Strategic market planning has always been a challenge in the rapidly changing health care industry. Both internal factors of unpredictability and external market threats create waves of instability in the health care market industry. For health care consumers, this often means fluctuating health care costs and unpredictable care availability. For health care providers, this means decreased health care payments, rising costs per patient and a stressed health

The effectiveness of different approaches to funding and running health systems is often hotly debated, with every viewpoint seemingly able to marshal facts in support of their case. In effect, health statistics have become every bit as politicized as criminal justice. With the current political focus on the limited reforms introduced into the US system by the Obama administration, accurate information is critical and in short supply.

Colic is a syndrome that appears in up to 20% of infants. It is generally defined by a set of criteria in which a baby between the ages of 2 weeks and 16 weeks cries inconsolably for at least 3 hours a day for at least 3 days a week, lasting at least 3 weeks. Colic has no defined etiology, and no effective treatments. But, any parent who has suffered through a baby with colic would be willing to try almost any remedy to soothe a crying baby.

Antidepressant medications are among the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States – one of the top three, depending on who is counting -- owing to a dramatic rise in antidepressant use in the last 10 to 15 years. A new health policy report finds, however, that this increase in antidepressant use is driven by nonpsychiatrist healthcare providers, often without a diagnosis of depression.

Social neuroscience is a rapidly growing discipline that examines the relationship between the brain and social behavior. The “social brain hypothesis” posits that, over evolutionary time, living in large, social groups favored the physical growth of brain regions important for social behavior. In non-human primates, some evidence indicates that the size of the amygdala is related to social behavior.