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What is a university if not a true marketplace of ideas — a place where scholarly pursuits in history, science, literature, philosophy, art, and mathematics can be nurtured and questioned, where crosscurrents of diverse thought and perspectives can co-exist? Today, students are challenged by the notion of an open society, tested on the one hand by values of free expressio...
Food labeling covers a range of issues important to consumers from personal health and well-being to healthier production systems. Consumers and advocates have been pushing for an assortment of food labels: GMO, organic, worker justice, animal welfare, and nutrition facts, to name a few. Meaningful labels can allow consumers to vote with their dollars to support their valu...
Patient-centered care is defined by the National Academy of Medicine as “providing care that respects and responds to individual patient preferences, needs and values, and ensures that patient values guide all clinical decisions.” Designed to place patients at the heart of the system, the approach is built around well-coordinated, quality care, including physical comfort a...
Health systems contribute significantly to the forces driving climate change, given the vast quantities of energy they consume and the enormous volumes of waste they generate. In the US, the health sector produces eight percent of the nation’s total emissions, while Brazilian hospitals account for 10 percent of that country’s energy use. Health systems can reduce their car...
A giant in global public health who dedicated his life to championing equity, Paul Farmer’s death in Rwanda this year at the age of 62 is a heartbreaking loss. Passionate, blunt, and inspirational, he was a physician, an activist, an anthropologist, a mentor, a father, and a husband who rooted his work on the unshakeable principle that all people should be valued equally....
From the skewed impact of climate change on the nations that have contributed least to the problem to financing mechanisms that allow primary care services to languish in the poorest countries, inequitable patterns in global health and development are all too evident. To radically reimagine healthcare systems, we need to acknowledge lingering colonialism and commit to exti...
Every year, one-third of all the food produced on the planet is lost or wasted, an amount valued at about one trillion dollars. If just 25 percent of that waste could be avoided, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people. Expiration dates that have no meaning to food safety, a reluctance to sell fruits and vegetables with cosmetic blemishes, and retail over-stoc...
Stolen medical records are worth more than financial data. If your Social Security number gets into the wrong hands, the cost to society is a dime. If your credit card is hacked, that loss is worth a quarter. But your medical records? They are valued at more than $1,000. Hackers scrape medical records for personal information that can be used to file fake insurance claims,...
When we understand how our emotions work — and how they can trick us for both good and bad outcomes — we can turn them into superpowers. Hear from researchers and practitioners who offer intriguing ways to think about emotions. They suggest ways to better navigate our inner lives and relationships with those around us.
We know that men and women are different — but how exactly, and why? Though some differences lie in anatomy and biology, that’s not the whole story. How do our brains dictate our manliness or womanliness, and what differences between males and females exist only in our imaginations? Do boys really have more trouble in the classroom, do girls innately care more about beauty...
Many health systems are retooling to provide “patient-centered care,” defined by the Institute of Medicine as a partnership between providers and patients that respects individual preferences, needs, and values. The use of big data to individualize treatment, detect clinical trends, share best practices, and predict the risks of infection and drug side effects is also resh...
Inequitable and untimely responses to COVID-19 and other pandemics. Disproportionate health impacts of climate change in Africa. Unequal financing mechanisms. Lack of reliable data and information. A dearth of leadership guided by human-centered values. These are a few of the many challenges that stand in the way of global health and development systems that work for all....
The 3rd annual Spotlight Health is a deep-dive into issues around health, and it’s a momentous time for health. It’s becoming easier to alter human genes, and the Zika epidemic continues to impact an increasing number of people. What’s being done to detect and respond to outbreaks like Zika? Are we combining science with values, and technology with humanity? How is pl...
In his new book, Rough Sleepers, author Tracy Kidder tells the remarkable story of Dr. Jim O’Connell, a Boston physician who has dedicated his life to providing healthcare to homeless people. Through the doctor’s eyes, Kidder also immerses us in the lives of the unsheltered population—their back stories, daily risks, survival mechanisms, and unmet human needs. In a society...
Many of the people doing today’s most consequential environmental work — restoring America’s grasslands, wildlife, soil, rivers, wetlands, and oceans — would not call themselves environmentalists; they would be too uneasy with the connotations of that word. What drives them is their deep love of the land — they feel a moral responsibility to preserve their heritage and ens...
Marijuana is now legal for medical purposes in 29 states, and nine states allow it to be sold for recreational use. With broad claims made for its physiological and psychological value, cannabis is being used to treat seizures and glaucoma, reduce pain and inflammation, stimulate appetite, lessen stress, boost the immune system, and much more. It has also been widely adopt...
Population growth, shifting agricultural practices, and altered weather patterns are weighing on the food supply, a pressure that will only intensify over the next 30 years, when the planet holds an estimated 10 billion inhabitants. Rising temperatures will reduce crop yield and spawn more pests, higher carbon dioxide levels will lessen the nutritional value of food, and f...
About 40 percent of GDP in the United States is spent on either the health or financial industries, yet workers themselves are in increasingly dire health and financial straits. The plight of a large segment of the American public should be a siren call to sector leaders to align their business goals with actions that enhance household well-being and healthy communities. F...
Trust is democracy’s most valuable asset; we simply can’t work together to solve large problems without it. Yet, trust is at an all-time low. Polling reveals that a majority of Americans do not trust government or the media, and — perhaps more concerning — they do not trust each other. The Aspen Institute’s program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation argues that when it...
In the face of the pandemic, technology became an important part of how we accessed care almost overnight. Suddenly, physician video consults became standard practice, tests and devices were routinely used to diagnose and monitor disease at home, and new software was connecting people with the information they needed from the convenience of their phones or tablets. This ch...