Contrarian Camel

Contrarian views on economics, healthcare and technology

Posts

  • Is rejection really a normal part of life?

    Rejection from a fool is cruel, sang Morrissey. But it’s an increasingly large part of modern life. Jobseekers can expect hundreds of rejected applications. Dating apps put your personal attractiveness up for the whole world to machine gun to pulp. In the workplace, for those who make it past all the rejection letters, any idea…

  • Do ADHD drugs really reduce adverse life outcomes?

    I’ve been seeing this study by Zhang et al in the news and on subreddits, with claims that it confirms ADHD drugs improve life outcomes. It’s an interesting study that uses methods to emulate an RCT using public registry data. However, it’s doubtful that the adjustments really eliminate bias. I’ve spent a lot of time…

  • The UK is so fractured we have Minority Report pre-crime policing to stop it crumbling

    In the UK it is considered a crime to plan a terrorist attack, even if the attack is not carried out. The law is being updated so that lone individuals without an established ideology can be arrested. And apparently the planning of an attack can be punished as severely as an actual attack. What is…

  • Does obesity really cost the UK £126 billion per year?

    A study has found that obesity costs the NHS £126 billion per year. Having gone through a PhD in the economic costs of disease I don’t even need to read the study to know the given figure is meaningless. Studies claiming that ‘disease x costs the economy y amount’, otherwise known as cost of illness…

  • Does drinking champagne really reduce the risk of cardiac arrest?

    The headline: Drinking champagne could reduce risk of sudden cardiac arrest, study suggests. But does the study actually suggest that? The full text article. For some reason scientific articles don’t get linked to in newspaper stories. The study used data from the UK biobank and the authors attempted to reduce confounding and show causality through…