What would you do if your son wanted to be a girl? Some doctors have a new and troubling answer.
Author: Hanna Rosin | Source: The Atlantic (November2008) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Individuality, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty.
Risk Compensation
One of the most important problems undermining the pandemic response has been the mistrust and paternalism that some public-health agencies … [ Read more ]
Author: Zeynep Tufekci | Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
Forty-two percent of Americans say that humans were created in their present form within the past 10,000 years — a percentage that hasn’t changed much since 1982, when Gallup started polling views on evolution.
Several lines of evidence, from the fossil record, comparative anatomy, and genetics, tell another story. But you don’t have to read all the research to find signs of our evolutionary history — … [ Read more ]
Sources: Vox, YouTube (March 17, 2016) | Subjects: Health & Medicine, Math & Science
The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now … [ Read more ]
Author: Ed Yong | Source: The Atlantic (August 5, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine
Last Updated: April 11, 2022
Here is a list of COVID-19 tracking tools and other useful articles and resources about Coronavirus and COVID-19. I don’t claim this to be authoritative or anywhere near complete. It’s merely a collection of the better things I have read over the past months. I compiled this list mostly for my own reference but if it can be of value to … [ Read more ]
Subject: Health & Medicine
Why are economically struggling blue collar voters rejecting a party that offers to expand public safety net programs? The reality is that the bulk of needy white voters are not interested in the public safety net. They want to restore their access to an older safety net, one much more generous, dignified, and stable than the public system – the one most well-employed voters still … [ Read more ]
Author: Chris Ladd | Source: Forbes (March 13, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
[Tim] Ferriss distinguishes between two kinds of secrets — those we keep because we fear fleeting mortification, like accounts of embarrassing things we’ve done in sub-optimal moments, and dark secrets that paralyze us with deep shame, “the shadows we keep covered for fear of unraveling our lives.”
[…]
“It’s easy to blow things out of proportion, to get lost in the story you tell yourself, and to … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Popova, Tim Ferriss | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2016) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Why do we get allergies? No one has a firm answer, but what is arguably the leading theory suggests that allergies are a misfiring of a defence against parasitic worms. In the industrialised world, where such infections are rare, this system reacts in an exaggerated fashion to harmless targets, making us miserable in the process.
[Ruslan] Medzhitov thinks that’s wrong. Allergies are not simply a biological … [ Read more ]
Author: Carl Zimmer | Source: Mosaic (April 6, 2015) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine
Healthcare is a huge part of the economy and has been a huge public policy issue and political problem for many years. After the election of 2016 the expectation was that full Republican control of government would lead to the repeal of Obamacare (Affordable Care Act) that the party had been championing since immediately after it became law. As of now that still hasn’t happened, … [ Read more ]
Subjects: Articles & Links, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
The bills before Congress get it wrong—what’s needed is incremental reform in a conservative direction.
Author: David Frum | Source: The Atlantic (June 30, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
The cost of health care in the United States is spiraling upward while politicians continue to bicker over how to fix a broken system. Elisabeth Rosenthal has a sweeping view of the problem because she has seen it from all sides. Rosenthal is a Harvard Medical School graduate who practiced emergency medicine before becoming a journalist. She covered health care and other topics for The … [ Read more ]
Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal | Source: Knolwedge@Wharton (June 2, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
The challenge of providing affordable, high-quality health care for all Americans is the subject of furious debate in the nation’s capital. University of Pennsylvania’s Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the medical ethics and health policy department and a health care management professor at Wharton, helped craft the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration. He puts forward some ideas for improving the system in his book, … [ Read more ]
Author: Ezekiel Emanuel | Source: Knolwedge@Wharton (June 22, 2017) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy
We humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another.
[…]
At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard … [ Read more ]
Author: Tobias Stone | Source: Medium (July 23, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, International, Military | War | Peace, Politics & Public Policy
Description:
THE SOURCE: “Immigration and the American Obesity Epidemic” by Lingxin Hao and Julie J. H. Kim, in International Migration Review, Summer 2009.
Excerpt:
The average immigrant is slimmer than the average native-born American and stays that way for some 10 years after coming to the United States.
The typical native-born American male, 5’8″ tall, weighs 187 pounds. This makes him officially seriously overweight, according to the Centers … [ Read more ]
Authors: Julie J. H. Kim, Lingxin Hao | Source: The Wilson Quarterly (Autumn2009) | Subjects: Articles & Links, Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Immigration, International