Word: heart
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Using information technology to figure out which treatments are most effective seems eminently sensible. Certain heart patients, for example, do just as well with clot-busting drugs as they would with angioplasty procedures, which typically cost thousands more. Crunching huge amounts of data from a wide cross section of patients could help us do better research than we are doing now. But what will happen when the new computerized research turns up a treatment that works a little better but costs a lot more? Will the government-sponsored researchers tell us? What happens to the patient whose particular circumstances argue...
...debut album, Fortress Round My Heart, Maria opens with the perfect song for her aesthetic. "Oh My God" is basically just a few frantic chords and two repeated phrases--"Find a cure/Find a cure for my life" in the verse and "Oh my God" in the chorus. One lyric is a prayer for control; the other a realization that she has none, and Maria plays the former like someone meditating before a hurricane and the latter like the hurricane itself. She roars from the back of her throat, timing the G in God to the crash of the snare...
...authors are careful not to dismiss out of hand, since it can indeed save lives, just not as many as its makers would like you to believe. The ad openly touts the 42% figure, which is based on a study in which 111 out of 2,221 people with heart disease who used Zocor later died of a heart attack. In a control group of heart patients who used a placebo, 189 out of 2,223 died. So the fact is there were indeed 42% fewer deaths among the Zocor users, compared with the controls. But when you consider...
...give you lab results you can boast about, it's to make you feel better and live longer; those are the patient outcomes. Sometimes though, good surrogate outcomes don't lead to good patient outcomes. Hormone replacement therapy, for example, raises good cholesterol, which helps reduce the risk heart disease. But it also makes the blood more likely to clot, which raises the heart disease risk. A cancer treatment that shrinks the size of a tumor is of limited value if it's soon followed by tumor regrowth...
...idea that stimulants like caffeine (or Ritalin or even something stronger like cocaine) can help you sit still and pay attention seems counterintuitive at first. But that surprising fact lies at the heart of Rapport's work: stimulants augment your working, or short-term, memory, where information is stored temporarily and used to carry out deliberate tasks like, say, solving a challenging math problem. ADHD kids have a hard time with working memory because they lack adequate cortical arousal, and Rapport believes that their squirms and fidgets help stimulate that arousal...