Undoctored

The “I’m-the-doctor, you’re-the-patient relationship” has been frozen in time since the days of Hippocrates. (Location 55)

The healthcare system is marvelous for developing the newest implantable defibrillator at a price tag of $36,000, even though a substantial portion of the people receiving such devices do not need them. But the system is miserable at delivering simple, self-managed nutritional solutions for heart disease. (Location 85)

As economically disastrous as spiraling healthcare costs are, you should also recognize that increasing costs are quietly celebrated by the healthcare industry, as they pocket the increased revenue. They have little incentive to fix this flawed healthcare system because your losses are their gains. Drug companies, medical device companies, doctors, hospital systems, health insurers—they all take their piece of this expanding pie, the pie that you and your family sacrifice to provide. Solutions to all the problems—cost, access, providing only as much care as is beneficial—are unlikely to come from within, so we provide the solutions that allow us to view health care as largely an option, not a necessity for the majority of health issues. (Location 171)

(Doctors struggle to deal with healthy people who no longer need drugs.) (Location 318)

Nancy’s dialogue with her doctor is fictional but based on thousands of similar encounters. Identify a problem, prescribe a drug. Natural remedies? “They don’t work.” “I don’t know anything about that.” “None of that is proven.” “I only practice evidence-based medicine,” even though the “evidence” is generated by industries and committees that profit from the message. (Location 466)

The popular surgical procedure called extracranial-intracranial (EC-IC) bypass, used to treat stroke, was performed at high volume in hospitals until 1985, when it was shown to be a sham. And the widely prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs Vioxx and Celebrex caused heart attack and cardiovascular death in over 100,000 people. The list of systematic and widespread blunders made in medicine involving millions of people would fill an entire book. No, (Location 623)

That concept is so important that I’d like to say it again, rephrased: Health care is the system created to deliver the greatest revenue-generating products and procedures to address illness, but not provide health. (Location 680)

The unspoken secret is that providers prefer treatment over prevention, expensive over inexpensive, patent-protectable over non-patent-protectable, billable procedure over nonbillable procedure, BMW over Toyota Prius. Spiraling healthcare costs are the expected result because greater revenues are built into the basic principles that drive the system. The endless year-over-year increase in your health insurance premiums should therefore come as no surprise because (Location 705)

Arthroscopic knee surgery for osteoarthritis—in which a surgeon passes a narrow scope and various tools to scrape away rough edges and loose debris and shaves down knee cartilage in the hope of providing pain relief—has been shown to have no benefit beyond placebo.17 (Location 923)

Nationwide, the pattern was clear: The more money spent on health care, the higher the mortality rate, even after factoring in variation in health patterns across different regions. (Location 1001)

I tell you all of this not just to make you wary as a healthcare consumer but to drive home the point that by taking the reins of health yourself, you are not trying to avoid a gleaming, efficient, and charitable system set up to serve you. You are trying to avoid being exploited, abused, and misled by a system driven by perverse motivations, unjustifiable costs, and incomplete protections, shaking you down for money like a Mafia leg-breaker at every opportunity while claiming to follow a “calling” or be your “guardian angel,” making you believe that you’d be sunk without them. You should stop viewing this system that fails to provide health as health care, but as wealthcare, or for-profit care, a business that puts its own interests first, not your health. There will be times in your life when you need the healthcare system, and those in it will be more than happy to take your money, but it is our job to minimize those times while you become healthier than ever before. (Location 1031)