Death by affirmative action: race quotas in medicine
See also previous 2017 post. I have been repeatedly asked about this topic, so here is a post that covers the basics. The argument goes like this: Affirmation action is…
Review: The Censor’s Hand (Carl E. Schneider)
Schneider, C. (2015). The censor’s hand: the misregulation of human-subject research. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Medical and social progress depend on research with human subjects. When that research is…
Health dysgenics: a very brief review
Woodley reminded me of the dysgenics for health outcomes by linking me to a study about the increasing rates of cancer. I had first reached this conclusion back in 2005…
WHO on genomics and health, 2002
I have been tweeting annotated snippets from a WHO report I'm reading. Like this: https://twitter.com/KirkegaardEmil/status/895006070388772866 Basically, the report does a decent job at summarizing the state of the art in…
Causal effects of head injuries revisited
Comment on: Sariaslan, A. et al. (2016). Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and…
Organ donation consent vs. actual rates
There is a famous paper arguing the case for libertarian paternalism by using organ donation consent rates. Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. (2003). Do defaults save lives?. Science, 302(5649),…
Admixture mapping assisted GWAS
Medical researchers have noticed that some diseases differ by SIRE (self-identified race/ethnicity) groups which differ by genomic (racial) ancestry. Hence, when genomic measures became available (last 15 years or so),…
Reanalysis of Josefsson et al (2014)’s meta-analysis of exercise as treatment for depression
A link on Reddit claimed that exercise could be an effective treatment for depression. I felt it necessary to comment that: Exercise does not have a causal effect on depression…
Criticism of BMI and simple IQ tests – a conceptual link?
BMI (body mass index) is often used a proxy for fat percent or similar measures. This is for a good reason: So, the mean correlation across age groups and gender…
Cancer rates: Part 2, does alcohol consumption have incremental predictive power?
Same guy proposed another idea. Wikipedia has data here. However, since i had previously seen that people fudge data on Wikipedia articles (e.g. this one), then maybe it was not…