PDF Download Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee
The soft file means that you have to visit the web link for downloading then save Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee You have owned guide to read, you have actually posed this Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee It is easy as visiting guide shops, is it? After getting this short explanation, with any luck you could download one as well as start to review Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee This book is really easy to check out every single time you have the downtime.
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee
PDF Download Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee When writing can change your life, when writing can improve you by supplying much cash, why do not you try it? Are you still really baffled of where getting the ideas? Do you still have no concept with what you are visiting create? Currently, you will require reading Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee An excellent author is a great viewers simultaneously. You could define how you write depending on what books to review. This Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee could assist you to solve the trouble. It can be one of the ideal resources to create your composing skill.
There is without a doubt that publication Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee will still make you motivations. Also this is simply a book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee; you could locate several genres and types of books. From captivating to experience to politic, and also scientific researches are all supplied. As just what we mention, here we provide those all, from renowned authors and also author on the planet. This Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee is one of the compilations. Are you interested? Take it currently. Just how is the way? Learn more this post!
When someone must go to the book shops, search establishment by establishment, shelf by rack, it is really problematic. This is why we offer the book collections in this site. It will alleviate you to browse the book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee as you like. By browsing the title, publisher, or authors of guide you desire, you can find them quickly. Around the house, workplace, or perhaps in your method can be all best location within internet links. If you intend to download the Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee, it is quite simple after that, due to the fact that currently we extend the link to purchase and make deals to download and install Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee So easy!
Interested? Obviously, this is why, we mean you to click the web link page to visit, then you can appreciate the book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee downloaded up until completed. You could conserve the soft file of this Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee in your gadget. Certainly, you will bring the device all over, will not you? This is why, every time you have downtime, every single time you can appreciate reading by soft copy publication Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer, By Shannon Brownlee
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. Brownlee dissects what she calls "the medical-industrial complex" and lays bare the backward economic incentives embedded in our system, revealing a stunning portrait of the care we now receive.
Nevertheless, Overtreated ultimately conveys a message of hope by reframing the debate over health care reform. It 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.
- Sales Rank: #292161 in Books
- Brand: Bloomsbury USA
- Published on: 2008-09-09
- Released on: 2008-09-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 209.30" h x 1.00" w x 5.45" l, .74 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Features
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Contrary to Americans' common belief that in health care more is more—that more spending, drugs and technology means better care—this lucid report posits that less is actually better. Medical journalist Brownlee acknowledges that state-of-the-art medicine can improve care and save lives. But technology and drugs are misused and overused, she argues, citing a 2003 study of one million Medicare recipients, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which showed that patients in hospitals that spent the most were 2% to 6% more likely to die than patients in hospitals that spent the least. Additionally, she says, billions per year are spent on unnecessary tests and drugs and on specialists who are rewarded more for some procedures than for more appropriate ones. The solution, Brownlee writes, already exists: the Veterans Health Administration outperforms the rest of the American health care system on multiple measures of quality. The main obstacle to replicating this model nationwide, according to the author, is a powerful cartel of organizations, from hospitals to drug companies, that stand to lose in such a system. Many of Brownlee's points have been much covered, but her incisiveness and proposed solution can add to the health care debate heated up by the release of Michael Moore's Sicko. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Award-winning health and medicine writer Brownlee notes that Americans spend between one-fifth and one-third of health-care dollars on unnecessary treatments, medications, devices, and tests. What's worse, there are an estimated 30,000 deaths per annum caused by this unnecessary care. The reason for what amounts to a national delusion that more care is better care is rooted, she says, in a build-it-and-they-will-come paradigm that rewards doctors and hospitals for how much care they deliver rather than how effective it is. In a step-by-step deconstruction of America's improvident health-care system, Brownlee sheds light on events, attitudes, and legislation in the twentieth century's latter half that led to this economic nightmare. With the skill of a crack prosecuting attorney, she cites specific cases of physician and hospital fiscal abuse. Her aim is broad but not scattershot as she hits not just docs and hospitals but private insurers, Medicare, patients, medical device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies by, for instance, quoting a pharmaceutical salesperson who confesses financing a physician's swimming pool to get the doc to write more prescriptions. She is not all bad news, though, for she posits models that could be adapted to create a nationwide health-care system that conceivably could staunch the current fiscal hemorrhaging. If only. Chavez, Donna
