New books show that the need to improve health care grows only greater

New books show that the need to improve health care grows only greater

By Phillip Longman
Washington Post

Tuesday, May 18, 2010
THE TREATMENT TRAP

How the Overuse of Medical Care Is Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent It

By Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prad Singh
Ivan R. Dee, 237 pages, $24.95

Amid all the cheering and jeering over the health-reform legislation recently signed into law, there remains one sober fact about our medical system that every American ignores at his or her peril: Contact with the health-care system remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States. The most recent confirmation comes from a new study from the independent ratings company Health Grades, which found that between 2006 and 2008, nearly 100,000 Medicare patients died due to medical errors.

With tens of millions of currently uninsured Americans now promised greater access to care, the urgency of reforming the practice of medicine, as opposed to its financing, has never been greater. This makes the two books reviewed here particularly relevant, whether you are an individual trying to navigate though the increasingly dangerous and dysfunctional health-care delivery system or a policymaker trying to figure out what's gone wrong and how to fix it.

"The Treatment Trap" is co-authored by Rosemary Gibson, who long worked at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on health-care quality and safety issues, and by Janardan Prad Singh, an economist at the World Bank whose previous work has concentrated on the same area. Together, they have produced a well-told, well-researched catalog of horrors about people killed and maimed by tests and operations they didn't need...

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Share Your Medical Overtreatment Story

Q Have you or a loved one had tests, surgeries, procedures or medications that you thought were unnecessary?

If so, Consumers Union's Safe Patient Project, and Rosemary Gibson, co-author of the Treatment Trap, would like to hear your story. We'd also like to know if you declined tests or treatments offered to you that you thought were unnecessary and found a medically appropriate alternative.

Please click here to Share Your Story.

A Leading Journal Spotlights Medicines Many Patients Don't Need - ABC News

A Leading Journal Spotlights Medicines Many Patients Don't Need - ABC News:

By JOSEPH BROWNSTEIN
ABC News Medical Unit
May 12, 2010



"Plenty of Hollywood dramas have a patient come in to a hospital for one problem, and in the course of their testing doctors find something horribly wrong -- cancer, for instance -- with that seemingly unnecessary test being the difference between life and death.

New research questions if radiation-based medical tests are worth the risk.
The story has appeal, but now a journal published by the American Medical Association is taking steps to highlight the perils of assuming that extra tests and treatments are always a good thing. Editors hope to spotlight the fact that those extra tests can often lead to unnecessary treatments or even hurt the patient..."

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