Archive for October, 2009

Three cheers for Harvard Pilgrim

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

I haven’t had to go to the doctor for a few years, so my primary care physician was based in Cambridge, while I am now living in deepest suburbia. Changing the PCP has been on the list for a while, but I never got around to doing it until I needed to see a doctor, uh, today.

I was prepared for a nightmare, but it was ridiculously easy. I called Harvard Pilgrim, and the entire change took only about two minutes. Good for them.

Football == Dogfighting?

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell writes a long piece in the New Yorker trying to draw a parallel between football and dog-fighting. I don’t buy the connection he’s trying to make, but some of the data he brings up on the football side is a little scary.

In case you didn’t know it, getting hit in the head an awful lot is bad for you. Not great news for offensive linemen.

The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times

It turns out that it’s not just the one big hit that does the damage. It’s the accumulation of all the medium-sized hits.

[Brain researcher] McKee is a longtime football fan. She is from Wisconsin. She had two statuettes of Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback, on her bookshelf. On the wall was a picture of a robust young man. It was McKee’s son—nineteen years old, six feet three. If he had a chance to join the N.F.L., I asked her, what would she advise him? “I’d say, ‘Don’t. Not if you want to have a life after football.’ ”