We are happy to support Family Action Network (FAN) as they welcome Anupam Bapu Jena, MD, Ph.D., author of the new book, Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health. Dr. Jena will be interviewed by Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road. This virtual event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. Click HERE to reserve your spot!

FAN is giving away copies of Random Acts of Medicine! Recipients will be chosen randomly from the event’s Zoom attendance list, and books can be either picked up at The Book Stall or be shipped if necessary. Details on the Zoom registration page.

This event will be recorded and available later on the FAN website and YouTube channel.

About the Book:   Why do kids born in the summer get diagnosed more often with ADHD and the flu? How are marathons harmful for your health, even when you're not running? What do surgeons and salesmen have in common? Which annual event made people 30 percent more likely to get COVID-19? As a University of Chicago-trained economist and Harvard medical school professor and doctor, Anupam Bapu Jena, MD, Ph.D. is uniquely equipped to answer these questions.

In Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces That Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health, Dr. Jena and his co-author Christopher Worsham, MD show us how medicine really work and its effect on all of us. In the spirit of Freakonomics and Noise, this singular work combines popular topics like behavioral science, health, and medicine through the lens of economic principles and big data insights to reveal the unexpected but predictable events that profoundly affect our health. Relying on ingeniously devised natural experiments—random events that unknowingly turn us into experimental subjects—the authors help us gain a better understanding of how medicine is practiced and how it could work better.

About the Author: Anupam Bapu Jena, MD, Ph.D., is the Joseph P. Newhouse Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. As an economist and physician, Dr. Jena’s research involves several areas of health economics and policy including the use of natural experiments in health care, the economics of physician behavior and the physician workforce, medical malpractice, the economics of health care productivity, and the economics of medical innovation.

Dr. Jena graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his MD and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago and completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the host of the Freakonomics, MD podcast, which explores the “hidden side of health care.”

About the Interviewer: Robert Kolker is the author of Hidden Valley Road, an instant #1 New York Times best-seller and selection of Oprah's Book Club that was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Slate; one of the year’s best by NPR, the Boston Globe, the New York Post, and Amazon; the #1 book of the year by People; and one of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2020. His previous work includes Lost Girls, also a New York Times best-seller and New York Times Notable Book, and one of Slate’s best nonfiction books of the quarter century. He is a National Magazine Award finalist whose journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Wired, O, the Oprah Magazine, the Marshall Project, Bloomberg Businessweek, and New York magazine.