turbulents

It's also important to consider that drugs work by leveraging a particular mechanism in the body into increased action, creating chain-reactions that are fueled by vitamins and nutrients. As a result, sustained use of that drug (or even short-term use of drugs that act aggressively) would make relevant vitamin and nutrient levels trend towards depletion, among the other listed side effects of that drug. If you take any medications, a normal diet may not be enough to mitigate this.

I bet if this happened in the US, the doctors would have prescribed something else to counteract the hypertrichosis.

$100,000 is way better than $1,500, right? Knowing the airline industry, this is a cost-cutting measure designed to try to trick you into thinking it's an improvement.

The converse (bad law makes hard cases) resonates more with me--glad it's mentioned in the article.

The FAA, NTSB, and airlines have made air travel incredibly safe over the years by operating the way you described.

Would have been nice when one of my family members was in the hospital for 6 months. Maybe he was talking about Dr. House?

I don't think it's that they get good results, but moreso that it's the conventional wisdom (or "standard of care") and a good mechanism for learning from and properly attributing bad patient outcomes just isn't there. I doubt anybody has told them that their patient died or was given inappropriate treatments because they didn't have the proper appreciation for Bayes theorem, even if it were the root cause. That's just not the culture of medicine today.

Clinicians seem to think that everyone is out to get them, or at least want to project the image that they're so vulnerable to lawsuits. The truth is, there's no threat to them. Only the most open-and-shut malpractice cases can realistically be litigated, due to the $250k damages cap (in California). And because there's such limited upside for the attorneys, most victims can't even get representation.

But despite all that, as someone who lost a family member due to physicians' mistakes, all we wanted was for the doctors to acknowledge what went wrong and then find a way to learn from it so it doesn't happen again to someone else. Victims understand--doctors are people and people make mistakes. I'm not the type to pursue litigation, but if anything, this code-of-silence/denial/cover-up routine only serves to encourage litigation as a way of making sure the problem is openly discussed.

The latest Freakonomics podcast addressed this issue as well: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/bad-medicine-part-3-death-di...

You sure it's a foley issue? Because it's his job to make complementing sound effects and it's someone else's job to decide how to use them in the final mix.

Bush did get his MBA from Harvard... in the 70s.

I'm not seeing any Group 1 passengers arriving late and having to board with Group 3 or 4 and that happens on pretty much every flight I've been on.

Maybe we're simulating a delayed flight then?

But if the flight's already delayed, who even cares anymore.

Looks like this could be useful for planning out some potential mileage run destinations!

I just started skipping through it once I saw the Comic Sans.

Last weekend, I was a little irritated when Southwest Airlines charged me an extra $5 to get a glass jar in my luggage bubble-wrapped when I would have preferred to save the $5 and take the risk of it breaking/leaking. The Southwest agent's explanation boiled down to more or less the same point as this article's. Kudos to her.