Healthcare

August 2024

• Aug 7, 2024ExplainersPersonalized Medicine: Tailoring Healthcare to YouPopejoy and Fullerton found about 81 percent of genome-wide association study participants were of European descent, against roughly 16 percent of the global population, and Martin's team measured polygenic scores performing about 4.5-fold worse in people of African ancestry. Also covers imatinib taking remission past 95 percent in CML and the HLA screen that ended abacavir hypersensitivity.22 MIN3.1k

July 2022

• Jul 20, 2022ConceptsImpact of Availability Heuristic in HealthcareHow the availability heuristic distorts medical judgment. Tversky and Kahneman described it in 1973: people estimate likelihood by how easily an example comes to mind rather than by statistics, demonstrated when participants wrongly judged K more common as a first letter than as a third. In healthcare the same mechanism drives over-testing, because symptom searches surface vivid serious diagnoses that dominate probability estimates regardless of base rates.18 MIN9.4k
• Jul 2, 2022ConceptsThe Cobra Effect in Healthcare: Treatment and HarmSouth Korea launched nationwide cancer screening in 1999 and thyroid cancer diagnoses rose fifteen-fold, while deaths from it did not move at all. Ahn, Kim and Welch concluded in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014 that roughly 90 percent of those extra cancers were overdiagnosis. Ivan Illich's three layers of iatrogenesis, clinical, social and structural, organize the rest, alongside the opioid cascade and defensive medicine.21 MIN1.8k