Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Category: Health
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I discovered today that vibrators were originally invented for medical use. An excellent article in the Guardian describes the history of the invention of the vibrator, in the context of an interesting new movie called Hysteria, which gives a fictional account of the life of its inventor. The vibrator, it turns out, was invented before…
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Today’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine has an interesting editorial on cost containment mechanisms in the Massachusetts health system. It gives some interesting facts about the context of rising costs and the mechanisms put in place recently to try and contain them, and paints rather an alarming picture of the situation in…
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As I understand it most Australian media organizations have an agreement with the various health departments not to report teen suicide, on the principle that copycat suicide is a real risk among teenagers and the benefits that accrue from reporting on any child’s suicide don’t outweigh the risk that it might trigger another. Furthermore, whenever…
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I’m doing some research work at the moment on a certain country, and have identified a negative relationship between inequality (measured using the Gini index) and all-cause mortality. I’m not at liberty to identify the country, or the details, of course. This negative relationship means, in essence, that the more unequal a small area becomes,…
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This week’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has a concise and informative overview of the US Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare, which is well worth a look. It even includes a cool table showing how each judge decided on each of the key issues, with pictures. Consistent with all its coverage to date, the…
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I blogged before about how the Supreme Court should probably abolish the Old School Renaissance, and how it has a history of deciding in favour of mandated health insurance. It appears that the supreme court hasn’t broken with that tradition, and will uphold Obamacare’s individual mandate. Of course the devil’s in the detail and Obamacare…
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Continuing (belatedly) my series of posts on sex work, public health and feminism, in this post I will discuss how I think anti-sex work feminists have coopted the movement against human trafficking in their political campaign against the sex industry. I have shown before that I don’t think moralist campaigners against sex workers have the…
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This week’s New England Journal of Medicine reports on the relationship between coffee drinking and mortality in a cohort study of Americans. The study followed 229,119 men and 173,141 women in the National Institutes of Health–AARP Diet and Health Study who were 50 to 71 years of age at baseline and this paper reports on…
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I’m in Nagasaki this week to attend the 86th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society for Infectious Diseases, where I have presented the results of my work building a mathematical model of the HIV Epidemic in Japan. The model is currently submitted to a journal so I can’t give any detail about it here, but…
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In my previous post on Obamacare commenter Paul has suggested I’m putting too much faith in government intervention to reduce inequality or contain costs. I’m about to go away for the weekend so don’t have much time to attend to my blog (nor may I next week, when classes start) but here’s a pair of…
Compromise and Conceit 