- What made the California fires worse: environmental protection for the smelt.
- Jimmy Carter’s boldest deregulation idea never happened.
- Lessons from all the past efforts to cut wasteful government spending.
- There is no relationship between climate change and wildfires.
- How long we live is 25% determined by our genes and 75% determined by lifestyle and environment. (NYT)
- Claim: breastfeeding could save 800,000 child lives a year.
- The virtual cell: “Scientists are now designing computer programs that may unlock the ability to simulate human cells, giving researchers the ability to predict the effect of a drug, mutation, virus, or any other change in the body, and in turn making physical experiments more targeted and likelier to succeed.”
Category: Consumer-Driven Health Care
AI Medical: Would You Consult Dr. Alexa or Dr. Siri
These so-called virtual assistants are algorithms, and function as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). In that regard, you ask questions, and they respond similarly to how an actual assistant would, except much faster. Someday algorithms like Siri and Alexa could provide high quality health advice.
Friday Links
- Medical debt no longer to appear on credit reports.
- Bad news: FDA threatens drug companies over communicating the benefits of off label uses of drugs.
- Correcting 3 myths about thalidomide:
- The FDA learned about the problems with thalidomide at the same time as the public.
- Far from being banished, thalidomide and some close variants are available and widely used today,
- Drugs today are no safer than they were in the thalidomide era.
- Why so many people hate health insurance companies.
- Why we need health insurance companies.
- Bidenomics: The White House values health gains resulting from the government’s climate regulations 10 times higher than identical improvements resulting from private sector medical innovation.
- A blow-by-blow description of how the 5 presidents interacted at the Carter funeral.
Thursday Links
- Trudeau’s legacy: Canada’s per capita income has fallen to below 70% of what it is in the U.S.
- Do hospital mergers damage local economies and result in an increase in deaths by suicide and drug overdoses? Maybe not.
- Telemedicine under Medicare gets a 3-month extension.
- Each year, 120,000 die from snake bites and about 400,000 lose limbs to amputation.
- Study: Sugary drinks were linked to 2.2 million additional cases of Type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million cases of cardiovascular disease in 2020, with a disproportionate share of those cases concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
- Wastewater, even after treatment to make it drinkable, contains high levels of forever chemicals.
- Evolution of Part D plans over a decade: more prior authorization and step therapy requirements