Should Health Professionals Be Like Jedi Knights?

Mike Magee David Brooks stimulated a brisk national discussion last week in a column called “The Humanist Vocation”.(1) In it, he noted that college majors in the humanities had dropped from 14% to 7% in the past 50 years. In the piece he defined the job of humanities “to cultivate the human core, the part […]

The Pull and Push of Personalized Health Care

Ralph Snyderman ORIGINAL SOURCE My interest in personalized health care began approximately a dozen years ago when as Chancellor for Health Affairs at Duke University, I realized that emerging sciences and technologies were creating medical capabilities never before known. Through the power of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, systems biology, and bioinformatics, one could begin to predict […]

Pfizer, Torcetrapib, and HDL: The Dangers of Presuming To Know.

Mike Magee In June 2006, I was meeting privately with a member of Pfizer’s executive leadership team when he shared with me two bits of information that resurfaced in my conciousness today. The first was offered as a bit of coaching (more political than scientific) but has broader application: “Mike, don’t ever presume that you […]

Healthy Behavior

Blending economics and psychology on behalf of healthDespite the great strides that we have made in health care over the last 50 years, we find ourselves in 2008 with an interesting problem: There is growing acknowledgement that human behavior has been unable to maintain pace with scientific understanding. When it first became obvious that we […]