Unpopular Health Imagine a magic elixir that’s free and grants much longer life (12 years for men, 14 years for women.) Despite benefits radically dwarfing the advantages of all health care, the elixir is almost universally spurned. For to receive this magic elixir individuals must put up with what are commonly regarded as unacceptable intrusions: they must […]
Confessions of a Marijuana Maker
When drugs are also foods, addiction becomes easier. The pleasures of dining conflate with drug pleasures. Particularly when new experiences are so prized people often ask, how can this be bad? That is why edible marijuana, now being packaged into innumerable combinations with many foods – especially chocolates and candies – represent a particular public […]
The Top Three Percent? How We’re Not Getting Healthy
Are Americans Healthy? We hear that Americans are doing better – at least in terms of health. Childhood obesity is not increasing. Adults and children are living longer. But what about the future? A recent study out of Mayo Clinic Proceedings is more disturbing. It looked at ten year old data (it takes a while to research […]
Why Don’t People Sleep?
“Can’t I just treat my insomnia with a book?” My interlocutor was sure there was a book out there (including one of my mine) that “could get me to sleep just fine.” Certainly many could do with a brief bout of Sleep School – understanding how sleep affects their health, performance, pleasure, pain, income and mortality […]
What’s Wrong With Immortality?
Endless life – what people won’t do to achieve it. Over twenty two hundred years ago the great Qin Shuangdi, the Tiger of Qin, unifier of seven kingdoms into the first Chinese empire, tried mightily to extend his life. The alchemists’ mercury pills did not work. Most historians suggest the attempt at immortality ended his reign, his […]