Natural & Physical Sciences: Health and Medicine 
Recommended
Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism
By Robin Hanson: "Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps, we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have collected many puzzling stylized facts about behavior regarding medicine, and have sought a small number of simple assumptions which might together account for as many puzzles as possible."
Is Health Care a Right?
In this podcast economics Professor Russell Roberts of George Mason University debates a physician who thinks health care is a right and the government should provide it.
Organ Transplants: Kidneys for Sale
"In his most controversial segment yet, reason.tv host Drew Carey offers a startling solution to the critical shortage in kidneys available for transplant: Pay people to donate their kidneys."
WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems
By Glen Whitman: "Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions— some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares."
Unintended Consequences
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt: "But with a government that is regularly begged for relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended consequences."
Congress Strong-Arming Baseball? That's Foul.
By Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: "First, Major League Baseball, along with other sports leagues and private-sector ventures, simply should not be required to submit their business plans -- much less blood and urine samples -- to Congress or any other government body."
Dismal Science Sees Upbeat Future
By Alexander Tabarrok: "Forget the talk of recession. The world is about to enter a new era in which miracle drugs will conquer cancer and other killer diseases and technological and scientific advances will trigger unprecedented economic growth and global prosperity."
The Failure of U.S. Organ Procurement Policy
By T. Randolph Beard, John D. Jackson, and David L. Kaserman: "In this article, we calculate how many lives will be lost if the United States continues in its current policy course. We do this to motivate policymakers to stop implementing one ineffectual policy action after another and attack the organ shortage with more effective weaponry in the form of financial incentives."
Drug Use and the Candidates
By Stanton Peele: "There has been massive drug and underage alcohol use by Americans over the years -- more than 110 million Americans, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, have used illicit drugs. Yet the overwhelming majority of them -- like Messrs. Bush, Clinton and Obama -- have grown up to be productive citizens. Some believe there's no need to know about their youthful misconduct."
The Great Depression: Is an epidemic of depressive disorder really sweeping America?
By Will Wilkinson: "The alleged epidemic of depression simply doesn’t exist. Horwitz and Wakefield are right: Millions who have been diagnosed with major depression never had it in the first place, even if their lives were nonetheless improved by the drugs they were prescribed."
WHO's Watching Over You
From Agoraphilia. The WHO rankings, by purporting to measure the efficacy of healthcare systems, implicitly takes all differences in health outcomes not explained by spending or literacy and attributes them entirely to healthcare system performance. Nothing else, from tobacco use to nutrition to sheer luck, is taken into account.
Drew Carey Defends Medical Marijuana
"I think it’s clear by now that the federal government needs to reclassify marijuana. People who need it should be able to get it – safely and easily," says The Price Is Right and Power of 10 host Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining medical marijuana and the war on drugs.
Green Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
By Roger Bate: "There is little more annoying for a policy analyst than when two types of wrong-headedness conspire to undermine his case. Such is the case for policies driven by the pursuit of a pesticide free -- or at least pesticide diminished -- future, which will cause an increase in insect-borne disease. "
Vaccination Bill Mutates
Sigrid Fry-Revere, Director of Bioethics Studies at Cato, writes about the new HPV vaccine, and why states should not mandate it.
A Short Course in Brain Surgery
By Stuart Browning. In A Short Course in Brain Surgery, filmmaker Stuart Browning shows the callousness of "single-payer", government-run health care systems as practiced in Ontario, Canada. His film highlights the plight of Lindsay McCreith, an Ontario man with a cancerous brain tumor who went to Buffalo, NY to receive the timely medical care that is rationed in his home country.
Behind the Baby Count
By Bernadine Healy, M.D.: " We're a nation of beautiful babies. In a remarkable achievement, the loss of babies during their first year of life has plummeted by almost 70 percent since 1970. Yet the nation's infant mortality rate is used time and again as evidence of America's failed health system."
Uninsured in America
By Stuart Browning: "Uninsured in America examines the conventional wisdom that 45 million Americans cannot get health insurance and consequently do not have access to health care."
What Do We Really Know About the Spread of AIDS?
By Emily Oster. Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa -- and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care -- but we also need to factor in, say, the price of coffee, and the routes of long-haul truckers. In short, there is a lot we don't know; and our assumptions about what we do know may keep us from finding the best way to stop the disease.