Article Alert

I'm still working on the conclusion to my series of posts on TCM/CCM, which I hope to have up soon, but until then I wanted to alert readers to two recent articles: the first by Gary Taubes on epidemiology ('Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy'?), using the paradigmatic story of hormone replacement therapy (H.R.T.) to illustrate the truth of the following comment from Richard Peto, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford University: "'Epidemiology is so beautiful and provides such an important perspective on human life and death, but an incredible amount of rubbish is published,' by which he means the results of observational studies that appear daily in the news media and often become the basis of public-health recommendations about what we should or should not do to promote our continued good health." It is in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, a link to which is found at Arts & Letters Daily under "Articles of Note": http://www.aldaily.com/

The second piece is by one of--if not the--foremost scholars in the field of public health, namely Lawrence O. Gostin: "Meeting Basic Survival Needs of the World's Least Healthy People: Toward a Framework Convention on Public Health," Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 96, 2008 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1014082 (I learned of it through Larry Solum's indispensable Legal Theory Blog, which posts the abstract: http://lsolum.typepad.com/legaltheory/

Patrick S. O'Donnell