Friday Links

FDA and anti-aging drugs. In defense of the dismal science. Which U.S. city decreased their minimum wage? Medicaid expansion, access and wait times. Are formulary restrictions ever a good thing? The logic of risk taking. Cancer is natural?

Warren Buffet, Success, Correlation and Causation

Warren Buffet once stated:  “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything.” I agree with with Buffet’s statement.  However, many self-help blogs have interpreted this as a causal statement. Gregg McKeown of Entrepreneur magazine comments on the Buffet quotation as follows: As I wrote in…

What do drugs cost in the long run?

That is the question that Lakdawalla et al. (2017) attempt to answer in the latest edition of the American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC).  The long-run average cost (LAC) of a pharmaceutical includes not only initial branded drug price, but also subsequent prices increases and decreases, especially those that occur after a treatment’s patent has expired…

What outcomes matter to patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis?

That is the question that the Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) Working Group attempted to answer. Specifically, the working group aimed to determine the core set of outcome domains for measuring the effectiveness of shared decision-making (SDM) interventions within clinical trials used to treat rheumatic diseases.  These diseases included osteoarthritis (OA), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and psoriatic…

Is being popular bad for your mental health?

The answer appears to be ‘yes’ according to a study by Narr et al. (2017).  They find that: Close friendship strength in midadolescence predicted relative increases in self-worth and decreases in anxiety and depressive symptoms by early adulthood. Affiliation preference by the broader peer group, in contrast, predicted higher social anxiety by early adulthood. Results…