Are You Getting Evidence-Based Healthcare?

02/23/18 • 14 min

Nearly half of medical procedures may not be based on sound science. That’s according to Eric Patashnik, director of Brown University’s public policy program. And he says it’s not necessarily your doctor’s fault. How did we get to this point? We put that question to Patashnik, who is co-author of the new book, “Unhealthy Politics: The Battle over Evidence-Based Medicine.”

Previous Episode

When “Useless” Research Has Long-Term Benefits

Back in the 1990s, the Digital Libraries Initiative from the National Science Project supported a small project out of Stanford University. It sounded obscure, and a lot of people thought it wasn’t exciting, and would have little real-world application. But on that team were two graduate students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the founders of Google.

The modest grant ended up paying off very well, according to Robbert Dijkgraaf, a physics professor and the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He recently wrote a companion essay to Abraham Flexner’s 1939 piece, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” explaining why Flexner’s ideas are even more relevant today.

We talk with Dijkgraaf about why governments should fund more basic research that doesn’t necessarily have immediate results, like the project at Stanford – and how it can actually reap huge rewards in the long run.

Next Episode

How Your Brain Interacts With Food

We know that our brain plays tricks on us, but did you know the size of your plate can dictate how much you eat? Or that a bowl filled with jelly beans in a variety of colors will induce you to eat more than a series of bowls with the jelly beans separated out by color? Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship with Food, describes the psychology that influences our eating habits.