Have you ever consulted Dr. Google? When I first began researching Internet-based medicine 25 years ago everyone was amazed that something like 100 million people per year were searching the Internet for health information. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Internet to learn more about one’s own health conditions. In the early days doctors hated it. Articles appeared in medical journals lamenting all the misinformation patients would encounter and the waste of doctors’ time discussing or refuting what their patients found. Looking back these fears seem ludicrous. Respected health care systems, like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, sponsor websites that provide basic but useful information about health and medicine.
Category: Direct Primary Care
Why It’s So Hard to Find a Primary Care Physician
Years ago I had a great primary care physician. One day I drove to his office and saw him assisting an elderly man walk to his car. Dr. Ingram could have asked his nurse to assist the patient. He could even have ignored the frail patient’s unsteady gait and let him fend for himself. Yet, Dr. Ingram personally helped his elderly patient make it to his car. That impressed me immensely. Not only did he treat the man’s health complaint, he made sure his patient got safely out of the office and on his way home. Nobody paid him for that, he did it out of his desire to help people.
Tuesday Links
- Labor Day good news: the number of hours worked per year, per worker has fallen by more than one-third over the last century.
- As your hourly wage rises, so does the opportunity cost of leisure.
- NYT on the reason A.I. is an existential threat: it will usher in an new era of neoliberalism.
- Almost 20 scholars offer remedies for revitalizing conservatism. A bird’s eye view suggests they all want us to stand athwart history and yell, “STOP.”
- Enslaved Africans were responsible for introducing the practice of smallpox inoculation throughout the Americas by the 1700s. Interesting, but speculative.
- Even the proponents of colonoscopies and breast cancer screening think they only lower cancer death by 20%. HT: Arnold Kling
PreCrime Interdiction: Can Future Criminals be Identified in Kindergarten?
A new economic analysis claims to identify future societal costs of kids with behavior problems in kindergarten (summary here). The analysis estimated costs to society in terms of crime, excess health needs and lost productivity.