Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | H | HealthFacts

New book: "overtreated--why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer".

Article Excerpt
In a nutshell, overtreatment is unnecessary treatment. It's treatment that has no positive impact on health or longevity, and in many cases, causes harm. It's the coronary-artery opening procedures given yearly to more than one million Americans for whom drug therapy has been proven to be the better choice. It's the long-term drug regimens recommended to people at low-risk for hip fracture, heart attack or stroke. It's the PSA blood test for finding prostate cancer at its earliest stage, despite the fact that studies have yet to prove immediate treatment is better than no treatment at all. Just to name a few.

About one-third of the medicine we receive is unnecessary, according to "Overtreated" by journalist Shannon Brownlee. "We spend between one fifth and one third of our health care dollars, between $500 and $700 billion, on care that does nothing to improve our health." Central to this excellent book is the work of John Wennberg, MD, whose pioneering research spans four decades.

Wennberg was the first to detect wide geographic variations in medical care, first within his home state of Vermont and later in the country at large. Wennberg recalls that he embarked on this research project in the late 1960s with a notion shared by many doctors of that era: The most serious problem in American health care was that many...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!