No Theory-Free Lunches in Well-Being Policy

No more free lunches.

Free pens and pizza lunches. Sponsored conferences and compromised medical education. Courtesy golf and unaffordable holidays. Thought leaders and ghost writers. These are the trappings of doctors and drug companies being entwined in an embrace of avarice and excess, an embrace that distorts medical information and patient care. An article in this theme issue of the BMJ identifies 16 ways in wh...

Subjective Well-Being and Policy

This paper analyses whether the aggregation of individual happiness scores to a National Happiness Index can still be trusted once governments have proclaimed their main objective to be the pursuit—or even maximization— of this National Happiness Index. The answer to this investigation is clear-cut: as soon as the National Happiness Index has become a policy goal, it can no longer be trusted to...

No free lunches: balancing bleeding and efficacy with ticagrelor.

The development of new oral antagonists of the platelet P2Y12 receptor has generated both anticipation and anxiety among practising physicians. In a field in which clopidogrel was the only choice available for the better part of a decade, prasugrel and ticagrelor represent new treatment options in many parts of the world. Weighing efficacy, safety, and cost to determine appropriate use of these...

Well-being evidence for policy: A review

Toward a Theory of Child Well - Being

Assuring the well-being of children has emerged over the past several decades as an important goal for health and social policymakers. Although the concept of child well-being has been operationalized and measured in different ways by different child-serving entities, there are few unifying theories that could undergird and inform these various conceptual and measurement efforts. In this paper,...