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Do ADHD drugs really reduce adverse life outcomes?
I’ve been seeing this study by Zhang et al in the news and on subreddits, with claims that it confirms ADHD drugs improve life outcomes. It’s an interesting study that uses methods to emulate an RCT using public registry data. However, it’s doubtful that the adjustments really eliminate bias. I’ve spent a lot of time…
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The UK is so fractured we have Minority Report pre-crime policing to stop it crumbling
In the UK it is considered a crime to plan a terrorist attack, even if the attack is not carried out. The law is being updated so that lone individuals without an established ideology can be arrested. And apparently the planning of an attack can be punished as severely as an actual attack. What is…
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Does obesity really cost the UK £126 billion per year?
A study has found that obesity costs the NHS £126 billion per year. Having gone through a PhD in the economic costs of disease I don’t even need to read the study to know the given figure is meaningless. Studies claiming that ‘disease x costs the economy y amount’, otherwise known as cost of illness…
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Does drinking champagne really reduce the risk of cardiac arrest?
The headline: Drinking champagne could reduce risk of sudden cardiac arrest, study suggests. But does the study actually suggest that? The full text article. For some reason scientific articles don’t get linked to in newspaper stories. The study used data from the UK biobank and the authors attempted to reduce confounding and show causality through…
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How much do we really work?
When asked how many hours they work, people tend to give the hours spent in paid employment. But paid work isn’t the only work people do. If ‘work’ only meant paid work then hunter gatherers and slaves must have spent their lives in idle leisure. That is obviously absurd. So what exactly do we mean…
Contrarian Camel
Contrarian views on economics, healthcare and technology