Dear clients and friends: Happy holidays! It’s the time of year for parties filled with eggnog and awkward conversations with people in reindeer sweaters.

Fret not! We rounded up our favorite healthcare articles we read this year, and we share them with you as conversation starters.

Here’s to yuletide cheer and fewer discussions about the weather!

1. To talk to the know-it-all…

…who pontificates about “disruptions” and “paradigm shifts,” mention data-first drug innovation:

 
From the FT: “Hypotheses for therapies are usually sourced from academic discoveries or publications and tested in a sequential way, mostly in animals, mice or even cell models to predict which of these drugs would actually work in humans. Hundreds of millions of dollars later you are entering clinical trials and, unsurprisingly, the drug fails,” said Zhang [a researcher]. “We are saying why not start in humans from day one, using a data driven approach if we want to succeed in humans?”

2. To talk to frustrated parents…

 …who complain their teenagers won’t leave their gaming chairs, brighten their mood by sharing that video games have cognitive benefits:

From the NIH: “Functional MRI brain imaging analyses found that children who played video games for three or more hours per day showed higher brain activity in regions of the brain associated with attention and memory than did those who never played. At the same time, those children who played at least three hours of video games per day showed more brain activity in frontal brain regions that are associated with more cognitively demanding tasks and less brain activity in brain regions related to vision.”

3. To talk to the “futurist” lauding AI…

…throw cold water by sharing how AI is failing in medicine and hospitals:

 From Dan Elton’s substack: “Hospitals are not set up to use AI. The most common radiology viewing software programs cannot display AI results. Most hospitals don’t have GPU machines, and sending images to the cloud can be tricky due to HIPPA regulations. EHR and imaging data live on separate systems, so integrating the two is difficult. Despite pushes for standardization, every hospital uses different coding systems and series description conventions for medical images.”

4. To talk to the PR professional…

…who is droning on about how their rebrand will showcase growth, innovation, sustainability, and shared purpose, scoff about the uselessness of overused words:

From The Economist: “Who really wants to be the person making the case for silos? Which executive secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation officer? Is it even possible to have purposelessness as a goal? Just as Karl Popper, a philosopher, made falsifiability a test of whether a theory could be described as scientific, antonymy is a good way to work out whether an idea has any value. Unless its opposite could possibly have something to recommend it, a word is too woolly to be truly helpful.”

5. To talk to your nephew in college…

…who is convinced that pharmaceuticals are poison and alternative treatments, like ‘shrooms and the metaverse, are the path forward, play the stickler and mention such pesky things as facts:

From MIT Technology Review: “The dominant theory on how psychedelics improve clinical outcomes (a debate far from settled) is that their effect is driven by both the subjective experience of a trip and the drug’s neurochemical effect on the brain. Since VR only mirrors the subjective experience, its clinical benefit, which has yet to be rigorously tested, may not be as strong.”