Michael L. Millenson

When my mother died back in 1993, the best way to alert the community was to get the local newspaper to run a news item people would see when they scanned the morning headlines. Unfortunately, our hometown paper was the Washington Post.

The Post obituary page, when not...

While it's comforting to just blame the GOP for the unhappiness with health reform threatening the president's re-election, the truth is that Barack Obama repeatedly botched, bungled and bobbled the health reform message. There were three big mistakes:

The Passionless Play While Candidate Obama proclaimed a passionate moral...

"We are now contemplating, Heaven save the mark, a bill that would tax the well for the benefit of the ill."

That's not a quote from oral arguments at the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act or from one of the earnest conservatives demonstrating against it...

In a provocative essay entitled, "Randomized God," internationally renowned psychiatrist David Healy lays out a blueprint for a clinical trial to test the healing power of prayer. Putting aside the spiritual benefits of supplication, a more pressing secular question might be phrased this way: Can strong...

Is the New York Giants' bathroom more sanitary than your hospital room? Could be. And that player cleanliness may even have helped send the team to the Super Bowl.

Freakonomics co-author and self-confessed germophobe Stephen Dubner, working on a Football Freakonomics segment for the National Football League, noticed...

Like everyone else, I've cheerfully hummed, whistled and sung along to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for as long as I can remember. But when I listened carefully to the lyrics this holiday season, I realized I'd missed the underlying message of a song that teaches invaluable lessons about...

Even the most causal fan knows that Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow wears his religion on his sleeve. But if it's a matchup of Biblical cred, ye of little faith should cleave to "Caleb" and the Chicago Bears over "Tim" and the Broncos on Sunday. Here's why.

In...

My wife was lying in the back of an ambulance, dazed and bloody, while I sat in the front, distraught and distracted. We had been bicycling in a quiet neighborhood in southern Maine when she hit the handbrakes too hard and catapulted over the handlebars, turning our first day of...

Spend some time with the Society for Medical Decision Making, and "shared decisions" starts to seem less a clinical ideal and more an offshoot of picking a monthly cell phone plan. The fine line between "motivating" and "manipulating" behavior (albeit sometimes unintentionally) starts to blur.

At the...

When an Israeli Army officer says, "Follow me!", the soldiers under his command may be confused whether he means Facebook or firefight.

According to an Israeli general, some officers have started issuing military orders to their men by email and text message. Even more incredibly, soldiers frequently ignore those orders,...

At a recent Chicago Cubs game, a sponsor handed out those big Styrofoam index fingers proclaiming, "We're #1!" It was the #1 dumbest promotion ever.

If you love baseball, there are three excellent reasons to give the index finger the third finger.
...

It's paternity test time for Obamacare.

Beneath the bogeyman label that the GOP leadership has attached to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the truth is that health reform has almost as many Republican as Democratic fathers. If you care about the country as much as political...

In the near-decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the "War on Terror" has cost the United States about $1.3 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

By comparison, it took just six months for the U.S. to spend that much money on health care, based...

IBM's Watson to be a doctor. Well, almost.

Fresh off a commanding victory on Jeopardy, IBM tactfully titled its knock-out, "Humans Win." That's because the company wants to show that its extraordinary computer can help humankind (and human customers), not merely humiliate mortal competitors.

As...

Maybe the uninsured could learn something from Egyptians and the Arab street. At a time when landmark health reform granting most of the uninsured access to medical care for the first time in their lives is being seriously threatened, protests by the uninsured themselves are nowhere to be...

In an America quietly divided by class as much as by race, our white, middle-class family in suburban Highland Park, IL, is an anomaly: our daughter has been friends for years with kids whose parents are illegal immigrants. If more Americans shared our experience, perhaps the Republicans would...

Talk about anti-incumbent passion. James L. Srch used his obituary to get in one last protest against the re-election of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In a paid obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune and the Reno Gazette, the family of Mr. Srch -- presumably with the deceased's consent --...

A new survey of public bathroom hygiene shows that the guy who just used the toilet at Grand Central Station is more likely to have clean hands than people at your local hospital.

The researchers didn't phrase it that way, but if you take what they found and compare it...

Shhh. Don't let Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin hear you, but by the standards of today's hard-right GOPers, Ronald Reagan was a RINO (Republican In Name Only) when it came to reforming health care.

Yes, as the much-ballyhooed bipartisan health care summit nears, we can credit Ronald Reagan...

The late great newspaper columnist Mike Royko suggested that Chicago's motto be changed from "Urbs in Horto" ("City in a Garden") to "Ubi Est Mea" ("Where's Mine?"). Unfortunately, Barack Obama and his Chicago political brain trust remembered this basic lesson when it came to cutting deals with Congress, but completely...