Dipak Das of the University of Connecticut has been found by a special review board to have committed 145 separate counts of data falsification and fabrication in his studies of the effects on the heart of red-wine consumption (and specifically of the compound resveratrol, found in red wine). A summary the board's findings is here. The research misconduct is said to affect 26 articles in as many as 11 journals. Retraction Watch is following the case, and has printed some responses from Das, who is alleging ethnic bias, conspiracy and mistreatment by UConn.
Harvard's David Sinclair (a booster of resveratrol) was quoted in the New York Times as saying that there will be little fallout for the general field of resveratrol study around the world. "Today I had to look up who he is. His papers are mostly in specialty journals,” he said. Ouch! But Science 2.0 (which is skeptical about resveratrol) notes an earlier connection between Sinclair and Das, and a sort-of retraction by Sinclair of his NYT comment. Curioser and curioser!
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Friday, January 13, 2012
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Too Much Spending on Healthcare, Not Enough on Social Services
Here's a remarkable op-ed by my colleagues Betsy Bradley and Lauren Taylor. (Among many other things, Betsy runs Yale's Global Health Leadership Institute and Lauren is an alum of our Bioethics Summer Program.) Their piece summarizes data from a study that ran in BMJ Quality and Safety earlier this year.
The US famously spends very much more on healthcare than other countries. But the study looked at social spending more broadly, counting expenditures not only on health, but also on social services such as rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support, and so on. When those expenditures are added up, the US comes in 10th in world spending. And we're one of only three industrialized countries which spends more on health care than on those other social services. This failure to spend on social services, the op-ed claims, explains why our huge expenditures on health care don't give us good health outcomes. We'd get more health for our dollars if we offered people more social support.
A striking example from the op-ed: 119 chronically homeless people in Boston logged 18,884 emergency room visits in just five years, at a cost of $12.7 million. Perhaps if those people had had better social services, we wouldn't have had to pay for so many costly ER visits.
The US famously spends very much more on healthcare than other countries. But the study looked at social spending more broadly, counting expenditures not only on health, but also on social services such as rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support, and so on. When those expenditures are added up, the US comes in 10th in world spending. And we're one of only three industrialized countries which spends more on health care than on those other social services. This failure to spend on social services, the op-ed claims, explains why our huge expenditures on health care don't give us good health outcomes. We'd get more health for our dollars if we offered people more social support.
A striking example from the op-ed: 119 chronically homeless people in Boston logged 18,884 emergency room visits in just five years, at a cost of $12.7 million. Perhaps if those people had had better social services, we wouldn't have had to pay for so many costly ER visits.
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