Sitemap - 2024 - Sensible Medicine

The Semmelweis Effect and The Great Barrington Declaration

Foreign-trained vs US-trained doctors

UCSF hematology oncology interest group

Nirsevimab (Beyfortus): is universal prophylaxis for RSV warranted?

Yes, the US should withdraw from the World Health Organization

Future Fellows Reflect on “The Match”

What COVID Did to Us

All I want for Christmas is ethical, informative trials

Is One of the Most Popular Cardiac Drugs Better than its Generic Competitor?

The Futile Quest for "Why"

Kennedy vs. Musk

Adam Cifu Interviewed by Michael Easter on the TWO/PERCENT Substack and Podcast

A Strong Critical Appraisal of the CHAGASICS Trial in patients with Chagas Cardiomyopathy

Advice for Internship: Part II

The ENTIRE healthcare system is broken, not just health insurance companies. It is NOT HEROIC to assassinate insurance CEOs

What characteristics define your most ideal screening test?

Another "Positive" Heart Failure Trial that Falls Short

A live taping from Wash U, a Sensible Medicine discussion

Advice for Internship

Will Lawmakers Ban DEI in medical schools?

RFK Jr is NOT the Contrarian We Need

Should My Patient Get a 7th Covid Shot?

A Story about Surrogate Outcomes

Friday Reflection 46: The Best of Days

Thanks to all our subscribers

The Health Equity Agenda is a Bad Prescription

The Value of Reanalysis of a Clinical Trial

Marty Makary is up for FDA commissioner

The NIH Needs Reform: Here are 10 Sensible Suggestions

Coming Out Against the Healthy Lifestyle

Pediatric Gender Medicine -

Subgroups, Specialties, and Prior Hypotheses

The VANISH 2 Trial is a Proper Study

Why Doctors Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love MAHA

What kind of a doctor are you?

Will RFK Jr make it all the way to HHS secretary?

What a Trump presidency can mean for health care

MAHA and Medical Conservatism

Systematic reviews 101

Why was Novo Nordisk singled out as ‘greedy’ by Sanders and Biden?

The EARLY TAVR Trial Exposes the Main Tension in Medical Science

Buying What SELECT is Selling: Semaglutide

Screening Can Do Silent Harm Part II

A Skeptical Take of Semaglutide for Cardiac Protection

Sensationalism Does Not Help Us Understand the Consequences of Race-Based Algorithms

Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection in the Pre-Delta, Delta, and Omicron Eras: A Critical Appraisal

Semaglutide (Wegovy) Is Not a Knee Pain Drug

Screening Can Do Silent Harm

Ask me anything

What makes psychotherapy ‘good’ and ‘effective?’

Lifestyle, Statins, or Both?

Pediatric Gender Medicine: Dispatches From a Deceptive Medical Field

Friday Reflection 45: Patients

Sensible medicine ask us anything part 2

Using Contracts to Encourage Post-Marketing Research

Publication Bias and Therapeutic Fashion

Would you advise your son or daughter to go medical school?

Conventional Medicine Invites the Rise of Alternative Medicine

Ask us anything podcast

We Need to Try a Tax Credit to Help Fix the Kidney Shortage

Masking Mistakes – Fall 2024 Edition

Do We Have a Breakthrough Drug for Patients with Heart Failure?

What I Read Last Week

The Ethics of Screening Mammography

A Midwestern Dermatologist Responds to A Midwestern Doctor

Let's Review a Truly Positive Trial

General Medicine Service Expectations

Letters of Recommendation Should Not Be a Component in Residency Selection

Letters of Recommendation Should Not Be a Component of Residency Applications

Comments Back On

Weak Evidence Can Hurt Important Ideas

The Rapid Ideological Retraction of a Scientific Article on Rapid Onset-Gender Dysphoria

A (re)Visit to an Old-Fashioned Doctor

Should Doctors Voice Their Own Mental Illness Publicly?

Is there a difference between Jay Varma for tecovirimat and Ashish Jha for Paxlovid?

Ask Us Anything!

When Trials Are Stopped Early for Benefit...

What I read last week 9/22/24

Diagnostic Limitations

The 50-year Failure of American Health Care

Thickened Liquids for Older Adults is Likely a Useless Therapy, but a Current Study Cannot Prove It.

Is there a such thing as 'too little benefit' in oncology?

Back to Sleep Series in Audio Format

Friday Reflection 44: Diagnostic Enigma

A Letter to the Editor of JACC-HF, which was Rejected

Prasad and Cifu offer rebuttals to their anti-science post from last week

The Wrong Way to Make Money in Medicine

STRONG HF – A Positive Trial that Does Not Help Clinical Medicine

What I Read This Week

Elle Macpherson Made a Reasonable Choice, and Naturopathic Medicine Did Not Help

Which US Presidential Candidate is More Anti-Science?

