Health surprises

From:

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/christiner ... sletterad=

Last summer, scientists credited the Ice Bucket Challenge for another breakthrough in researching the disease.

This is about ALS research. My wife keeps saying that insurance isn't health care. I'd add that good research can lead to better health care. However, financing can be a problem, either because of a lack of it, or wasting it. Does anyone know if any of those challenge prizes are aimed at better prevention of bad health? The advantage of a well planned prize is that many will try for it, using their own resources, but it only goes to success. A problem sometimes is that resources are absorbed by poorly planned spending.

There was a SF short story about someone who became head of a government research group, who aimed at many small blue sky projects, and made himself the acknowledged expert on how to do research well in order to continue the policy. Analog, I think, a few decades back.

BTW, is there anything in Obamacare that improves the research situation? Just asking

The thing about medical research is that it's usually focused at big issues (obesity, cancer etc), but problems that afflict a small portion of the population tend to get less money for research. In those cases competitions like the ice bucket challenge is a good way to put the spotlight on them and at the same time generate money for research.

I haven't seen any challenges with a large participation for preventative measures against bad health, but there have been smaller ones which mostly was focused on getting people to exercise more.

Poor planning of resources usually tend to happen when there is no clear plan on how to use them or you have a top heavy organization where the administration consumes almost everything.

Regarding Obamacare including Base Medical and Medicare, it actually costs less now than just Base Medical and Medicare before Obamacare was created (see figure). Neither Obamacare, Medical or Medicare has anything to do with research, that's NIHs domain. They spend about ~$32 billion/year on research. How well that money is used is another question though.

Joat42 wrote:
snip

Poor planning of resources usually tend to happen when there is no clear plan on how to use them or you have a top heavy organization where the administration consumes almost everything.

snip

Also when there is a clear plan, which is incorrect. IMO, some of the cancer research suffers from this. A well planned prize program, focused on results only, should tend to make it easier for useful unexpected consequences to be found. IIRC, many important discoveries, such as penicillin or radioactivity, started by finding an effect that couldn't be predicted from accepted theory.

One nice thing about real science, is that given application of the methods involved to even unpopular views, it is self correcting.

Read:

"On the Origin of Human Mitochondrial DNA differences, New Generation Time Data Both Suggest a Unified Young-Earth Creation Model and Challenge the Evolutionary Out-of-Africa Model." by Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson PhD (biology, Harvard)

Isaac Asimov once had an article on how theories change from unacceptable to commonly believed. IIRC, he said that in most cases, the older generation doesn't change their ideas, it is the youngsters who are willing to examine a new paradigm using real data. Hopefully, some of us are young in mind