Orshe

It’s common for parents in the Netherlands to allow their older teenagers to have sleepovers with a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Can you imagine that here?

The WSJ Bonds column today explains how American parents should start teaching their children about sex from the time their children can talk.

There’s a lot of concern today that paying fees to medical providers for each service may lead to unnecessary care. But there’s no easy way to replace the massively complicated fee-for-service system.

Since signs emerged last year that Americans were using fewer medical services, the question has been when we would flock back to clinics and hospitals. The answer: not yet.

With four big insurers already done announcing earnings, there are scant signs of an uptick in what health experts call “utilization.”

We wince when journalists are called “content providers,” so we sympathize with a perspective piece in the current New England Journal of Medicine bemoaning “the new language of medicine.”

The two physician-authors, Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman, do not wish to be called “providers,” thankyouverymuch. Nor do they want their patients to be called “customers” or “consumers.” Instead they prefer specific job titles: doctors, nurses, physical therapists, etc., to describe specialized medical professionals.

Mood Lift?: A study shows that for women, drinking two to three cups of coffee per day is associated with a 15% lower risk of developing depression during a ten-year period, the WSJ reports. Other forms of caffeine were also tied to a lower risk of depression. However, this type of study can’t prove that caffeine prevents the condition.

We already know that health-care spending and use can vary wildly depending on where a person lives.

But most of that evidence comes from Medicare data, notably reports by the Dartmouth Atlas Project. Those analyses don’t say anything about spending patterns for people covered by commercial insurance.

At first blush, Washington’s tough talk about fiscal austerity doesn’t look good for drug makers. Government programs including Medicare and Medicaid spend $99 billion each year on prescription medicines, according to Washington consulting firm Avalere Health, making for a ripe cost-cutting target.

Sorry, soy supplements.

Women in the first five years of menopause who took the supplements saw no differences in bone-mineral density and experienced more hot flashes than women who took a placebo, a new study finds.

Early Focus: Research increasingly suggests that Alzheimer’s disease damages the brain years before symptoms appear, raising the possibility that treatments should be focused on this early phase if there’s a hope of slowing or reversing the disease, the WSJ reports. That’s why Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Bristol-Myers Squibb are looking to treat patients with signs of milder memory loss, the paper says.