Product Description
Though touted as perhaps the best in the world, the American medical system is filled with hypocrisies. Our health care is staggeringly expensive, yet one in six Americans has no health insurance. We have some of the most skilled physicians in the world, yet one hundred thousand patients die each year from medical errors. In this gripping, eye-opening book, award-winning journalist Shannon Brownlee takes readers inside the hospital to dismantle some of our most venerated myths about American medicine. Using vivid examples of real patients and physicians, Overtreated debunks the idea that most of medicine is based in sound science, and shows how our health care system delivers huge amounts of unnecessary care that is not only expensive and wasteful but can actually imperil the health of patients.
The interests of politicians and the medical-industrial complex continually trump those of patients, seducing the wealthy with unnecessary procedures and leaving the poor with haphazard access to treatment. Backward economic incentives allow patients with chronic conditions to receive ineffective care, and roll after roll of red tape undermines even the best-intentioned doctors. Tens of thousands of patients die each year from overtreatment. American medicine is in desperate need of fixing.
Nevertheless, Overtreated ultimately conveys a message of hope by reframing the debate over health care reform. Americans worry about rationing—that any effort to rein in the high cost of health care will result in limited access to life-saving treatments. Covering the uninsured seems like an insurmountable problem because it will drive up costs even more. Overtreated offers a way to control costs and cover the uninsured, while simultaneously improving the quality of American medicine. Shannon Brownlee’s humane, intelligent, and penetrating analysis empowers readers to avoid the perils of overtreatment, as well as pointing the way to better health care for everyone.
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 Excellent and important book ( rickmayes )
"Overtreated" is a superb book for both experts and non-experts who want to learn more about health care in the U.S. It does a great job of explaining two important realities that are initially difficult for most people to grasp and accept: (1) modern medicine involves a lot more clinical uncertainty than most individuals realize and that the medical profession admits, and (2) that our current models for paying medical providers--hospitals, doctors, drug companies, home health providers, and others--routinely creates numerous perverse incentives, lower quality health outcomes, and lots of unnecessary and potentially dangerous medical care. While reading this book, it is important to remind oneself that a lot of what modern medicine offers is extraordinarily helpful and life-saving/life-extending, and that no one would want go back to what "medicine" provided prior to the 20th century. In fairness, Shannon Brownlee does do a commendable job of trying to help readers remember this throughout "Overtreated."
Great book! Highly recommended!
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Thoughtful and Thorough Study of the Health Care Crisis ( ohiobusymom )
Ever since my husband decided to go back to school to get a degree in the medical field (he hasn't quite decided in what yet), I have gotten more interested in reading about topics in that particular field. This book is one of the more fascinating reading and perhaps one of the most disturbing reading. However, I will have to admit a lot of the material in this book is already familiar. There are times when I seem to recall a particular incident from reading the newspapers. But if you're in a small town like me, you may not get a lot of these stories and tidbits unless it's buried someplace else in the papers. This is information that are out there already but this is the first book I've read that has them all compiled together in an organized fashion.
Ever since I've had children, I have noticed there is a health care crisis in this country. Just recently, my brother had a stent put in (he's younger than me) and he listed all the drugs he got in the ER before the surgery and it literally made me cringe. If he's going to get all that meds plus the surgery where it is not even certain that it helps ... I am not about to run off and get an intensive check up just to get that done. I have been leery of the health care practices ever since my doctor tried to give me valium for just going through a divorce. She was going to hand me all those freebies. No thanks. (That same doctor also prescribed a certain kind of antibiotics when I was pregnant, knowing that it would cause birth defects and yes, she knew I was pregnant.) With my own personal horror stories, this book just reconfirms my beliefs that there is something wrong with the medical care in today's society.
Why do people believe that more is better? So there are all the solutions to fixing the problems, but not enough on preventing the problems. This book will explain a wide variety of conceptions that people have, both laypeople and doctors, insurance companies and it gives a great brief history of what happened in the last 50 plus years. Are doctors and nurses evil people? No. They are human just like the rest of us and a lot of them may be caught up in trying to make a living.
