#314 - How to Make Health Decisions When the Science Is Unclear | Dr. Anupam Jena & Mike Haney

<p>Most health decisions happen before the science is settled. A study points one way, another points somewhere else, experts disagree about what matters, and even strong population-level evidence may not tell you what will happen to you.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode, Mike Haney talks with physician and economist Dr. Anupam Jena about how to make decisions under that kind of uncertainty. The goal isn’t to find a single hierarchy of evidence or a perfect source to trust. It’s to understand how much weight to put on any one piece of information, when personal experimentation can actually teach you something, and how the potential downside of an intervention should change the amount of evidence you demand before trying it.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Free course: Improve your metabolic health</strong></p><p>Get our free email course on how glucose, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and measurement can help you build habits that support better energy and long-term health: <a href="https://www.levels.com/partner/multimedia?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=link&utm_content=wnl&partner=Jena" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferer">⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://levels.link/wnl⁠</a></p><p><br></p><p><strong>What We Cover:</strong></p><ul><li>Why even a high-quality study should rarely change your mind by itself</li><li>Why a meta-analysis is only as useful as the studies that go into it</li><li>What randomized trials can establish, and where they can still fail to apply to real life</li><li>How to judge whether a study’s outcome is actually meaningful, not merely statistically significant</li><li>When N-of-1 experiments can help, and how they can fool you</li><li>A practical framework for deciding whether an intervention is worth trying: potential harm, quality of evidence, biological plausibility, and cost</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>🎙️ About the Guest:</strong></p><p>Dr. Anupam Jena is the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an economist whose research uses natural experiments to uncover unexpected influences on health and medical care. He is also the host of <em>Freakonomics, M.D.</em> and co-author of <em>Random Acts of Medicine</em>. </p><p><br></p><p><strong>📍What Dr. Anupam Jena &amp; Mike Haney discussed:</strong></p><ul><li>04:04 - Why taxi and ambulance drivers die least often of Alzheimer&#39;s</li><li>09:20 - Why half of people still skip a free heart medication</li><l