The System: • Shocking graph showing the growth of physicians and administrators in healthcare from 1970 to 2009. Much like higher education, medicine continues to become more complicated, with more rules, while costing much more. Physicians are making less money and patients are spending more. You really have to see the graph to understand the magnitude…
Easy Answer: • Article commenting on the Pill as Answer to every disease paradigm. Fiona Godlee begins with Hypertension, then addresses Type 2 Diabetes. Finally the increasingly prevalent nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). There are 100 drugs in phase II and III trials for NAFLD, with a market of $1.6 billion! • This concise, firm article is just…
• Hello everyone! Exciting news this month! After several months of preparation, the Journal of Wellness is now live and accepting submissions. JWellness is a peer-reviewed, open access, journal that publishes original research articles as well as review articles in all areas of medical, physical and psychological wellness. We welcome contributions from all fields therein, including the humanities.…
Paradox: • I am fascinated by paradox. Sometimes what looks like a paradox is actually not – we can resolve apparent contradictions with more understanding. The French paradox: High saturated fat but low heart disease. The Isreali paradox: High vegetable oil but high heart disease (The short post summarizes a very cool article).• These paradoxes cease to be paradoxes if…
Fitness: • Check out this old video (2011) from Greg Glassman, founder of Crossfit. This represents an early stage in his effort to disrupt the healthcare industry. An even better place to start is Glassman’s 2002 articleon what fitness really is. • He distills his philosophy of fitness (including nutrition) into 100 words. Hard to argue with…
Time: • Another cool pieceon passage of time. Physicist Adrian Bejan is apparently a renaissance man, attempting to use physics to explain everything from how humans shape a campfire to wealth inequality. This time piece shows how eye movements and brain processing slow with age, leading to an apparently faster perception of time; we notice less…
Carnivores: • Cool article on Mongolian steppe dwellers based on archeologic remains. They reconstruct a traditional pastoral lifestyle where people lived in small groups, relied on a protein-rich diet and used animals for transportation.They found one dental cavity out of 252 teeth. Three people (out of 25) had inflammatory conditions. The proportion of old adults in the sample, and the fact that the pathologies…
Musonius Rufus: • We have covered embracing voluntary discomfort. Yes it will “make you stronger.” But how does this actually work? William Irvine breaks down several stoic principles in his book A Guide to the Good Life. He gives 3 specific reasons to embrace discomfort (adapted from first century stoic philosopher Musonious Rufus): 1. Voluntary Discomfort hardens us. If…
Sun worship: • Comprehensive and enlightening article from Outside Online. I love the title, Is Sunscreen the New Margarine. Hopefully the headline alone will cause some people to read and find out that margarine is a horrible poisonous atrocity.• The article dives in to some interesting literature on skin cancer and mortality. If you develop non-melanoma skin…
Practice: • Is practice a verb or a noun? We often think of it as something we do, whether it is medicine, golf, guitar. George Leonard argues (in his book Mastery) that we should think of it more as a noun, something we have, something we are. Practice is Tao in Chinese and do in Japanese, but these words more directly translate to path or way.…
