Patients liked a blood pressure app better because it was inaccurate

If I were to pick a single study that wraps all my angst about medicine up into a tidy bow, it would be this one:

"...user enjoyment and likelihood of future BP monitoring were negatively associated with higher-than-expected reported systolic BP. These data suggest reassuring app results from an inaccurate BP-measuring app may have improved user experience, which may have led to more positive user reviews and greater sales."

A better writer could hold forth on how doctors (and devices?) are so bad at giving negative but meaningful information to patients that patients simply avoid the process altogether, leading patients to seek a relationship with their doctors that more resembles that between a shaman and a subject than that of a modern, informed, dynamic doctor-patient exchange of information.

*head explodes*

Dr. Robert Badgett, on seeing this study, reminded me of a quote by Voltaire:

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

I certainly feel like I'm in the entertainment business some days.

With wider availability of cannabis comes wider use and wider abuse

"Public-health experts worry about the increasingly potent options available, and the striking number of constant users. 'Cannabis is potentially a real public-health problem,' said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at New York University. 'It wasn’t obvious to me 25 years ago, when 9 percent of self-reported cannabis users over the last month reported daily or near-daily use. I always was prepared to say, ‘No, it’s not a very abusable drug. Nine percent of anybody will do something stupid.’ But that number is now [something like] 40 percent."

I knew guys in college who were stereotypical "potheads," and I think my bias at the time was that all but a few of them would be reined in by the relative difficulty of getting the drug (not that it was difficult). Now that the reins are off, we're stuck addressing possible solutions to the problem. This is not an argument for going back to hard-core criminalization. As Annie Lowrey points out, the US still arrests more people for marijuana offenses than it does for all violent crimes combined. That seems, shall we say, excessive.