Why Pediatric Rare Medicine is Like Timeshare Sales

GLP1a Drugs are Great But Unlikely to Treat COVID-19 Infection

Doctors Should be Political, but not Political as Doctors

How can we do better as a county hospital?

Friday Reflection 43: The Absence of Reassuring Counterfactuals in Clinical Medicine

What Medical School Looks For and What Medical School Should Look For

Post #5 Concluding remarks on the Back-to-Sleep series

More Problems with (and Suggestions for) Medical Education

There will be a breakthrough in AF ablation coming next week at the ESC meeting

John Mandrola is Wrong about Political Activism

Post #4 Back-to-Sleep Series

Friday Reflections on Econ Talk

The Surprising Ability of Medical Therapy in Coronary Heart Disease

Price negotiation does not save money when keep you paying for drugs that don't work

Hustling at Work: What's the difference between a TechBro and a Junior Faculty Member in Medicine

The Moment I Realized AI Will Introduce a Brave New World for Medicine

Post #3 Back-to-Sleep series

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #7

Screening for Cancer Costs Billions - I Doubt it is Worth it

Should residents take the day off when they are sleepy?

Post #2 Back-to-Sleep Series

Churnalism: Summarized on Video

When Population Health and Individual Health Clash

For Academic Institutions, Silence is Golden

What I Read Last Week

Adam Cifu and Vinay Prasad are Both Wrong about A New Masking Trial

What Matters is How You Use it

A New Series on the "Back to Sleep" Recommendation to Reduce SIDS

Long-Term Outcomes in Patients Using Protocol-Directed Active Surveillance for Prostate Cancer

Yes, we should definitely study that!

Adam Cifu is Wrong About Masking

Vinay Prasad is Wrong about Masking

The Retirement of Dr. Mark Siegler

A new mask randomized trial shows that masks work?

Medicalized Gender Transition and the Silence of Medicine and Bioethics

When the patient is in the room, stop typing your note

Money in Medical Education Makes Me Sad

Friday Reflection 42: Patient Approaches to a Doctor’s Visit

Ozempic May Cause Eye Problems - But I Doubt it

"Toxic" quizzing: Is the attending mean or is the resident sensitive?

The Doctor (and Her Computer) Will See You Now

Johns Hopkins Pancreas Cancer Screening Clinic Publishes Flawed Study to Justify their Unproven Medical Experiment

Primary Care Dystopia

"Before he gets chemo, he should go to the fertility preservation clinic". Docs say this, but is it true?

Eli Lilly's Court Victory: Dutch Agency Must Reevaluate Abemaciclib Amid Controversy

Acute Pain Management in the Opiate Dependent Person

Update: Per the White House, Biden was not on cold medication... so why did doctors speculate that he was?

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #6: Decision Analysis

The Most Ignored Study in Cardiac Electrophysiology

Some doctors & professors claim Biden's debate performance was due to stuttering or cold medication.

Friday Reflection 41: Sometimes I Just Need to Complain

A Discussion with Professor Venk Murthy on Coronary Artery Disease

Impella, Mammograms and Med School Fails Students

Sex, Gender, and Language in Public Health Communication

The Study of the Week Is A Study That Did Not Happen

CT screening for lung cancer for homeless people: the new JAMA IM paper

Workplace culture: Reader Input Needed

Fear and Opioids in Academic Medicine

Should women in their 40’s be screened for breast cancer?

Brain Safety After Pulsed Field Ablation for Atrial Fibrillation

A discussion with interventional cardiologist Dr David Cohen on medical evidence, TAVR and stroke prevention

How medical school fails students

Regard for Power: Part 2

Churnalism on NPR

Healthcare Workers in the AI Revolution: Pioneers or Passive Users?

The Importance of Proper Control Arms

When residents call out "fake sick"

Are physician scientists and other part-timers good doctors?

Why should I take these medications?

