How Chance, Timing and Cognitive Bias Shape Our Health
You wouldn’t think that the month in which you’re born has much to do with your medical outcomes. In fact, kids who have summer birthdays are more likely to get the flu than kids born later in the year, and kids diagnosed with ADHD and born in August are prescribed an average of 120 more days of medication than kids born in September. These anomalies are just some of the many hidden forces that “can send two otherwise-similar people down very different paths of care, by chance alone,” according to Harvard Medical School doctors Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham. We learn why chance events…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.