Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Health

  • The Implausibility of World War Z

    I started reading World War Z this morning, and so far it’s excellent but the central conceit – that it’s a factual account written in the aftermath of a zombie plague – just doesn’t hold up, because the introduction presents information so implausible that you can’t trust the credibility of the author. I mean, sure,…

  • New Year Plans

    I crawled out into the freezing cold with a hangover today to visit the Asami Shrine in Beppu, to burn my 2010 demon-breaking arrow and purchase a new arrow for 2011. Burning the arrow that symbolizes the year before gives one time to pause and think about what one did in that 365 days, and…

  • New Opinion on the Tory Health Reforms

    Recent revelations in the UK have shown that the UK government’s intended efficiency savings aren’t working (shock!) and it faces a huge funding shortfall. This is hardly unexpected, and probably the first of a range of such reports that are going to start filtering around Whitehall soon, but it has spawned a disappointing tirade from…

  • Science by Press Release

    Today I had an article published in the British Medical Journal, along with an accompanying editorial[1] and a front page press release (which will be visible for about 3 minutes before the next health care fad overwhelms it). The article itself is an investigation of rates of referral to secondary care (that’s “hospital” to the…

  • Faustus’s Position on the Legalization of Heroin

    This post has come about because over at Crooked Timber I was outed as one of the authors on this paper, while defending the prohibition of heroin (I’m the third author on that paper, and have a brace like it[1]). I don’t usually like to reveal my identity on the internet, because … well, because…

  • why the Tory Reforms of the NHS Won’t Work, Part 2

    In a previous post I noted some reasons (that I hope are largely practical rather than ideological) why the Tory reforms of the NHS won’t work, based on my superficial understanding of them. Yesterday I discovered that the Tories have introduced a second – and in my opinion completely mad – reform of the NHS…

  • Health Savings Accounts

    I note that recently this blog has been getting a more political bent, but I’m trying to avoid it with a recent flurry of role-playing/fantasy related posts. I fully intend to restrict the political analysis to a) health-related stuff, b) stuff I can apply stats to and c) very occasional commentary on really big stuff.…

  • Healers in the Crimea: a factual account

    I am presenting a Special Lecture on Global Crime and Public Health this semester, which is really the culmination of my work on international drug cartels, prohibition and harm reduction. In preparation for the lecture on harm reduction, at the end of the lecture on sex work and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) I thought I…

  • Alternative NHS Reforms

    So previously I mentioned that I don’t think the Tory’s reforms of the NHS will work, and there was a bit of discussion (well, me waffling, really) about alternative models. Today via the Guardian I discovered this gem of a website, in which the Treasury has put up a list of suggestions that British people…

  • Why Tory reforms of the NHS won’t work

    Over in the UK, the long period of flirting with market-based solutions to the NHS’s problems has finally come to a head, with the new coalition government deciding to abolish the cap on fee-paying patients at public hospitals. This means that the big hospitals can compete for a supposedly lucrative health tourism and private health…