Review
PRAISE FOR OVERTREATED: "My choice for the economics book of the year...it's the best description I have yet read of a huge economic problem that we know how to solve--but so often misunderstood."—New York Times article 'No. 1 Book, and It Offers Solutions' “This book is written for a sophisticated general audience. I hope it is widely read, providing patients with the needed resolve to stop demanding that their physicians prescribe the latest procedure, poultice or potion that marketing and medical journalism foists on them….Brownlee’s presentation is brilliant journalism.”—Journal of the American Medical Association “The cardiologist who found blocked arteries in nearly every patient…the brilliant breast cancer cure that too often killed patients…Brownlee uses anecdotes of medical misdeeds, mistakes, and misunderstandings to illustrate a surprising truth at the heart of American healthcare: More isn’t necessarily better. Shoring up her conclusions with groundbreaking findings from a group of researchers at Dartmouth, Brownlee also points the way to workable solutions.”—O Magazine "Excellent new book"—Slate.com “A bombshell of a book: must reading for consumers, their political representatives and all those White House contenders.”—Kirkus, Starred review
“[Brownlee] presents a stunning but reasoned picture of the out-of-control, inefficient and often tragically ineffective U.S. health care system…This rousing call for change, accessible for general readers, is recommended.”— Library Journal
“Exhaustive takedown of the U.S. health-care system…Overtreated eclipses Michael Moore’s reporting and eschews his polemics. By piling on facts, Brownlee shows why Americans spend so much on health care yet are in measurably poorer shape than the residents of just about every other developed nation."—Conde Nast Portfolio “alarming and intriguing…Brownlee gives each of her theme-based chapters an emotional core by rolling out a story.”—Bloomberg.com “’Overtreated’ should be read by anyone interested in health care economics.”—Tyler Cowen, Marginalrevolution.com "Overtreated is a marvelous new book by Shannon Brownlee.”—Thehealthcareblog.com “Finally, someone willing to expose the dirty little secret of US health care. If you have insurance you will certainly get too much health care, and in this situation more is definitely not better. Shannon Brownlee's book, Overtreated, will open your eyes to the problems and point the way to the answers.”—Susan Love, M.D., author of Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, President and Medical Director, Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation “In the blizzard of books on our healthcare system, Shannon Brownlee’s is unique in its provocative argument that individuals and the nation suffer from misguided and costly treatments. Patients, physicians, and policy makers would do well to consider her evidence as an important prescription for reform.”—Jerome Groopman, M.D., Harvard Medical School and author of How Doctors Think "This book could save your life. In gripping detail, Shannon Brownlee explains how well-insured Americans get much more high-tech medical care -- CT scans, angiograms, and the like -- than they need, enriching the hospitals and doctors who provide it, but driving up the overall costs of health care and often endangering patients' lives. Brownlee clearly shows in this important book that overtreatment, like undertreatment, is very bad medicine.”—Marcia Angell, senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine “Overtreated will scare you. And that's a good thing. In this vivid and arresting tour of medicine in America, Shannon Brownlee shows why the care that is supposed to make us healthier frequently makes us sicker instead. At a time when health care reform is atop the political agenda again, this book should be required reading -- not only for every lawmaker and medical professional, but for every voter and patient, too.”—Jonathan Cohn, author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---and the People Who Pay the Price “With her razor-sharp analyses, Shannon Brownlee disentangles the messy paradoxes of today's health care mess and turns every assumption on its head. She will forever change the way you view health care while restoring your hope for its future. This book is an important read for anyone interested in health care reform, which, in this day and age of overtreatment, should be all of us.”—Pauline Chen, author of Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality "Overtreated is a necessary, if bitter tonic. As the election season starts to take shape, we desperately need an unbiased examination of the mess we're in and some substantiative ideas for fixing it. Overtreated delivers on both counts...Brownlee uncovers some truly amazing facts...Brownlee has given us a thoughtful push in the right direction."--Cleveland Plain Dealer
Most helpful customer reviews
105 of 106 people found the following review helpful.
HELP! - Healthcare Reform Needed!!!!!
By Mark W. Ketterer
Read this book.
If you are in the American healthcare system, this is the single most important book you will ever read. If you are in a healthcare system that is moving towards "privatization" or "free market reform", this may be the most important book you will ever read. If you are a behavioral scientist interested in the role of behavioral factors in medical populations, this is the most important book you will ever read.
A science journalist with a real science background (an M.S. in Biology) and now a Fellow at the New America Foundation, Brownlee has brought together many strands of research to provide us with a picture of the core dilemma in the american health care system - why do we spend so much more than other industrialized countries while not producing better outcomes? At 16% of Gross Domestic Product (and climbing), the American healthcare system is 60-100% more expensive than any other industrialized country and yet we do not live as long as citizens there. Where all these countries cover 100% of their citizens, the American system leaves about 15% of its population (about 47 million people) uncovered at any one time (and even more if you include loss of coverage for extended periods, but not a whole year). Fifty percent of bankruptcies in the U.S. are due to medical bills. Americans avoid switching jobs for fear of losing coverage for pre-existing conditions. The U.S. manages to achieve these colossal failures while still expending 62% of all costs through the government (if civilian government employee's coverage is included as part of the government supported costs).
