Rhona Finkel

Today, thanks to smartphones, a visually impaired person can walk to the store guided by GPS technology and check out the price of a shirt he wants to buy by scanning its bar code. If he finds it cheaper two blocks away, the app will guide him there, stopping on his way when a large, lovely flower catches his eye. He can snap a shot of it to learn that its color is Alabama crimson. Arriving at the better-priced store, our friend can locate his shirt, bring it to the cashier, and can pay with complete assurance that he is not being cheated.

Everybody loves a bargain, Americans as much as anyone. Yet they have failed to find one in their healthcare system. Let's just take some fairly recent data, published in 2012 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 34 countries that reports on over 1,200 health system measures. Any guesses here for [...]

Let's face it.  If the Food and Drug Administration thought it was urgently life–threatening, they would have pulled the drug faster then you can say "ZyprexaRelprevv." But no rational person can honestly interpret the events surrounding June 18, 2013, as positive publicity for drug-maker, Eli Lilly. What in the world is she talking about?You may be [...]

In a contest nobody wants to win, one Dirk Schroeder seems to have indeed come out victorious. Schroeder went in for a prostate cancer operation in 2009. It seems the operation went well – except for one small thing. Surgeons left not one, not two, not three – but 16 items inside Schroeder's body.   It's [...]

So we know from last post that bipolar sufferers spend more time depressed than manic (in a three-to-one ratio), and that with that depression comes lost days per sick worker, a loss to the U.S. labor force in the billions—and the highest suicide rate for any psychiatric disorder.

According to the World Health Organization, bipolar disorder is the sixth leading cause of disability in the world. The illness is characterized by periods of overexcitement, or mania, followed by depression, with its reduced functioning. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill adds the shocking statistic that approximately 25-50% of those with bipolar disorder (BD) attempt [...]