A five-minute chat with preschoolers about their past or future selves helps them make better decisions
By Christian Jarrett
There could be an Arctic blizzard blowing outside for all little Mary cares. The fact is, she’s hot from running around indoors, and no matter how much you try to explain to Mary that her future self – the one that’s about to go walking in the cold – would really appreciate that she put her coat on, Mary, like most kids aged under five, finds it very difficult to step outside of the present and consider her future needs.
While psychologists have already spent a lot of time demonstrating the limitations of young children’s ability to plan for the future, until now they’...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - April 3, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Decision making Developmental Educational Source Type: blogs
The Robots Are Coming And Cutting Employment
Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University find that robots really do decrease human employment. As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the cha...
Source: FuturePundit - March 31, 2017 Category: Research Authors: Randall Parker Source Type: blogs
Post-Doc Position in the Department of Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences, Sargent College, Boston University
The Guenther Lab at Boston University is seeking applications for a postdoctoral associate in computational neuroscience and neuroimaging of speech in normal and disordered populations. The Guenther Lab is one of the world's preeminent speech, neuroscience laboratories, and the associate will work with a team of experts in neuroimaging, computational modeling, and neural data collection and analysis within the Guenther Lab, the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Required Skills:PhD ...
Source: Talking Brains - February 23, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Greg Hickok Source Type: blogs
Health Law at AALS 2017
Next week, in San Francisco, there is a plethora of health law related programming at the 111th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.
THURSDAY, JAN 5
Health Law and Health Equity8:30 am – 10:15 amContinental Ballroom 5, Ballroom Level, HiltonModerator and Speaker: Elizabeth Pendo, Saint Louis University School of LawSpeakers:Daniel Dawes, Executive Director, Government Relations, Policy & External Affairs, Morehouse School of MedicineDayna B. Matthew, University of Colorado Law SchoolCourtney Anderson, Georgia State University College of Law Medha D. Makhlouf, The Pennsylvania ...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - December 28, 2016 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD Tags: Health Care medical futility blog syndicated Source Type: blogs
Lack Of Exercise May Mean Smaller Brain Size
If you want to keep your brain from shrinking as you age, your best bet may be to keep yourbody physically fit. New research from Boston University School of Medicine found that poor physical fitness in midlife was linked to smaller brain size (a sign of accelerated brain aging) 20 years later. Researchers used treadmill tests to assess the physical fitness of 1,583 people whose average age was 40. All were participants in the long-running Framingham (MA) Heart Study, and none hadheart disease when they took their first treadmill test. They were re-evaluated with treadmill tests two decades later and also underwent MRI sca...
Source: Dr. Weil's Daily Health Tips - November 27, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Dr. Weil Tags: Science and Supplement News aging brain brain size exercise Source Type: blogs
Trumping the Evidence - The Donald Denies Asbestos Related Disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy but Asserted Vaccines Cause Autism
One of the main causes of health care dysfunction identified by demoralized health care professionals in our 2003 qualitative study was threats to evidence-based medicine, and by extension, evidence-based public health and health policy.(1) Since then, we have frequently discussed threats such asmanipulation andsuppression of clinical research to further vested interests, and distortion of research dissemination, such asghost written articles, often enabled byindividual andinstitutional conflicts of interest.These and other causes of health care dysfunction which we discuss, however, have hardly been the stuff of political...
Source: Health Care Renewal - November 2, 2016 Category: Health Management Tags: asbestos Donald Trump evidence-based medicine health policy public health Source Type: blogs
16 Ways to Get a Dementia Patient to Eat More Food
Alzheimer's and dementia patients often eat less, and have difficulty eating, because of problems like chewing, swallowing or digesting food.Alzheimer's Reading RoomAlzheimer's and dementia patients sometimes lose interest in eating. This can happen for a long list of reasons including loss of taste, the ability to smell, memory loss, and thinking they already ate.Medications can also effect appetite, and can increase constipation.When a person has Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia, these problems can becomemore pronounced, and often effect mood, behavior, and physical functioning.When Dementia Patients Don't EatAl...
Source: Alzheimer's Reading Room, The - November 2, 2016 Category: Neurology Tags: alzheimer's awareness caregiver stress dementia care family caregiving help alzheimer's help with dementia care home care learning memory care senior care Source Type: blogs
Narrative Matters: On Our Reading List
Editor’s note: “Narrative Matters: On Our Reading List” is a monthly roundup where we share some of the most compelling health care narratives driving the news and conversation in recent weeks.
