When Will Your Consequentialist Friend Abandon You for the Greater Good?

What will you do with your life?

31 years ago, Donald Trump said in an interview: "I'll be 36 next year and I've done everything I can do. Sometimes I think it was a mistake to have raced through it all so fast. What's the next level up? The grass isn't always greener . . . I work, and I don't worry. How can you top that? . . . I protect myself as well as anybody can. I prepare for things but ultimately we all end up going . ....

Ten falsehoods your staff will tell you.

5. We have too much work for staff we have and we need to hire another. The dentist cannot afford to have even one extra staff person, nor can they afford the luxury of working inefficiently. This may be a good time for the doctor and staff to review the way they do things and streamline operations if need be. The number of staff needed is based on activity. Decrease activity and your staff wil...

Will your safety harness kill you?

A change will do you good.

The primary care physician is described as many things-generalist, information manager, chronic care coordinator, and specialist in disease prevention. But midlevel clinicians, the Internet, and self-motivated patients can provide most of these services quite ably on their own. Why, then, are we here? One indispensable role for the family doctor is to be an agent of change for our patients and ...

Predicting What Will Happen When You Intervene

This paper offers some rules of thumb that practicing social workers can use for case studies that aim to construct, albeit not fully and never entirely reliably, models designed to help predict what will happen if they intervene in specific ways to help this particular client, here and now. We call these 'ex ante case-specific causal models'. 'Ex ante' because they are for before-the-fact pred...