So, after all that , is there even a solution? In the last chapter, she provides an outline of what might work. That alone is what stitched up the book for me. Check out the website: www.overtreated.com and it will give you a brief synopsis of chapter ten, what we can do to correct this problem that is facing us today. Will it be a cure-all? No, but it will be a start for a better future in medical care. It has to be better than what we've got nowadays. There are too many uninsured people out there and that number is rising every day.
I highly recommend this book even if you don't agree with everything Brownlee says. It is readable and very fascinating. She points out different issues with thoughtfulness. If nothing else, it just might better equip you with more thorough questions the next time you go in for a check up.
4/12/08
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Crash Course on the Healthcare Crisis
Balanced and thoroughly researched, this book illustrates how the failings of our healthcare system are more complex than simply claiming that insurers are greedy and malpractice insurance premiums are too expensive.
Patients with the same illness are getting more costly medical care in certain parts of the country but actually do worse. The amount of medical care delivered is driven by the number of specialists, hospitals, and technology available in the community. The more doctors and hospitals add new services and technology the more likely those expensive services are used regardless of whether patients need it but because the providers can get paid for it. When organizations and committees try to set up guidelines or do research to see if current therapies are effective, special interests and politics kills the initiatives.
Hospitals focus on generating more business in departments which are profitable, like oncology, with newer buildings and the latest medical equipment so that they can afford to run emergency departments which continually lose money. Doctors and patients are enamored with the latest treatments and interventions which often are far more expensive, aren't better than existing therapies, and like the case of bone marrow transplant for metastatic breast cancer patients, are more lethal.
The pharmaceutical industry is intimately linked to doctor education and invariably influences which prescriptions are prescribed and market prescription medications as easily as consumer companies promote common household products. It is money not science that drives the healthcare system.
The author believes that solving the dysfunctional healthcare system requires that doctors and hospitals align themselves into integrated healthcare organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and the Veterans Health Administration. Unfortunately, however, because she makes such a compelling case of how each of the various providers and businesses each have a financial self interest to keep the current system going at the detriment of patient care, it is difficult to see how the transition will occur, if ever.
If you were asked to set policy for the White House, then this would be the book to get you up to speed on what makes our healthcare system the most expensive in the world and the worst at keeping us healthy. If however you are just trying to navigate through our healthcare system then the book Stay Healthy, Live Longer, Spend Wisely: Making Intelligent Choices in America's Healthcare System would be a better bet.
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 What? Me Worry?
On March 12, 1989, I suffered a major heart attack. I was 44. On Easter Sunday morning in 1991, I was the joyful recipient of a heart transplant.
Prior to 1989, I had paid attention to the instructions of the American Heart Association and kept my cholesterol low, weight down, and exercised frequently. I did not smoke or use illegal drugs. I probably survived the heart attack because of my past vigilance.
I expect Brownlee's book will do more harm than good. Doctors, the AMA and other health experts should decry the proposals in this book as unwise at best.
One would do better to read "Mr. NewHeart," the incredible story of my comeback.
Author of: Mr. NewHeart (New Heart): Heart Attack to Transplant and Beyond
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 A Time for Hard Choices
Shannon Brownlee's analysis of the flaws in our "system" of treatment has led us to an important decision point. Can we continue to have a system that is the equivalent of industrial piecework that will bankrupt us unless we address the power of insurance companies, organized medicine, for profit health care and hospitals? She outlines often wrenching stories of people who have been abused and neglected by the very system that is supposed be set up to save them. The highlight of the book is the last chapter which provides some of the most rational arguments for change I have ever read. Particularly the analysis of the VA system which is an outstanding model for change. If you have trouble in the first part of the book, skip to the last chapter, copy it and give it to every serious student of real health care reform you know.
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