While there are many contributing problems (profiteering by insurance and drug companies, a system which rewards physicians for doing more rather than just what is proven effective, malpractice anxiety leading to defensive practice, lack of coverage for primary preventive and mental health care which could avoid more expensive emergency care, etc.), Brownlee demonstrates that the core issue is a lack of clinical research to guide physician's decision-making. Where ambiguity exists (and it exists in up to 80% of healthcare), variability in "standard" care is great, and unnecessary care and expense mounts. As a comic strip character once observed: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Starting with the studies by John Wennberg and the Dartmouth Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences, Brownlee reviews the high level of variability (up to seven fold) in the use of various procedures across the U.S. Wennberg's observation is that in U.S. healthcare, "geography is destiny". The kind of treatment you receive depends upon where you live, not what your illness is. And the characteristic most strongly associated with unnecessary care is the number of specialists. If we build it, they will come. The normal operation of a free market is distorted in healthcare by: socialization of costs; the desperation of patients and families; the vast difference between "buyers" (patients) and "sellers" (practitioners, hospitals, drug companies) in understanding what actually works and the tradeoffs in outcomes; and the placebo effect and spontaneous remission. But isn't it part of our duty to protect patients from unproven, and potentially harmful, interventions? If outcomes were improved in the more aggressive geographic areas of the country we might be able to claim that the less costly areas are undertreated, but they are not. In fact, in most comparisons, patients are, if anything, worse off with the more aggressive care. Remember that Hippocratic dictum: "Primum, non nocere" (First, do not harm)? The propensity of U.S. healthcare is to "do something" rather than accepting the patient's status as perhaps better than the potential harm occasioned by aggressive intervention. For those of us raised in the era of "If it might help, do it", this is tough medicine to swallow. But it is necessary medicine.
Brownlee acquaints the reader with many of the more egregious failures of the system: back surgery for chronic low back pain; mastectomy (vs lumpectomy) in breast cancer; bone marrow transplantation in breast cancer; PTCA for event, or even chest pain, reduction in coronary heart disease; fen-phen for weight loss; carotid endarterectomy in asymptomatic patients; surgery for prostate cancer, etc.
One implication of all this is that the highest priority for medical research should be clinical trials that clarify the effectiveness, safety and efficiency of various treatments. The hostility of the NIH to this task is captured by a quote from its director: "We don't do Coke versus Pepsi". Fine. If the NIH is uninterested in improving American healthcare (it's congressionally mandated mission), defund the NIH and put the money into the Agency for Healthcare Policy and Research - the folks who blew the whistle on back pain surgery and were subsequently assaulted by the Orthopods bribing Congress. The priorities for public funding should exactly answer us about "Coke versus Pepsi", because that's where lives are won or lost. Cellular, subcellular and genetic research has such a low rate of clinical payoff that it ought to be the minor theme.
See my blog on evidence based healthcare reform: primumnonnocereonline.com
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
a wonderful unbiased look at healthcare.
By ARG
Least insane of the healthcare quality books I have read of late. Shannon Brownlee isn't promoting an agenda other than revealing how much waste and art is currently involved in the practice of American medicine. Despite pills on the cover, procedures and testing are also covered in her treatment of medicine. The solution presented lacks a means by which to obtain it and a bit too much of taking Wennberg as gospel, but otherwise a wonderful unbiased look at healthcare.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD READ THIS BOOK
By Art Curtis
An essential book about our broken healthcare system, which has become a business driven mostly by profit. The best protection for patients against unnecessary medical "care" is evidence to know whether or not highly promoted treatments are effective. The recent 21st Century Cures Act has lowered the already-low standards of evidence for the National Institutes of Health, and recent rule changes by our new president have lowered evidence standards for the Food and Drug Administration. The medical sector of our economy, currently at 17.8 percent of our GDP, is expected to reach 20 percent in 10 years, sucking money out of the pockets of American workers. Other countries spend much less, and yet the United States ranks near the bottom, compared to other wealthy countries, in most aspects by which medical care is judged. The number of people with health insurance has been rising, and yet American life expectancy is declining. Preventable medical errors have become the number three cause of death in the United States, after cancer and heart disease. "Too much medicine" is indeed "making us sicker and poorer."
See all 82 customer reviews...
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee PDF
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee EPub
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee Doc
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee iBooks
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee rtf
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee Mobipocket
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee Kindle
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee PDF
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee PDF
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee PDF
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Shannon Brownlee PDF
