How many billions per year will the DSM-5 cost?

This was a really interesting article, because it gives a glimpse of the economic reality of the American medical system.  Among the parties involved - doctors, pharmaceutical companies, lawyers, and patients, there is but one incentive:  do more, prescribe more, treat more.  Whether patients are helped or hurt by these treatments seems to be of minimal concern, and certainly nobody is doing a cost-benefit analysis.  It is as if financial resources were infinite.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-20/how-many-billions-a-year-will-the-dsm-5-cost-.html

Read the comments at the bottom, too.

What does Adam Smith think about your medical degree?

This letter was written two years before "The Wealth of Nations", in 1774.

My favorite paragraph:

"A degree can pretend to give security for nothing but the science of the graduate; and even for that it can give but a very slender security. For his good sense and discretion, qualities not discoverable by an academical examination, it can give no security at all. But without these, the presumption which commonly attends science must render it, in the practice of physic, ten times more dangerous than the grossest ignorance, when accompanied, as it sometime is, with some degree of modesty and diffidence."

Vegan sandwich!

Who says you need meat and cheese to have a great sandwich?

Spinach, sauteed red peppers (if they are hard they don't fit into the sandwich well), red onion, hummus, avocado, tomato.  And here is the trick - use sprouts like a net to hold it all together.

Very satisfying and balanced..  Carbs from bread and tomato, protein from sprouts and hummus, fat from avocado.