mRNA vaccines helped bring the pandemic under control. Could they also train the immune system to fight cancer?
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Why are there still so few female surgeons? Success and failure are hard to measure in medicine. looks at how surgeons are judged after a bad outcome — and whether men and women are treated the same.
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Home sweet … hospital? We take it for granted that, when people are acutely ill, they should be in the hospital. Is there a better way?
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The E.R. doctor’s dilemma: Figuring out which patients to hospitalize and which to safely send home can be tricky. Is there a way to make this decision easier for doctors — and get better outcomes, too?
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What can we do about the hardest patients? A small number of patients with multiple, chronic conditions use a lot of resources. Dr. Jeffrey Brenner found a way to identify and treat them. Could it reduce health-care spending too?
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Why did this 60-year-old man collapse at the supermarket? tries to stump master clinician Dr. with a medical mystery.
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Does health insurance make you healthier? It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. Bapu talks with a health economist about a natural experiment that led to some unexpected findings.
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At the start of the 1900s, there weren’t many hospitals in the U.S. That changed in 1918, thanks to the Great Influenza pandemic. Its effects on health care are still felt today. Which makes us wonder: will the impact of Covid-19 also be felt in 100 years?
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Is Facebook bad for your mental health? Half the world's population uses social media — and a new study suggests that it causes anxiety and depression. Can anything be done, or is it too late?
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What medicine gets wrong about race. Some diagnostic tests give distorted results for Black patients. How are doctors trying to change that?
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Why don’t we have a cure for Alzheimer's? Promising drugs keep failing in trials. Allegations of fraud have cast a shadow over the field. An expert explains why Alzheimer’s treatments have been hard to find—and why one clue may lie in the Andes Mountains.
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Dr. anticipated a pandemic. He didn’t think it would look like this. This week, Bapu talks to the Covid Czar about becoming a household name, studying pandemics, and the frustrations of politics. Also, when will he be out of a job?
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Should You Bother Getting a Colonoscopy? Colonoscopy is strongly recommended for Americans over 45. But a new study suggests its benefits have been overstated. Should we change how we screen for colorectal cancer?
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The Doctor Is Out. The Physician Assistant Is In. Chances are, at some point you’ll be treated by a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant instead of a doctor. Will your care suffer?
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The most valuable resource in medicine: time. How can doctors and patients make the best use of it — especially when there isn’t much left?
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How important is breastfeeding, really? Can a clever new study shed light on one of parenting’s most elusive and contentious questions?
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Doctors know they prescribe too many antibiotics. Why don’t they stop? Antibiotics save lives. But what happens when we use them too much? Bapu looks at how changing physician behavior could help prevent a major public health disaster.
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Could prison be good for your health? Incarceration has been linked to infectious diseases, mental illness, cancer, and violence. But new research suggests it can extend some people’s lifespans. Bapu investigates the paradox of prison time.
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A COVID vaccine program designed by and two Nobel laureates was a bust. Why? The vaccine "was a politically-heated issue. Issues of identity and politics make us dig in our heels even more than we would in other circumstances,” says Milkman.
“Maybe this event [COVID] has shifted the way the public interacts with health,” says economist Tom Chang. “In which case, now we might need to reconsider how all health outreach needs to be messaged and how that needs to be incentivized.”
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. is an expert in behavioral change and health. In Spring 2021, she put her mind to a very relevant question: how to increase vaccine uptake. She landed on the idea of a regret lottery. Hear her talk about it:
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Economist Tom Chang found that financial incentives to convince people to get the vaccine actually backfired for certain groups. People that supported Trump in the previous election, for example, were less likely to get vaccinated over the next 30 days.
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., , and Daniel Kahneman all designed a regret lottery for increasing vaccine uptake. How did it go? “It had no impact. Just zero, a very precisely estimated zero,” says Milkman.
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Why do financial incentives for vaccines sometimes backfire? People might think, “If you're paying me for it, it must be because there's something bad. Or there's something that you are getting out of this,” says economist Tom Chang.
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. is, at the very least, a cousin in the Freakonomics Radio Network family. She works closely with , who co-hosts , and she’s been a guest on Freakonomics Radio a few times. Now listen to her on Freakonomics, M.D.:
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Economist Tom Chang wanted to learn what methods work the best when it comes to increasing vaccine uptake. “We tried financial incentives, we tried public health messaging, and we tried lowering the frictions of setting appointments.” Listen now:
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In the spring of 2021, professor received an email from Nobel laureates and Daniel Kahneman. (Casual). Katy works on getting people to change their behavior and they wanted to pick her brain. The subject? COVID vaccines. Listen now:
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Economist Tom Chang found that public messaging had a large effect on a person’s self stated probability of getting vaccinated. But when his study followed those same people to see if they got the vaccine: “They didn’t. There was nothing there.”
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How did , , and Daniel Kahneman land on the idea of a regret lottery for increasing vaccine uptake? One word: loss-aversion. “Losses tend to loom much larger than gains psychologically,” says Milkman. Listen now:
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. wants to find a way to increase vaccine uptake. In one study, her team sent messages to patients encouraging them to get flu shots. She found that telling someone there’s already a vaccine waiting for them was the most effective message.
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Economist Tom Chang tried a variety of methods to increase vaccine uptake: financial incentives, public health messaging, and making it easier to set an appointment. “Nothing seemed to really work.” Listen now:
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In the spring of 2021, the behavioral scientist received an unexpected message. It was an email from two Nobel laureates. “Which doesn't happen to me every day. I don't know about you.”
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Behavioral economists say “regret lotteries” are powerful motivational tools. When Philadelphia tried one in 2021, the results were disappointing. Bapu looks at how incentives can backfire — and what we can learn from failures.
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This vaccine lottery seemed like a great idea. Why didn’t it work? This week on Freakonomics, M.D.:
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Health care worker burnout is a significant problem. A report published earlier this year by found that 47 percent of physicians reported feeling burned out in 2021, an increase of five percentage points from the year before.
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Telemedicine use has dropped steadily since its peak at the height of the pandemic, and it now accounts for about five percent of all medical claims. That might sound small, but it’s still well above pre-pandemic levels. Listen now:
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In the spring of 2020, hospitals were overloaded with COVID patients. and other health care providers worried that patients who needed care for conditions other than COVID weren’t going to get it. Luckily, there was a solution, but it was untested.
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Telemedicine should increase access to health care for traditionally underserved populations. But it’s not that simple. “Unfortunately, during the pandemic, rural communities have used telemedicine at a much lower rate than those in cities,” says .
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Electronic health records are critical, but they’re also cumbersome. A study published earlier this year in found that, on average, physicians in the U.S. spend nearly two hours each day on EHR work.
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According to a report, there was a 154% increase in telemedicine visits during the last week of March 2020, compared to that same week the year before. It was a sudden shock to medicine, unlike anything seen before. Listen now:
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