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Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer | 
 enlarge | Author: Shannon Brownlee
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $14.95
You Save: $11.00 (42%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 154546
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 1582345805
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.10973
EAN: 9781582345802
ASIN: 1582345805
Publication Date: September 18, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: new - some minor shelf wear
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Root cause for spiraling health care costs in the US September 4, 2008
This country has spent a lot of time agonizing over health care delivery and costs ever since medicare was introduced in the 1960's. Since then, health care costs have increased at rates much higher than inflation causing health care to become unaffordable to many people and a huge economic burden on US businesses that must supply health care insurance to their employees. The way things are headed, Medicare will soon be insolvent (it's a much bigger problem than social security) and even more people will be uninsured.
Against the clatter of partisan politics and special interest obfuscation, this book prevents a well-researched, evidence-based discussion of one the main driving factors behind the perverse economics of health care. Until people and politicians understand the root causes of the problem, the problem can't be solved. I hope people read this book because it's a big step forward towards a solution.
 Healthcare System Misdiagnosis August 16, 2008
The author clearly documents how our healthcare system frequently wastes resources on unnecessary scans and procedures due to a number of reasons including, demands of the patient, doctor's personal beliefs in a procedure, and the economic incentive of more procedures resulting in more profit.
From the author's perspective, over treatment is the problem and the solution is better assessments of what scans and treatments are needed, part of which includes communication between the doctor and patient. When the patient understands and can weigh the potential risks and benefits, he or she is likely to be more conservative than the doctor, resulting in less care by direction of the patient.
What the author overlooks is the patient's lack of consideration of cost. In nearly any other transaction in our economy, the customer would not only evaluate risk and benefit but also cost. Over treatment is not the core problem, but a symptom of the problem. The problem is our healthcare system is a big all you can eat buffet where your personal consumption has little or no impact on your cost. As the community eats more and more, the buffet price goes up for everyone. Meanwhile the cooks are profit motivated for you to eat more. The expensive dishes are being promoted while the cheaper ones may not even be displayed unless you ask for them by name.
Pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, hospitals and physicians need to have the same market pressures that nearly every other business has, that their product or service be affordable to their customer and it's benefits outweigh it's cost, otherwise there will be no sale and thus no profit. Insurance works against this basic virtue of the free market. A system that gives the customer an incentive to shop and consider costs, such as HSA's, is what is truly missing from America's healthcare system. Over treatment is merely a symptom of the underlying problem.
Excellent and important book July 23, 2008
"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!
Thoughtful and Thorough Study of the Health Care Crisis April 12, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
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
Crash Course on the Healthcare Crisis April 2, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
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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