SURVIVING HEALTHCARE

Healthcare is not a free market. Gaming the licensing and patent system creates monopolies and can raise prices even for older drugs. Artificial shortages of vital medications increase their cost. Stalling in court with imaginative lawsuits lengthen patent monopolies. Litigation is also used to intimidate any individual or corporation that stands in a company’s way. Lawyers’ bills are modest expen...

First chapter of Butchered by "Healthcare." Physicians, to practice effectively and ethically, must understand what they face. Familiarity with these controversies is indispensable, even if you reject some conclusions. Your work will improve after you realize that doing less may produce better results. Likewise, patients must learn about these issues to have the best chance of benefiting...

Chapter 2, Butchered by "Healthcare." For at least half of healthcare, the potential benefit does not outweigh the harm . For a lot of the rest, supporting evidence that it works is lacking . A review of over 5000 articles recommends against many of today’s standard practices .  The list below introduces some of the topics in this book, the worst failures of healthcare, in rough order of...

Chapter 3 of Butchered by "Healthcare" Healthcare costs started growing nearly exponentially when social support programs and private insurance fueled it in the 1960s. US costs are now $4 trillion (2020), almost a fifth of our gross domestic product (GDP), and twice what other developed countries are paying per capita .  Our medical sector spends more than the total revenues of banking (...

Chapter 4 of Butchered by "Healthcare." How could physicians have allowed this to happen? No doctor I know started with the idea of money above patients. We all wrote that essay in school about how we wanted to save the world. But we are now pawns of moneyed interests, and we often betray our patients’ trust.  The best marketers on the planet are spending billions of dollars trying to ge...

Chapter 5 of Butchered by "Healthcare." The US is a nation of pill poppers. According to Bloomberg , nearly half of us take prescription drugs. The Mayo Clinic (2013) puts this figure even higher, a whopping 70%, with 20% of Americans taking five or more (verified by the Centers for Disease Control in 2019). This is absurd and obviously damaging, but doctors do not get it. How could this...

Chapter 6 of Butchered by "Healthcare." Pharmaceutical corporations violate more criminal laws than any industry in history, as measured by their criminal settlements.  The top 22 drugmaker payoffs since 2004 have their own Wikipedia page of shame. Peter Rost, former Pfizer marketing vice president, compared the drugmakers to mobsters: It’s scary how many similarities there are between t...

Chapter 7 of Butchered by "Healthcare." Well over half of the FDA revenue is paid directly from the pharmaceutical companies in the form of "user fees". These are incurred during the drug approval process. If drugs aren't approved, the FDA might have to lay off employees. This is only one example of the problems. These and other conflicts of interest make the FDA's su...