Gary Lucas, Jr. (Texas Wesleyan): Saving Smokers from Themselves: The Paternalistic Use of Cigarette Taxes. From NYRB, Jerome Groppman reviews The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700 by Robert Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong (and more); and Arnold Relman on how doctors could rescue health care. The quiet health-care revolution: How a company’s mix of high-tech (wireless scales) and low-tech (regular toenail-clipping) strategies is transforming health care. Do you like comic books with CBO scores, two-headed alligators and health economist superheroes? Then has Jonathan Gruber got a graphic novel for you. A review of Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You by Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband. A review of Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform by Paul Starr (and more). Barbara J King on why the paleo-diet is not the way to a healthy future. On be(com)ing a good doctor: A review of My Imaginary Illness: A Journey into Uncertainty and Prejudice in Medical Diagnosis by Chloe G.K. Atkins and Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care by Augustus White and David Chanoff. Health is a social construct: How do we determine that readings from modern medical equipment like EMGs, MRIs, and C-T Scans have something important to tell us about our health? Nicholas Jackson introduces The Atlantic's Health Channel. A drug that wakes the near dead: A surprising drug has brought a kind of consciousness to patients once considered vegetative — and changed the debate over pulling the plug. The anti-mouse: Could a hairless African rodent be our secret weapon in the war on cancer?
