How is a physician supposed to know which medicine is most affordable under which insurance plan? Fortunately, there are tools coming into use designed to help clinicians figure out patient-specific costs of any medication they prescribe. The tools (jargon alert!) are called RTBTs, for real-time benefit tools.

After learning that her favorite prophylactic is going off the market, Seinfeld’s Elaine Benes had to decide which potential partners were “sponge-worthy,” even putting her new boyfriend through what resembled a job interview to see if he was up to her new sexual standards. While the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic is hopefully behind us, new variants continue to spread, with news sources reporting this week that Jill Biden and Whoopi Goldberg have come down with the virus. Given the ongoing threat of Covid-19 and other infectious diseases, we all face a new kind of worthiness judgement, a decision about who is “contagion-worthy”: who should we hug, kiss and socialize with given the risk that they harbor a dangerous microorganism?

You wake up in the post-operative recovery area, still groggy, the full effects of the procedure obscured by an anesthetic haze. You begin to ponder several questions: Was the surgery a success? Did the surgeon find anything unexpected? How quickly will the procedure make you feel better? There's another question you might ask yourself. A few weeks from now, is anyone involved in your care going to send you a surprise bill?

It would have been a difficult ending under the best of circumstances. Composing what would be his last opera, Giacomo Puccini was struggling to humanize Turandot, daughter of the Emperor and a woman of mesmerizing beauty. Early in the opera, she had cruelly disposed of a series of want-to-be suitors, beheading some and torturing others, […]

Will a fiercely independent person like me become less generous if I practice mindfulness? Will all that focus on self and present drawing me away from other people's concerns?

Doctors who join up with hospitals or large healthcare organizations in anticipation that this will increase their incomes are misguided or ill informed.