In honor of this week’s holiday, I’m taking the week off from writing a blog post. A happy Thanksgiving to all of my readers and patients, and I will post something more informative next week.
To my patients: we will be hosting the holiday at our house, so I will be in the area and available all weekend for any urgent matters.
We live in a weirdly politicized and polarized time, and little better illustrates this than some of the critiques we see against the “MAHA” movement (since when did removing artificial additives from the food supply become a “conservative” issue?)
But before I get into that, I want to stress that this blog – like the practice of medicine itself – is not political. On a personal level, my politics are fairly moderate, and I have at different times in my life found myself agreeing with and voting for candidates from both major parties (and, more often, being highly critical of both parties), and I certainly have a LOT of concerns with the current administration. On a professional level, my only allegiance is to good science and good medical care. In the exam room, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, a liberal nor a conservative, and I’ve had wonderful relationships with patients of every political stripe over the years.
I state all of this because I don’t want what I’m about to write to be interpreted as an endorsement of any particular politician or political party. Rather, I want to highlight how reasonable scientific discussion can get dismissed as partisanship when it is offered by a politician, and to once again demonstrate just how poorly our national media does of keeping the public informed about issues of science and health.
In case you’ve never heard of it, Freakonomics is a sometimes interesting project co-founded by a University of Chicago economist and a New York Times reporter. Starting with a book by the same title in 2005, the pair have built a mini-empire of books, podcasts, and an NPR show, all examining facets of everyday life through the lens of an economist. (The original book, for example, looked at topics such as the incentives for public school teachers to sometimes help their students cheat on standardized tests, how people’s names can affect their odds of success in life, and the economic hierarchy of drug gangs in inner city Chicago).
This past week, Freakonomics had an episode on the causes of the current physician shortage. Do they do full justice to the topic? No, I don’t believe they do – but probably nobody could in just a one hour radio show. They spend a lot of time looking at the history of why we don’t have enough medical schools in the United States (certainly an important topic) and not enough, in my opinion, looking into how many work hours a typical physician is forced to waste navigating bureaucracy rather than focusing on patient care, and the generally demoralized and unhappy attitude that prevails amongst physicians, and which has led to an exodus from the field.
Nonetheless, it’s a reasonably interesting and informative episode, and if you want to know why it’s so hard to find a physician these days, you could do worse than listening to it, which you can do by clicking here:
While watching the baseball World Series the other night (what an incredible game 7, by the way! I’m not the kind of person who typically gets that drawn into watching sports, but that really was a game for the ages!), I saw a commercial that got my attention: Serena Williams, the legendary Tennis player, was advertising GLP1 agonist medication (translation: weight loss jabs such as Ozempic or Wegovy) for a company named “Ro.”
