Equal health for all, regardless of social status! It's a noble call today in response to a widening social status gap in our country. The Affordable Care Act is one effort to try to answer it. The premise certainly seems reasonable: One's health is determined by his physical access to modern medical services. The rich have access; the less rich have less access, or none. Health advantage: the rich, right? Not so fast. There's more to status and health than access to medical services, Continue Reading
Taking Charge of Your Own Health: Monitor Body or Thought?
What do you get when you strap 700 health app monitors to your body? If you're Chris Dancy of Denver, Colorado, you get the title “Most Quantified Human” and you now know what your body is doing--your heart rate, blood pressure, etc. On any given day, Dancy wears and monitors dozens of body devices, from a Pebble smartwatch and Google Glass to a BodyMedia armband and Blue heart rate monitor. He eats, drinks, sleeps, and so on, according to the data. He rejoices in taking charge of his Continue Reading
Re-thinking Science?
We thought we knew what “science” meant. Until 2013, that is. Last year, “science” was the word with the greatest increase in lookups in Merriam-Webster.com—a 176% increase over 2012, in fact. And it remained a top lookup throughout 2013. It's not a new word, so why the sudden interest? Perhaps it's because, as Merriam-Webster's Editor-at-Large, Peter Sokolowski suggests, “A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated Continue Reading