Last week we looked at the challenges of using racial categories for assessing health risks and making treatment decisions. One of the alternatives proposed is to substitute measures of health indicators for racial categories, to move away from contingent causes and towards more proximal biological markers. Among the common and readily obtainable metrics are weight and the related body mass index (BMI). Here again, correlations do exist between weight & BMI and health outcomes, but also, a single measure fails to … [Read more...] about Science Corner: A Measure of Health
healthcare policy
Science Corner: Governing By Osmosis
Osmosis has long been part of our metaphorical repertoire for describing the spread of knowledge. The implied passivity no doubt rankles some teachers, and the reappropriation of a fairly precise term for such nebulous purposes confounds some scientists. Diffusion is a more generic and so perhaps more appropriate concept to be used analogically, which is exactly the approach used for modeling how health policies spread through society. The general notion of policy adoption as a diffusion process actually seems to be … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Governing By Osmosis