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. Brownlee dissects what she calls "the medical-industrial complex" and lays bare the backward economic incentives embedded in our system, revealing a stunning portrait of the care we now receive. Nevertheless, Overtreated ultimately conveys a message of hope by reframing the debate over health care reform. It 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.

This volume addresses the public and private policies affecting physician supply in the United States, focusing on the physician surplus, market forces, and geographic distribution of physicians, life-style choices and evolving practice patterns, market influences of foreign medical graduates, the university's role in establishing priorities for medical education, and other pertinent topics.

The number of prescriptions issued by family doctors has soared threefold in just fifteen years with millions now committed to taking a cocktail of half a dozen (or more) different pills to lower the blood pressure and sugar levels, statins, bone strengthening and cardio protective drugs. In Too Many Pills, doctor and writer James Le Fanu examines how this progressive medicalisation of people's lives now poses a major threat to their health and wellbeing, responsible for a hidden epidemic of drug induced illness (muscular aches and pains, lethargy, insomnia, impaired memory and general decrepitude), a sharp increase in the number of emergency hospital admissions for serious side effects and implicated in the recently noted decline in life expectancy. The paradoxically harmful, if increasingly well recognised, consequences of too much medicine are illustrated by the remarkable personal testimony of the readers of James Le Fanu's weekly medical column, coerced into taking drugs they do not need, debilitated by their adverse effects - and their almost miraculous recovery on discontinuing them. The only solution, he argues, is for the public to take the initiative. His review of the relevant evidence for the efficacy, or otherwise, of commonly prescribed drugs should allow readers of Too Many Pills to ask much more searching questions about the benefits and risks of the medicines they are taking.

An informed argument for reworking the broken market†‘based U.S. healthcare system by making cost and quality more transparent The United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world. While policy makers have argued over who is at fault for this, the system has been quietly moving toward high†‘deductible insurance plans that require patients to pay large amounts out of pocket before insurance kicks in. The idea behind this shift is that patients will become better consumers of healthcare when forced to pay for their medical expenses. Laying bare the perils of the current situation, Peter A. Ubel—a physician and behavioral scientist—notes that even when patients have time to shop around, healthcare costs remain largely opaque, difficult to access, and hard to compare. Arguing for a middle path between a market†‘based and a completely free system, Ubel envisions more transparent, smarter healthcare plans that tie the prices of treatments to the value they provide so that people can afford to receive the care they deserve.

Medical mistakes are more pervasive than we think. How can we improve outcomes? An acclaimed MD’s rich stories and research explore patient safety. Patients enter the medical system with faith that they will receive the best care possible, so when things go wrong, it’s a profound and painful breach. Medical science has made enormous strides in decreasing mortality and suffering, but there’s no doubt that treatment can also cause harm, a significant portion of which is preventable. In When We Do Harm, practicing physician and acclaimed author Danielle Ofri places the issues of medical error and patient safety front and center in our national healthcare conversation. Drawing on current research, professional experience, and extensive interviews with nurses, physicians, administrators, researchers, patients, and families, Dr. Ofri explores the diagnostic, systemic, and cognitive causes of medical error. She advocates for strategic use of concrete safety interventions such as checklists and improvements to the electronic medical record, but focuses on the full-scale cultural and cognitive shifts required to make a meaningful dent in medical error. Woven throughout the book are the powerfully human stories that Dr. Ofri is renowned for. The errors she dissects range from the hardly noticeable missteps to the harrowing medical cataclysms. While our healthcare system is—and always will be—imperfect, Dr. Ofri argues that it is possible to minimize preventable harms, and that this should be the galvanizing issue of current medical discourse.

The topic of "too many lawyers" is timely. The future make up and performance of the legal profession is in contest. What do we mean by "too many"? Is there a surplus of lawyers and what sort of lawyers are and will be needed? How best can we discern this? This book, is composed of scholarly articles presented at the Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain), by some of the best researchers in the field, aims to answer these questions. This collection, with an introduction by Prof. Richard L. Abel, addresses methodological, normative and policy questions regarding the number of lawyers in particular countries and worldwide, while connecting this phenomenon to political, social, economic, historical, cultural and comparative contexts. This makes this book a source of interest to lawyers, law students, academic and policy makers as well as the discerning public. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the Legal Profession.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

Next in Line is the first book to examine the doctor-patient relationship in the context of its new environs, in particular the impact of efficiency-driven innovation and retail-care models on physician mindsets and the patient experience. The overall picture is one of lowered expectations -- a transactional, impersonal, and institutionally-limited incarnation of the medical bedside that leaves all parties underwhelmed and overstressed.

Andy Rooney's syndicated newspaper columns and cantankerous "60 Minutes" essays have made him one of the best known curmudgeons in America. Rooney writes about almost everything, boasting in the introduction to Not That You Asked . . . : "There's something in this book that will irritate almost everyone." Andy Rooney once again proves why he is one of America’s favorite curmudgeons. Writing at the top of his form, Rooney covers a plethora of subjects, from getting rid of leftovers to the worst job in the world, from travel tips for the travel industry to the best hotel room he ever had. Andy Rooney has an opinion on everything, and in his inimitably irreverent and crotchety style he voices here those things we’ve always wanted to say but never thought we could get away with. You’ll find yourself smiling and frowning and involuntarily bobbing your head in agreement. Praise for Not That You Asked . . . “As television watchers know, Andrew A. Rooney is a very funny fellow. He can be even funnier in print, as Not That You Asked . . . amply demonstrates.”—The Associated Press “The greatest thing about Andy is that he makes everyone uncomfortable—especially me.”—Don Hewitt, Executive Producer, 60 Minutes “The best of Rooney’s collections of columns so far . . . irreverent and warmhearted, thoughtful and provocative.”—The Orlando Sentinel