Random Acts of Medicine
An interview with Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham
Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham
How do timing, circumstance, and luck affect health and health care?
HMS physician-economist Anupam (Bapu) Jena and HMS pulmonologist and health care policy researcher Christopher Worsham specialize in revealing how chance events can change medical outcomes.
The two physician-scientists delve into the unexpected and underappreciated effects of coincidence on health care — and discuss what patients and practitioners alike can learn from it — in their book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health.
The book offers case studies drawn from natural experiments: random events, like a child’s birth month or the wind direction on a particular day, that create study-like scenarios. The authors’ analyses illuminate how to extract useful data from such events and use the resulting insights to improve the practice of medicine.
In this episode of The Written Word, Harvard Medicine speaks with Jena and Worsham about the genesis of the book and the value of natural experiments.
Jena is the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and an HMS professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Worsham is a teaching associate in the HMS Department of Health Care Policy and an HMS instructor in medicine at Mass General.
Read the transcript (PDF)
Related links:
- Harvard Medical Labcast: Challenging Common Knowledge: Inside the mind of physician-economist Bapu Jena
- Organ Donations, Transplants Increase on Days of Largest Motorcycle Rallies
- When the Doctor’s Away: New survival boost seen for some patients during academic conferences
Author reading
Listen to Jena read an excerpt from the book about ferreting out the effect of doctors’ ages on patient outcomes:
Read the transcript (PDF)
Adapted from Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health by Anupam B. Jena, MD PhD, and Christopher Worsham, MD, published by Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2023 by Anupam B. Jena and Christopher Worsham.
Bonus clip
City marathons, doctors’ golfing habits, speeding tickets: Jena and Worsham explain the importance of exploring topics that may at first seem frivolous.
Read the transcript (PDF)