antimeria

It turns out that getting sick is not as conducive to blogging as I had thought. More updates soon.

Update: Animals with lightsabers! Dot com!

At first glance, this is a pretty heartwarming story–it turns out that if doctors are nice to their patients and act like decent, responsible human beings, patients are less angry when their doctors screw up! They might not even sue!

At the University of Michigan Health System, … lawyers and doctors say admitting mistakes up front and offering compensation before being sued have brought about remarkable savings in money, time and feelings.
[...]
“What we are doing is common decency,” said Richard Boothman, a veteran malpractice defense lawyer and chief risk officer for a health system with 18,000 employees and a $1.5 billion annual budget.

Okay, so  it’s not entirely altruistic:

The willingness to admit mistakes goes well beyond decency and has proven a shrewd business strategy… According to Boothman, malpractice claims against his health system fell from 121 in 2001 to 61 in 2006, while the backlog of open claims went from 262 in 2001 to 106 in 2006 and 83 in 2007.

And of course, there are the detractors.

For “saying sorry” to work, doctors need protection from having their own honesty used against them in court, said Jim Copland, director of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy and an advocate of curbs on damage suits. … “If you go out and say, ‘Oh, we messed up,’ are you going to lose the lawsuit? You need to give them some protection,” Copland said.

Ah cynicism, I missed you so. Look, I understand the desire to protect doctors from frivolous lawsuits, and I realize that the boundaries there can be pretty vague. I even think his concern is perfectly rational, as long as your scope remains “winning individual lawsuits.” But the UM doctors aren’t saying “Oh man, my bad–my bad, yo! We cool?” They’re “offering compensation”–settling possible cases before they go to court. In that situation, a sincere (or sincere-sounding) apology and a patient’s belief in her doctor’s good faith go a long way to avoiding a suit in the first place.

As Caroline put it today, “For someone with…an insatiable nutty curiosity, your blog has been awfully quiet lately.” Updates on more serious topics are coming, but I’d like to start with a bleg: does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with severe, multi-day muscle pain?

Also, Ezra Klein’s revelation that even Potbelly’s vegetarian sandwich has 550 calories and 60% of your day’s saturated fat (thanks to the three kinds of cheese they put on it) was quickly followed by his Cheesecake Factory roundup. Takeaways:

• Michael Ruhlman thinks the Cheesecake Factory does, in fact, rock.
• You should never, ever, ever order mashed potatoes there (bottom of this image from Calorie Lab).
• The CF’s miso-glazed salmon weighs in at 1,673 calories, 500 more than their chicken piccata and across-the-board worse for you than their shrimp scampi, though it doesn’t come close to the 2134-calorie, 81-grams-of-saturated-fat monstrosity that is the pasta carbonara. As Ezra notes, both miso and salmon are pretty low-fat, so I’m curious as to where all that gut-busting comes from.
  

This is a pretty compelling reason to require nutrition information on restaurant menus (and though I’m no great fan of Cosi, they’re one of the few chains that does so).

Update: Caroline just linked me to this fascinating look at fast-food hamburgers (PDF). Just so you know, the average fast-food burger is 12.1% meat. I’ll let you find out what the other 87.9% is on your own.

After some initial swine flu terror (All the victims were between 25 and 50?), I got curious*. There are two drugs currently being prescribed to treat the disease, oseltamivir (branded Tamiflu from Hoffman-La Roche) and Zanamivir (branded Relenza), so I did a quick search on Google Trends.

The full country-by-country results are interesting, too–Mexico is the only country where oseltamivir searches even come close to Tamiflu (In the US, Tamiflu outperforms oseltamivir 64:1). It might be a good time to invest in Hoffman-La Roche. As long as you don’t die.

*Okay, I won’t lie. I’m still terrified of this stuff. I’ll probably have a panic attack on the metro or something.

“Asians who get red in the face when they drink too much alcohol have a higher risk of getting cancer of the esophagus, US and Japanese researchers said yesterday.”

“Red-faced Asian drinkers at esophageal cancer risk” (Shanghai Times, HT @rss301)