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From Men's Journal:
Every time you walk into a physician's office, you run the risk of overtreatment: Tests you don't need, medications that are ineffective (or dangerous), procedures that cause more problems than they solve. In many cases the best thing for your health is to do nothing.
Make no mistake: A good doctor is, or should be, your most trusted resource if you're sick. If you're not sick and he wants to treat you anyway, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad doctor. But it does make him a player in a system that operates according to the unspoken and often unexamined assumption that more treatment is better for the patient. It's unquestionably better for the financial health of the stakeholders in the system: the doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, the health-insurance companies, and the hospitals. If you don't know how the game is played, the odds go up that you'll wind up the loser.
What do you people think, will people change if they know this?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:20PM
It seems to me that most people just don't question a doctor prescribing medications at all.
The last time I had a routine colonoscopy as part of a physical, there were many others in the same part of the hospital getting them as well. A nurse was questioning each of us as to what medications we were on.
I was one of the oldest people there, and was the *only* one that wasn't on one or several full-time prescriptions. One young guy there...decades younger than I...was on five full time prescriptions, and couldn't even recall what two of them were for. Mind bogging.
This is how people end up on as many as ten things, interacting in ways that are obviously impossible to predict...something that no sane doctor should ever let happen to anyone...madness.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:58PM
Unfortunately, there are some conditions that require multiple medications to suppress. One easy one seen in younger people now is coronary heart disease. If a person has a heart attack it's quite common to be on 5 medications for it. Each one prevents a different complication of the disease process. Do they work? Let's just say that you're 10 times less likely to be dead a year after a heart attack if you take all the medications than if you didn't take any of them.
(And I mean suppress in the first sentence above. We don't have proper cures for a lot of medical conditions other than some infectious diseases. We have medications that help suppress them. You stop the medications, bad things happen.)