but you know it's fiction because when a doctor does something illegal he's immediately disciplined

someone with cellulitis winces when you brush their skin? a young person looking very blue? better know i can spot those multiple choice questions

watching the pitt as a doctor is like sitting through Board Exam: The Show!

IPUMS DHS data extracts can now be created using a microdata API in R, through a package called ipumsr! See our introduction to the microdata API at tech.popdata.org/ipumsr/dev/articles/ipum...

THE HOUSE JUST VOTED TO EXTENDED TPS FOR HAITI!!! Thank you, Rep. Ayanna Pressley for your leadership on this. Proud to help co-lead this effort for our Haitian brothers, sisters, and siblings. What a day.

A JAMA viewpoint article titled "Mandatory Training Modules in Health Care—Time to Reassess" by Michael Gottlieb, MD¹, published online April 16, 2026, doi: 10.1001/jama.2026.3969.

💬 Viewpoint: Mandatory annual training modules consume millions of physician‑hours each year, yet their largely passive formats may offer limited educational value while contributing to administrative burden and clinician burnout.

ja.ma/4mICoPp

a+++ pedantic footnote

AcademyHealth Action Resource: Submit Testimony to Congress on AHRQ Funding Our new resource offers tips and best practices to help you contact lawmakers and advocate for a fully-funded AHRQ.

Attention all who have ever received AHRQ funding to fuel #healthcare research: You have 6 days left to submit expert testimony to the House Appropriations Committee as they consider the agency's future funding.

@academyhealth.bsky.social has tips: ahsituationreport.substack.com/p/academyhea...

Wildlife trade drives animal-to-human pathogen transmission over 40 years

New in @science.org ‼️ In the most comprehensive study to date, we show that wildlife trade is driving animal-to-human zoonotic spillover at a planetary scale, with +1 spillover per host every 10 years. Live animal markets and illegal trade pose even greater risks. 🔓 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Recently accepted by #QJE: “The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military,” by Greenberg, Wasserman, and Weber: doi.org/10.1093/qje/...

Viral photo from some years back of a man nonchalantly mowing his yard with a tornado on the horizon .

How it feels doing literally any task right now.

Nearly 40 state lawmakers urge Mass General Brigham to recognize primary care doctors’ union - The Boston Globe The legislators implored the state’s largest health care system to abandon its appeal to the National Labor Relations Board and to start contract talks.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/07/b...

in other news ...

I do appreciate that NYT called a physicist at Emory to ensure that he also had Atlanta credentials in order to ask about Waffle House teleportation

Season 7 / Episode 21

"You call hamburgers 'steamed hams'?"

"Yes, it's a regional dialect."

"Uh-huh. What region?"

"Uh, upstate New York."

"Really? Well, I'm from Utica and I've never
heard anyone use the phrase 'steamed hams'."

"Oh, not in Utica, no, it's an Albany expression."

"I see."

We consulted with the writers of The Pitt on this storyline. The scripts don’t always get all the insurance and health policy details right, but I can vouch for the fact that they definitely work hard to understand the nuances. It has to work as a compelling story, too.
@robinr.bsky.social

Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project Results from massive, ‘eagerly awaited’ initiative reinforce concerns about the credibility of science — but raise hope for solutions.

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding

go.nature.com/4bZ9k0W

SCORE | Center for Open Science SCORE shows that there is no shortcut to producing credible research findings, and there is no single indicator of trustworthiness. Research progress depends on transparency, rigor, and establishing r...

SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.

We are thrilled to announce the finalists for the 32nd Annual #NIHCMAwards in Health Care Journalism and Policy Research! Join us in congratulating these journalists and researchers and learn more about their work here: bit.ly/NIHCM2026Awa... #NIHCMAwardsJournalism #NIHCMAwardsPolicyResearch

this is pretty fascinating, have to digest more to understand the meaning of the inequality scale

GitHub - asacarny/hospital-cost-reports at add-snf Code to process the CMS hospital cost reports (HCRIS) and cost report datasets - asacarny/hospital-cost-reports

Now available: my hospital cost report (HCRIS) code downloads and processes SNF cost reports, too. I've only tested it a little, so take with a grain of salt and let me know how it works for you! For now, it's a separate branch in the repository here:
github.com/asacarny/hos...

Only 23% of government workers believe they “can report a suspected violation of a law, rule, or regulation without experiencing retaliation.”
That's way down form the share the prior year (72%) who said they could report suspected illegal activity without fear
www.thebulwark.com/p/two-more-g...

Pet peeve: un-self-aware academic junket culture. We spend $2000 to attend conferences where 75% of speakers rail against American inequality, while we splurge on $75 dinners, stay in $300/night hotel rooms, and take a $50 uber ride to avoid a 3-stop subway ride that would cost $2.50.

so much of the time when one of these guys says "i would do ANYTHING for my family" they mean "i fantasize about using violence to defend my family" and not "i'm willing to do some cooking and cleaning and spend time with my partner and kids doing things that interest them"

Geneva's CERN hails delicate test on transporting antimatter as a scientific success Scientists at CERN took some antiprotons out for a spin in a never-tried-before test drive. Tuesday's experiment was hailed as a success.

CERN took some antiprotons on a field trip! apnews.com/article/cern... (HT @matociquala.bsky.social)

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

This is a great list of techniques for getting real information out of a Google search and avoiding AI slop and paid results.
(One thing not included is that if you add "-ai" to a search, you block the AI summary) cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

Antibiotic use and gut microbiome composition links from individual-level prescription data of 14,979 individuals - Nature Medicine Using individual-level data from the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register and fecal metagenomes of 14,979 individuals in Sweden, the authors examined the association between oral antibiotic use over 8 yea...

Antibiotics and the gut microbiome -

“Clindamycin, fluoroquinolones and flucloxacillin accounted for most of the associations with the abundance of individual species,”
with impact seen 4-8 years after use…

www.nature.com/articles/s41... #IDSky

Little 4 panel comic. Panel 1: forg on a pink skateboard on a grey road surface. It reads “I’m going”. Panel 2: he is going fast down hill. He goes “wooooo”. Panel 3: we see him mid air with the skateboard flipped. He says “sick flip”. Panel 4: finally he’s laying down in the grass with the skateboard next to him, resting. It says “no big deal”.

He was a skater frog

A still from a video of a tiny white horse the size of a large dog. Its forelock is braided. It's wearing a little blue vest/cape. It has tiny black booties on it's itty bitty hooves.

I just want to make sure everyone knows Mayo Clinic has a therapy miniature horse named Blue Sky