Anthony Fauci failed during the coronavirus response

A Social Science Perspective on Masking

Three Critiques of the DanGer-Shock Trial

Friday Reflection #40: Power

Adam and I discuss the week's medical news

Universal Depression Screening Leads to Unnecessary Harm

Cifu, Prasad, Mandrola

The Study of the Week Pauses for Memorial Day

Doctors take money from pharmaceutical firms so they die with a slightly bigger number in the bank

Clinical Experience: The Neglected Leg of the Three-Legged Stool of Evidence-Based Medicine

A Prompt for a Reflection

When a Medicine Works but Overall Benefit is Minimal to None

Friday Reflection #39: What to Expect When You Are Aging

A Novel Approach to AF Ablation

Medical Student Accommodations

Explain This One to Me

Video version of our podcast

Cifu, Mandrola, Prasad

Evidence based medicine... 6 months a year

Cancelled by Medscape

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #5

The Frustration of Not Being Able to Sort Signal From Noise

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #4

A Discussion with Dr. Dena Zeraatkar regarding analytic flexibility in observational studies

The Definitive Analysis of Observational Studies

DanGer Shock, MRI for all, Conflict of interest

The US FDA's cancer drug approval process is broken and needs audit

Medicare doesn't pay because there is no evidence you live longer or better as a result

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #3

Chelation Did Not Work But Science Did

Why you should NOT get a whole body MRI

Masking in 2024: A Response

Is It OK for Internists to Wear Masks Forever?

Almost the AI Article I Want

Finally a Positive Trial for the Impella Ventricular Support Device

Unproven healthcare will bankrupt America

Friday Reflection 38: Yesterday’s Solutions; Today’s Problems

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #2

A New Approach to Evidence in Cardiology

Yet Another Excellent Explainer About P-Values in Randomized Trials

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills #1

Improving Your Critical Appraisal Skills

Modern Cardiology May Change Next Sunday

The Many Harms of Cancer-phobia

Doctors need to stop speculating about Kate Middleton

Peter Attia, Outlive, Cardiology 3.0 and primordial prevention of heart attacks

Life My Way!

A broken study of time-restricted eating exposes broken thinking amongst Top People

From modular to moral: why longitudinal clinical experiences matter in professional identity formation (Part 2)

What multimorbidity shows us about guideline-driven evidence-based medicine

A (different) perspective on statins in the primary prevention of heart disease

Negotiating the physician identity in an era of complexity and connectivity (Part 1)

Martin Kulldorff was wrongly fired from Harvard Medical School

Being Comfortable Being Uncomfortable – A Medical Student’s Perspective

Doing statistics can be difficult but understanding them can be fairly simple

Sensible Diversion #7 Answer

Sensible Diversion #7

Friday Reflection 37: Why I Teach (acceptable and less acceptable reasons)

Should I Change My Mind About Aspirin for the Prevention of Cardiac Events?

MIT hosts COVID-19 policy debate

I Am Afraid of Early Cancer Detection: Part III

In Defense of the Coronary Artery Calcium Scan in Primary Prevention of Atherosclerotic Heart Disease

From Guideline Recommendations to Articulated Harms and Benefits

The Story of IV-Insulin after MI

Diversion #6 Answers

Sensible Diversion #6

I Am Afraid of Early Cancer Detection

Don’t throw the baby out with the breast milk

Everyone keeping blood pressure low because of the SPRINT trial is practicing bad medicine

No, We Should Not Denounce Digoxin

Sensible Diversion #5 Answer

Sensible Diversion #5

Most Important

I Am Afraid of Early Cancer Detection

When will Nature and NEJM tell me who to vote for?

A Note On Criticism Of Yesterday's Study of the Week

The Study of the Week Is a Beautiful Example of Science Done Well

Diversion #4 Answers

Sensible Diversion #4

The Patient

Can We Select “Better” Residents?

Can Data Just Speak for Itself?

Masks are nearly all off

Answer to the third sensible diversion

A Third Sensible Medicine Diversion

Friday Reflection 36: Why Don’t Doctors Want to See Patients?

"Can you tweet my paper" vs. "Here are some edits, no need to add me"

Small Trials vs Large Trials

Sensible Diversion #2 Answer

Saturday's Sensible Diversion #2

What happens when doctors run unethical trials? They get promoted

New Austrian Study Shows Boosters do NOT reduce COVID19 deaths in people who had COVID

How Caring, Informed, Intelligent, and Committed Doctors Can Disagree about COVID Boosters

The Evidence that Established Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery is Worth Studying

A Sensible Connection Answer

A Sensible Connection

What's best: breast milk, bottle or a mix of both

Math Professor Ben Recht and I Discuss P-values and Confidence Intervals

Fraud, Distortion, and Truth in Science

Not the Way to Pull Vaccines Back from a “Dangerous Tipping Point”

A Surprising Look at the Evidence for Beta-Blockers After MI

I Still Can’t be Rational about COVID

What it Takes to Actually Achieve Shared Decision Making.

Hearing Aids are great, even if they don't save lives

The Perfect Placebo

How Many COVID Vaccines Are Enough?

Three Words that Cause Harm: "Bone on Bone"