“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 […]
Does Health Insurance Insure You?
Why is using American health insurance such a farce? We can begin with the preposterous process of personally procuring it. As the end of 2015 appeared, I received missives in the mail from Assurant Health, my health insurer, that I would be delisted at the end of the year. I had used them for only over […]
Will Stopping Sex Stop Zika?
The End of Pregnancy Fear eats the soul and creates strange policies: witness how the Zika virus provokes national recommendations to stop pregnancy cold. If you are young and fertile and Salvadoran, the government wants you to shut down your reproductive capacity for two full years – you can think about having children in 2018. Colombia […]
Depression Screening – What Is It Worth?
The U.S. government has recommended all American adults undergo depression screening. But how will that work, and what are the most pragmatic ways to aid the public health? The Recommendations: The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s US Preventive Services Task Force (someone has to come up with better names) suggested every primary care physician use on every […]
It’s Not Only The Lonely
Do only the lonely die young, or does social connection and support affect most measures of health and longevity? Yes, it’s true: the less social connections you have, the greater the tendency towards illness of many kinds – physical and mental. Even if you don’t feel lonely at all. But how big an effect? For […]