Heard through Ari Armstrong: Several anti-abortion groups intend to protest the birth control pill on the grounds that it allegedly affects the sexual development of fish species.

Obviously, these groups are not really upset about hermaphroditic fish. They’d like to ban birth control because it supposedly violates “God’s” commandment to “be fruitful and multiply,” even if that means sacrificing your values, and viewing sex not as a pleasure, Read more

Dr. Pauline Chen writes in today’s New York Times that Medicare’s and Medicaid’s (and, consequently, private insurers’) refusal to pay for so-called “never events” — complications caused by egregious physician errors — could lead to denial of care to the sickest patients.

On the surface, refusing to pay for a “never event” makes sense. As John Galt puts it after his capture by a totalitarian government, you wouldn’t pay a doctor to set Read more

Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, isn’t happy that laws forcing restaurants to post calorie counts haven’t induced the restaurateurs to cut high-calorie offerings from their menu. As Reuters reports, Jacobson complains that “[chain restaurants] practice caloric extremism, and they’re helping make modern-day Americans become the most obese people ever to walk the Earth.”

Mr. Jacobson: Read more

In this week’s Ethicist column of the New York Times, a woman whose husband benefited from a stranger’s donated kidney asks whether she has a moral obligation to help the stranger, now that the stranger is in financial trouble and has written to ask for help. The writer says, “I wish it were legal to sell organs; it would be much cleaner in many ways.”

So true. If selling organs were legal, then the stranger could have asked a substantial Read more

The New York Times says “a simple swab can make you a lifesaver” — that is, if a swab of the DNA in your cheeks shows that you’re a match to donate bone marrow to a patient with a blood disease.

The article’s strong implication is that everybody should do this. After all, this little thing could be such a big thing for a sick person, right?

Well, no. If you’re a match, you won’t necessarily, as the Times reports, have to go Read more

Remember how the White House wanted Americans to tell it about any “fishy” health care information they heard? Well, the government’s push to turn us all into informants in medicine doesn’t stop there. The FDA would like your doctor to rat out those evil pharma companies as part of its new “Bad Ad” campaign. If a doctor sees a campaign that violates FDA’s (vague, nonobjective) guidelines, he is supposed to play informant by calling the FDA’s hotline Read more

Most people I know have the opposite problem that I do with exercise: They profess a desire to work out regularly, and can’t seem to make themselves do it.

My problem, which is a pretty common one among runners (and I suspect anyone who has gotten good at disciplined practice of a particular athletic activity), is that I have a training plan, and it’s really hard to make myself not stick to it. Yes, that is a problem — occasionally, as Read more

Although I don’t agree with choosing a drug’s “birthday” by its FDA approval date (the lifesaving idea was developed much earlier, and why give FDA the credit for the innovation?), many news outlets are using that determination to say that hormonal birth control is turning 50 this month.

Says the AP article: “In the 1960s, anthropologist Ashley Montagu thought the birth control pill was as important as the discovery of fire. Turns out Read more

Dr. Jane Orient, author of Your Doctor Is Not In, tells us why she won’t take government money for her services: because she understands that having the government as a customer is inherently dangerous. If a patient who pays with his own money thinks Dr. Orient is charging too much for her services, he can try to negotiate payment with her or look for another doctor. But if the government decides her profits are “too high,” she can be fined, forced Read more

In the American health care system, where so many goods and services are paid for indirectly, through a third-party insurer, patients learn to ask for champagne even if they should really be on an iced-tea budget. But I’d never thought about how doctors’ thinking, too, is so different from what it would be in a free market, until I read this New York Times article.

A doctor’s education is devoid, with rare exceptions, of consideration of Read more