"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than th...

The line between consumerism and obesity is not that difficult to draw, and mechanisms for this relationship are plentiful. Passively sittin...

Frankly, I am sick of people taking credit for chance events. One such chance event is the less-than-expected severity of the H1N1 pandemic....

Backscatter scanners cost $150,000-$180,000 a piece . Congress has appropriated funding for 450 scanners to be placed in the US airports. B...

Happy New Year to everyone, and apologies for not posting for some time. You probably thought I was on vacation, but in fact a family illnes...

I know I've been on a conflict-of-interest kick lately, and this post will continue in that vein. I have to thank the New England Journa...

Two items have grabbed me so far today: one on your favorite contemporary intellectual (and mine) Sarah Palin, and the other on the "De...

It's Charlotte's Web over at the Florence dot com blog : Welcome to this holiday edition of Grand Rounds! It's the time of year...

Last week I blogged about the empty black box of evidence in medicine. Afterwards I got to thinking about black boxes in other parts of our...

A close friend of mine gave birth a few days ago to her second child. My friend is a slight woman whose infant came out at 6 lb 9 oz, even t...

Seeing as I am an outcomes researcher, I thought I'd float this question to all the zealots of free market economic theories: Have their...

Allos Therapeutics is a small biopharmaceutical company located in Westminster, Colorado, with a single agent on the market. Pralatrexate ,...

Just out of curiosity I Googled news on "peak oil" and got 3,397 hits. Then, I Googled "Tiger Woods", and got a staggeri...

A rather shocking analysis by an otherwise astute observer of American history Athul Gawande, MD, in the New Yorker has sent me reeling fro...

At the recent meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians I went to a session on hospital rapid response teams. This was a talk give...

The recent uproar over the new screening mammography recommendations got me thinking about a lot of stuff. One of the lessons cited by some ...

When I was in medical school, I learned that the differential diagnosis was the cornerstone of any medical encounter. Differential diagnosis...

Just posted this on the BMJ's doc2doc blog    Is it rare for an information disconnect to be accompanied by a complete absence of cogn...

Where to begin? The phrase "unintended consequences" has been making rounds in healthcare, politics, and other venues of late. It ...

I don't know about you, but I am really struck by the lack of support for the new USPSTF evidence-based recommendations for mammography ...