Below is just a capped screen shot.

Be sure to play around with the interactive version here.

“The key here seems to be the notion of control (or to use the academic term, self-efficacy) — self-monitoring can give us a way to participate in our health. And turning it into something fun, something that we can play with and improve upon — that can give us not only a role but an authority. We can take control of our health. And we can play to win.”

“Now comes an important and provocative book called Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by the psychologist Gene Heyman …

Heyman mounts a devastating assault on the brain-based model of addiction. Not that he views addiction as independent of the brain—no serious person could even entertain such a claim. What he rejects, however, is the notion that excessive drug or alcohol consumption is an irresistible act wholly beyond the user’s control, as the term “addiction,” commonly understood, implies. …

But addiction is not a brain state, it is a behavior. As philosopher Daniel Shapiro of West Virginia University puts it, “You can examine pictures of brains all day, but you’d never call anyone an addict unless he acted like one.” …

Contingencies are the key to voluntariness. No amount of reinforcement or punishment can alter the course of an entirely autonomous biological condition. Imagine bribing an Alzheimer’s patient to keep her dementia from worsening, or threatening to impose a penalty on her if it did. This is where choice comes in: choosing an alternative to drug use. …

It may strike some as insensitive to insist that addiction is a disorder of choice. “I have never come across a single drug-addicted person who told me [he or she] wanted to be addicted,” Nora Volkow, the current director of NIDA says. Exactly so. How many of us have ever come across a person who wanted to be fat? So many undesirable outcomes in life are achieved incrementally. In a choice model, full-blown addiction is the triumph of feel-good local decisions (“I’ll use today”) over punishing global anxieties (“I don’t want to be an addict tomorrow”). …

Progress in brain science will also force a confrontation with the fact that the common interpretation of pathological behavior is often informed by a primitive form of dualism. If biological roots can be found, then we reflexively think “disease”—as in the obliteration of choice-making ability. The mechanical “brain disease” rhetoric is a symptom of the growing tendency to privilege neuroscientific explanations as the most authentic way of understanding human behavior.”

“It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. … Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing. … “There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.” … any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical.”

Journals will start calling for more rigorous statistical analysis. Better get those patient record analyses in before editors realize how egregiously bad your data set is!

“The hydrogel lenses are embedded with nanoparticles which change color by reacting with the glucose in wearer’s tears.” – Singularity Hub

Is it just me or will nanoparticles become “normal flora” in a few decades?

Take a look at this remarkable chart put together by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine:

Economix has a take on this.