Doctors have so consistently harmed me that I was forced to learn to heal myself when I was finally disabled by the so-called medical care I received over the years. I now avoid doctors if at all possible. It’s well worth doing extensive research for every single treatment that is recommended by a doctor. Always. It’s possible to become knowledgable enough to stay safe at least most of the time.
Reporter Jeanne Lenzer investigates overtreatment at the heart of healthcare. Overly aggressive treatment is estimated to cause 30 000 deaths among Medicare recipients alone each year. Overall, unnecessary interventions are estimated to account for 10-30% of spending on healthcare in the US, or $250bn-800bn (£154bn-490bn; €190bn-610bn) annually.This video features Shannon Brownlee, acting director of the New America Health Policy Program and author of Overtreated: How Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, David Himmelstein, professor at the City University of New York School of Public Health, and Vikas Saini, a Harvard cardiologist and president of the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation.
Read more about the problems of overtreatment in Jeanne Lenzer’s feature article Unnecessary care: are doctors in denial and is profit driven healthcare to blame? Unnecessary care: are doctors in denial and is profit driven healthcare to blame?
This is true in all of medicine and is especially and dangerously true in psychiatry. I’ve written about my own extreme over-treatment on Dr. David Healy’s website RXisk: Monica’s story: the aftermath of polypsychopharmacology
More articles on healthcare in the United States on Beyond Meds
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