In this month’s Narrative Matters essay, former Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Louis Sullivan writes about growing up in rural Georgia and entering medical school as the only black student in his class. Sullivan graduated from Boston University School of Medicine in 1958 with only $500 in debt — hard to fathom when, today, med students might finish school owing some $150,000 to $250,000. Sulli...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - August 12, 2016 Category: Health Management Authors: Jessica Bylander Tags: Elsewhere@ Health Affairs Featured Narrative Matters On Our Reading List opioids Veterans Source Type: blogs
Yep, they're still evil
That would be the drug companies. Boston University School of Public Health prof. Alan Sager (with whom I am acquainted) runs down their profiteering at society ' s expense. I would say, do read the whole thing because it takes him 11 pages to properly debunk all of the prevalent falsehoods about this. I ' ll just offer you this excerpt which reiterates stuff I keep saying here, which is that the mythological and non-existent " free market " bears absolutely no resemblance to the reality of pharmaceutical development, manufacture and selling:Unfortunately, functioning free markets are simply unattainable in health care, an...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 11, 2016 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
June Man of the Month: Marc Sommers, PhD
As a child, Marc loved looking at National Geographic magazines, especially at his Uncle’s home on New Year’s Day. That’s where young Marc went with his family to celebrate. Not much for the adult conversation upstairs, Marc would slip away to the basement and lose himself in exotic photos of far-away places. At 12, he decided he was going to go to the Serengeti.
Not only did he get there, but he has dedicated much of his adult life to working with young people, primarily in Africa—19 countries and counting. Marc Sommers, who is fluent in Swahili, is an internationally recognized youth, conflict, education, g...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - June 1, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Global Health Man of the Month Source Type: blogs
Are You Ready for Some (Political) Football? - the NFL, Concussion Research, the NIH, and the Revolving Door
Probably because it involved the favorite American sport, the controversy about the risk of concussions to professional National Football League (NFL) players, and how the NFL has handled the issue is very well known. A recent article in Stat, however, suggested that one less well known aspect of the story overlaps some issues to concern to Health Care Renewal.Allegations that a Prominent Physician and NFL Official Tried to Influence the NIH Grant Review Process The article began,Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, president of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital [BWH] and one of the nation’s most prominent medical execut...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 26, 2016 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest NIH Partners Healthcare revolving doors Source Type: blogs
CONCUSSION: Bioethics, Foot Ball and Post Traumatic Lies.
Concussion is a documentary biography about medical science’s triumph over a social and corporate conspiracy to suppress evidence of a serious preventable disease. Forensic pathologist, Bennett Omalu, MD, discovered a pathognomonic sign confirming chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). He happened to find it in a cluster of professional football players during autopsies. Concussion was written and directed by Peter Landesman, who managed a riveting story pace, despite most of the visuals occurring in the inglorious world of microscopes and morgues —done to death on television. Will Smith’s Dr. ...
Source: blog.bioethics.net - May 11, 2016 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: September Williams, MD Tags: Health Care syndicated Source Type: blogs
How to Save American Football
BY GEORGE LUNDBERG, MD and DAVID METZNER
American football is a great sport. It offers, requires, nurtures, and rewards speed, skill, strength, cunning, offensive and defensive strategic thinking, courage, judgment under pressure, competitive spirit, reliance on teamwork, a requirement for exquisite timing, and resolve. Football teaches a participant how to get up and get back at it after being knocked down again and again, a great life lesson. And football has the capacity to engender huge dedicated fan bases.
Unfortunately, as the supreme contact sport, it is also a collision sport and thrives on a degree of inherent v...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 7, 2016 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized George Lundberg National Football League Source Type: blogs
Research Forum Claiming that Moderate Drinking Improves Health is Deliberately Hiding Its Conflicts of Interest with Big Alcohol
An organization calling itself the "International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research" (ISFAR) has published on its web site a scathing review of a recent meta-analysis which concluded that moderate alcohol consumption does not reduce mortality as previously thought. The review contains statements from 14 members of ISFAR, and every one of the 14 blasts the study, with the review concluding that the study "markedly distorts the accumulated scientific evidence on alcohol and CVD [cardiovascular disease]."The International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research claims to be committed to providing a "balanced" analysis regardi...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - May 1, 2016 Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs
Throwback Thursday: April 28th, 1986 (30 Years Ago): Anti-Tobacco Groups Blast Cigarette Companies for Not Supporting Development of a Safer Cigarette
April 28, 1986 (AP, New York): Today, a coalition of anti-smoking organizations, heath agencies, and researchers are attacking the nation's cigarette companies for failing to support the development of much safer cigarettes. Health officials complained that for many years, cigarette companies have had the technology to produce a much safer cigarette, but have failed to show any support for even the idea of manufacturing a safer product.Also today, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson and Liggett, alleging that each of these companies could easily have prod...
Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - April 28, 2016 Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs
