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How Behavioral Economics Can Produce Better Health Care

Consider the following.

I’m a physician at the end of more than a decade of training. I’ve dissected cadavers in anatomy lab. I’ve pored over tomes on the physiology of disease. I’ve treated thousands of patients with ailments as varied as hemorrhoids and cancer.

And yet the way I care for patients often has less to do with the medical science I’ve spent my career absorbing than with habits, environmental cues and other subtle nudges that I think little about. read more »

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NIH-led Effort Examines Use of Big Data for Infectious Disease Surveillance

Big data derived from electronic health records, social media, the internet and other digital sources have the potential to provide more timely and detailed information on infectious disease threats or outbreaks than traditional surveillance methods. A team of scientists led by the National Institutes of Health reviewed the growing body of research on the subject and has published its analyses in a special issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases (link is external). read more »

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This Is Your Brain On Bias, And It Will Cost You

Neuroeconomics has gained attention in recent years. While it’s not exactly news, research continues to lift the veil on the mental processes behind people’s choices. Why would anyone, particularly a savvy investor, continually try to defy biases rooted within our neurobiology? read more »

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One Weight-Loss Approach Fits All? No, Not Even Close

Dr. Frank Sacks, a professor of nutrition at Harvard, likes to challenge his audience when he gives lectures on obesity.

“If you want to make a great discovery,” he tells them, figure out this: Why do some people lose 50 pounds on a diet while others on the same diet gain a few pounds?

Then he shows them data from a study he did that found exactly that effect.

Evidence Piles Up: The Poor Are High Risk for Mental Illness

After a mother killed her four young children and then herself last month in rural China, onlookers quickly pointed to life circumstances.

The family lived in extreme poverty, and bloggers speculated that her inability to escape adversity pushed her over the edge.

Can poverty really cause mental illness? read more »

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Too much food to tempt us in too many places (some quite surprising)

Eat too much over Thanksgiving? Holiday tables can certainly strain with overabundance. Now that the holiday is over, we can go back to living without tempting food directly and unavoidably in our faces. Right?

Well, the answer may depend on where you live.

Certainly, the amount and type of food available at home matters, as well as the calories found away from home—say at school or at work. But it is the space in between home and other destinations that people often think less about. And it turns out there is a lot of tempting food there.

I do research on food sources around where people live, work, and learn. Through my work, I have come to appreciate that food sources are much more numerous, diverse, and unexpected than most people realize—even other researchers in the field.

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