Guys, let's distract RFK Jr from his vaccine agenda by telling him about Naftalovich et al's idea to use PTFE (teflon) as a zero-calorie ingestible bulking agent in food. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19…

Question for John McWhorter and other linguists: is it ever possible to shift a word back to an earlier meaning, or is it a fool's errand, and a better strategy is to find or coin a new term? An example of one I'd love to get back: liberal / liberalism / liberalization.

Debate is a cornerstone of a free society, which is why we're looking to hold debates on campus this year, tackling difficult health policy questions. We're looking for students to participate and donors to help us make these events a reality. Get in touch to learn more!

"Neither a flourishing life nor a healthy one can be given to an individual; each human being is necessarily and unavoidably responsible for creating his own character and life." (Rasmussen and Den Uyl, 1991; cited by R.M. Sade)

In healthcare, there's often more to the story. Here's a piece of writing that throws a monkey wrench into most people's view of physician-insurer dynamics. (From a 2001 paper in Ann Thorac Surg.)

Scout mindset or soldier mindset? cnn.com/2025/09/22/hea…

When will it sink in with everyone that medicine is intricate, uncertain, contextual, and personalized, and that government officials should no more tell us what to do/take than tell us what not to do/take? Let's work to *reduce* the role and influence of government over

"Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis machts, daß ein Ding kein Gift sei." I don't speak German, but I know Paracelsus's dictum that the dose makes the poison. (The translation above is what I found online.) wsj.com/opinion/tyleno…

Let’s make a deal at a grand bargain between the two sides that hate each other so much. The Left will quash all their loony woke shit, and the Right will stop the slide into autocracy.

Hospitals That Accept Public Dollars Owe Public Accountability centerformodernhealth.org/publications/h…

I don't endorse everything in this piece, but it's good to see NEJM publish an alternative to the common "large = bad" perspective. Here's a good part: "Delivery system leaders view asset aggregation in a different way — as a vehicle for efficient deployment of human, physical,

Free advice for every university president who's been approached about the "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education": you should be a hard no. Even if you agree with most or all of the conditions, it is profoundly unwise to go down that road. Noli vendere animam tuam.

Construct validity question for John Gramlich and the team at Pew Research Center (and I promise I'm not a troll). How should someone answer this question if they believe that sports betting is bad for society but the legality of sports betting is good for society?

There is no indication in this fact sheet as to why Pfizer Inc. would agree to this deal voluntarily. (I can come up with about four or five theories, but they're all speculation. I'll be interested to see what happens next.)

Normally you might do a diff-in-diff analysis or make a survival model, but with such stable numbers of critical access hospitals over the years, is that amount of research effort even justified? centerformodernhealth.org/publications/d…

One of the subtlest but most consequential ways in which healthcare is broken is the way in which some hospital services cross-subsidize others. It results in aggregations that might not naturally occur in a free market. Other, more market-driven industries don't experience

Eek! And this is from a 2003 paper by TenHave et al. "Further complicating matters, the resulting population of potential depression study participants is constantly changing. There is a shrinking pool of persons who have never been exposed to any treatment and who are not

A simple visual inspection of the number of critical access hospitals over time in states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and California, where some cash-only ASCs have opened over the past twenty years shows a relatively stable number of CAHs in each state, not the kind of precipitous

You know when you first introduce a new grad student to a raw NHANES data file, and they helplessly flail about? That's this administration on everything, except it's with live policy. Tech bros would understand this as fooling around in the production environment.