add to the total over the years.
Category: Doctors & Hospitals
Wednesday Links
- Next year, the number of counties with only one company providing Obamacare will jump from 72 to 146.
- Clinicians make over 100 million specialty referrals annually in the U.S., yet research shows that as many as half are never completed.
- The United States currently recommends immunizing all children against 17 diseases. In Denmark it’s only 10. (NYT)
- One in ten participants in Canada and Poland were persuaded to change their candidate preference after interacting with an AI chatbot tasked with converting them.
- A new trend in Christmas gifts: health tracking devices. (WSJ)
- “Some 50 million Americans struggle with drug and alcohol addiction… drug overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45 years old.” (NYT)
Monday Links
- The main effect of affirmative action: discrimination against Asians.
- Trump announces in deals with nine companies to cut prices on drugs that treat Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hepatitis B and C, HIV and certain cancers.
- Study: Most psychiatric disorders are not genetically separate diseases. Instead, they share a large amount of the same genetic risk, which clusters into a small number of underlying genetic “families.”
- Why health care needs AI: Since the turn of the century, hospital prices are up 271%; computer software is down 73.3%.
- Why estimates of a declining fertility rate might be wrong.
- A decade ago, about 40 artificial intelligence systems were approved for clinical use. Today, more than 1,200 are FDA-approved.